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Michigan Attorney General celebrates overturned wrongful convictions

"Handcuffs with black background" by JobsForFelonsHub is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Two brothers are going free after Michigan's Conviction Integrity Unit got them exonerated.

The unit, part of the Attorney General's Office, says it's gotten more than 16-hundred requests for assistance. The brothers are the third and fourth convictions the unit has gotten overturned.

"Because it’s only two of us, two agents that’s actually on the ground working, we only can do two, maybe three cases at a time. We can actually—we vet faster than we exonerate." said Special Agent Gentry Shelby.

The brothers had been arrested on the word of a witness whose DNA was at the crime scene and was later convicted of a similar offense.

Shelby says cases need new evidence like DNA or cell phone data to move forward.

Requests can come from a variety of sources including defense attorneys organizations and inmates themselves.