A root doctor testified that Hoffman had bought a magic charm from him, hoping it would be a shield from arrest for having killed a man. As payment, Hoffman supposedly handed over the shotgun he had used and jewelry he had stolen. Indeed, Willie "Pops" Pearson, 90 at the time of Hoffman's 1996 trial in Union County, did have the gun and the jewelry in his possession.

The testimony helped convict Hoffman of murdering Marshville jewelry store owner Danny Cook. But there were things about Pops the root doctor, now dead, that the jury wasn't told.

As a story last week from the Charlotte Observer related, this was the second time Pearson claimed in court to have sold a protective potion to someone who had confessed to a killing. That disclosure would have set jurors' eyes to rolling -- and they would have rolled faster if they had learned that Pearson bargained his testimony in the Cook case for reward money.

Hoffman was a bad actor, a convicted robber, but he was sent to death row with the justice system's cards stacked against him. The prosecutors cheated -- they also failed to disclose a deal with another key witness, who later said he'd made up his testimony -- to the extent that Hoffman was granted a new trial.

Now, the current Union district attorney has decided that the available, and admissible, evidence isn't strong enough to reinstate the murder charge. So from Central Prison's cozy confines for the condemned, Hoffman is progressing all the way to freedom.

Doesn't this sound sickeningly familiar? No, there was not the kind of irrefutable DNA evidence that recently brought freedom for Dwayne Dail, the Goldsboro man who did 18 years in prison after being falsely identified as a rapist.

Hoffman's attorneys did not turn up forensic evidence of the sort that won a new trial and a speedy acquittal for Alan Gell after a five-year death row stint. (An existence surely as miserable as anything the State of North Carolina has to offer.)

But to return a verdict of guilty in a criminal trial, a jury of course has to agree unanimously on guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. If the evidence is tainted, or if exculpatory evidence is withheld, the jury's finding cannot be considered reliable. So in the eyes of the law, Hoffman is innocent.

Nor should this be seen as his being saved by a technicality. The D.A. says he still suspects Hoffman, but unless he goes to court and proves his case fair and square, Hoffman has to be regarded as no more culpable than you or me.

Speaking of saved by a technicality, the State Bar tried to discipline the original prosecutors in Hoffman's case but was blocked by a deadline for the filing of charges. We're left to wonder how often prosecutors, wielding the full power of the state, have shipped someone off to prison who'd simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Certainly that description fit Dwayne Dail, identified by a 12-year-old girl as the man who had climbed through her bedroom window and raped her. Wasn't him, as the DNA recovered from a long-missing nightgown has proved.

The story of Dail's exoneration and his efforts to resume a normal life after 18 years of hard prison time has been told in this newspaper and illuminated on its Web site. Can he find his footing on the outside, having missed out on so much -- education, work experience, family relationships? Will he be able to conquer the inevitable bitterness?

Certainly his case points up the ludicrous inadequacy of the state's compensation for wrongful imprisonment -- $20,000 per year. How is that supposed to make up not only for the undeserved loss of freedom, but also the lost income, the lost companionship, the lost opportunities of all kinds? The $360,000 Dail stands to collect -- he'll probably have to pay some of it for child support -- doesn't amount to much more than the state saying "sorry 'bout that."

Most folks in prison belong right where they are, fairly arrested and convicted. The criminal justice system also can't be expected to operate flawlessly at every step. Multiple layers of appeals available to defendants help winnow out mistakes.

Deliberate misconduct by those in charge, however, can never be part of an acceptable margin of error.

When someone is wrongfully imprisoned, whether on bad faith or good, there should be no sense that the state is reluctant to make amends.

And even if North Carolina, so far as we know, has avoided the nightmare of wrongful execution, there can be no ignoring the implications of cases like that of Jonathan Hoffman, ordered to forfeit his life after prosecutors bent the rules and a root doctor spun his improbable tale.