A woman in Arizona who spent 22 years on death row after being convicted of conspiring with two men to kill her son in order to collect insurance has had charges against her thrown out.

Debra Milke is only the second woman to have been exonerated after being sentenced to death in the United States, and the case was dismissed due to prosecutorial misconduct primarily on the part of the detective, Armando Saldate, who had claimed that Milke confessed the crime but couldn’t produce a recording, according to a CNN report.

Milke has always maintained her innocence, but she was convicted anywhere as prosecutors withheld the personnel record of Saldate that showed that he may have lied under oath in other cases. The men who were convicted of conspiring remain on death row.

Milke last saw her young son Christopher at a mall on December 1, 1989, when he was going to see Santa Clause. Her roomate, James Styers, then took the boy and called her saying he had disappeared, when in reality Styers and a friend drove te boy to a secluded ravine and shot him three times in the head. Both men were convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Styer’s friend, Roger Scott, allegedly implicated Milke, and prosecutors suggested during the trial that a $5,000 insurance policy that had been taken out on the child may have been the motivation, although neither Scott nor Styers would testify to that.

Although Saldate claimed to hear a confession from Milke, there was no recording of the interrogation and no one else witnessed it. Saldate also claimed he threw away his notes after writing up the report. Milke denied the claims, but the jury sided with Saldate and convicted Milke.

However, prosecutors failed to inform the court of a long history of misconduct by the detective. Four confessions or indictments had been tossed previously due to Saldate’s actions, and four other confessions were vacated because of a violation of a person’s constitutional rights. Finally, in 2013, an appeals court overturned Milke’s conviction, a decision that the state of Arizona appealed, but the state Supreme Court declined to hear the case, causing all charges to be dropped.

According to CNN, Milke departed the courtroom after being freed, sobbing with relief.