Prosecutors in Camden County are dropping charges against two New Jersey men serving life sentences for murder after an appeals court found new evidence “powerfully undermines" the testimony of the lone witness in the case.

Kevin Baker and Sean Washington have spent a quarter-century locked up for a 1995 double murder at a Camden housing complex. Both say they didn’t do it.

They were convicted after a two-day trial, during which a local woman, Denise Rand, told jurors she was high on crack cocaine when she saw Baker and Washington run up to the victims, Rodney Turner and Margaret Wilson, and shoot them in the head.

But a three-judge appellate panel tossed their convictions in December, finding the state’s witness “vacillated on many aspects of her narrative."

Baker has long maintained he was nowhere near the scene at the time. Washington claims he discovered the bodies and called 911. The tape of that call did not surface until years later.

The case was the subject of a two-part NJ Advance Media series in 2015 that chronicled the work of the Last Resort Exoneration Project, a legal group devoted to investigating wrongful conviction cases at Seton Hall University School of Law in Newark, that uncovered evidence and a host of witnesses raising questions about Rand’s testimony.

That evidence included ballistics and forensics testing that showed the victims were killed by a single shooter while lying in the courtyard — not by two shooters while standing upright, as Rand had testified.

The appeals court found that evidence, along with the 911 call made by Washington, “probably would have changed the jury’s verdict.”

On Tuesday, the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office said that in light of the ruling it would not retry the pair. The office said it would retract the notice it previously filed with the state Supreme Court seeking to have their convictions reinstated.

In a statement, acting Prosecutor Jill Mayer said the office maintains the conviction was valid but, given the passage of time, was not confident it could win a new trial.

The statement emphasized the judges who threw out their convictions “did not declare Baker and Washington ‘actually innocent’ and did not find error with the initial prosecution of this matter or the majority of the rulings made by the trial court during the trial and post-conviction relief hearings.”

Camden authorities said they made the decision in consultation with the state attorney general’s conviction review unit. A spokesman for Attorney General Gurbir Grewal declined to comment.

Attorneys for the men praised the prosecutors’ decision.

“After all this time, we are in a state of shock," said Michael Risinger, who runs the legal project with his wife and co-counsel, Lesley Risinger, and represented Baker. "The just decision was made and we look forward to making preparations as expeditiously as possible.”

After the exoneration project took on Baker’s case, their investigation led them to believe Washington was also innocent. He was represented on appeal by Lawrence Lustberg, who leads the criminal defense practice for the Newark-based Gibbons P.C. law firm.

Reached by phone, the Risingers said they had not yet been able to deliver the news to the two men, who have spent decades inside New Jersey State Prison.

It’s unclear when Baker and Washington will be released from prison. As of Tuesday afternoon, authorities hadn’t formally filed the paperwork dropping the charges.

S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.