Case Dismissed Against Inmate in 1995 Double Murder

A Chicago man who spent 20 years in prison for a 1995 double murder of two eighth-grade girls in a hail of gunfire is free after prosecutors announced they were dropping their case against him.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports prosecutors announced Tuesday they were dropping the case against Matthew Sopron. Sopron was released from Stateville Prison Tuesday afternoon.

During the trial, prosecutors argued that a 15-year-old opened fire on a van on Chicago's South Side as part of a gang battle on the orders of the then 22-year-old Sopron and his co-defendant, killing Carrie Hovel and Helena Martin.

But during the recent hearing the gunman testified that he barely knew Sopron and that nobody told him to shoot at the van.

Sopron was one of six teens convicted in the two girls’ shootings, arrested nine months later and convicted in 1998.

His family maintained for years that he was innocent, with his father insisting that Sopron was home sleeping the night of the crime and that a number of flaws in the case were ignored.

“There is no DNA or physical evidence,” Sopron’s attorney Allan Ackerman said in 2016, amid a billboard campaign pushing to re-open the case.

Copyright AP - Associated Press
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