Debra Milke won another court battle in an effort to clear her name in the death of her 4-year-old son when the Arizona Court of Appeals on Thursday ordered the Maricopa County Superior Court to dismiss charges against her with prejudice.
The decision by the appeals court would prevent murder charges from being brought against Milke, who spent 23 years in prison for the murder before her conviction was thrown out in federal court last year,
according to the Arizona Republic. Mariposa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, though, pledged to take the case to Arizona Supreme Court.
The appeals court cited "egregious prosecutorial misconduct" in ordering the dismissal of the charges because of the original prosecutor's failure to disclose evidence that might have helped Milke's attorneys challenge a detective's claim that she had confessed to him.
Authorities accused Milke of convincing her roommate and would-be boyfriend James Styers and his friend Roger Scott to kill her son for insurance money. The boy was taken into the desert and shot in the head in 1989, according to the Republic.
Scott and Styers are currently both on death row in Arizona. Prosecutors charged that Milke didn't want the child anymore and didn't want him to live with his father,
according to the Arizona Daily Star.
In its ruling, the appeals court said it had no opinion on Milke's guilt or innocence, but criticized prosecutors for turning over the investigation of the case to Phoenix police detective Armando Saldate, who claimed he had a confession from Milke but failed to record it.
A federal appeals court threw out Milke's first-degree murder conviction in March 2013 because prosecutors failed to disclose the detective's history of misconduct.
Milke has been free on bail since September 2013.
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