By Matt Sledge

New Orleans prosecutors said Tuesday they will drop their case against John Floyd, the onetime Angola lifer who had his murder conviction overturned last year.

District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro said in a statement that the absence of key witnesses and the loss of evidence would prevent his office from retrying Floyd in the 1980 killing of a Times-Picayune proofreader in the French Quarter.

Cannizzaro’s announcement came after the U.S. Supreme Court denied a request from prosecutors to review a lower court’s decisions to overturn Floyd’s conviction.

In a May 2017 order, U.S. District Judge Sarah Vance found that police had withheld key evidence supporting Floyd’s claim that he was innocent and his confession had been coerced.

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