"This is a great day for justice," Ainsworth said. "On the day that Jon Burge is headed to prison, Eric Caine got the news that he is going to be coming home."



Caine's release from prison comes eight years after his co-defendant, Aaron Patterson, was pardoned by then-Gov. George Ryan and freed from death row.



Caine, who was sentenced to life in prison, was not freed with Patterson in 2003 because his lawyers hadn't filed the proper paperwork, thinking Ryan was only considering pardons for inmates on death row.



Patterson "got the attention, the publicity and the pardon, and Eric Caine … was left behind," Ainsworth said.



By 2004, however, Patterson was back in custody after he was charged for dealing drugs and illegally buying guns. He was later convicted and sentenced to 30 years in federal prison.



Ainsworth said he was expecting that Judge William Hooks would hold an evidentiary hearing in the case Wednesday at the Criminal Courts Building. But to his surprise, the judge ordered Caine released after a special prosecutor appointed in several Burge cases moved to dismiss the charges against Caine. The special prosecutor, Stuart Nudelman, held he could not prove Caine's guilt without his confession, which had been tainted by the allegations of abuse against Burge and his detectives.



Caine, now 45, has said he sustained a ruptured eardrum when a detective under Burge's command struck him on the left ear while he sat handcuffed to a chair. In pain and tired, Caine said he falsely confessed to the killing of Vincent and Rafaela Sanchez in their South Chicago neighborhood home.



In 2008, Ainsworth, a lawyer with the Exoneration Project, sought Caine's release, saying he had new evidence, including the widespread knowledge of torture by Burge by then and the alleged confession to the double murder by an alternate suspect.



In January Nudelman, who was appointed the special prosecutor in 2009, sought to dismiss Caine's request for a hearing on a new trial, but Hooks rebuffed the prosecutor.



"Based upon that, we felt we would not be able to successfully … win a conviction at trial," Nudelman said Wednesday after moving to dismiss the charges against Caine.



Meanwhile, hours before Caine's order of freedom, Burge, 63, surrendered to a low-security federal prison in North Carolina to begin serving a 41/2-year sentence for lying in a civil lawsuit about his knowledge of the torture. He was convicted last year by a federal jury of perjury and obstruction of justice charges.



Caine's family made hurried plans to travel to downstate Menard to be there when he is scheduled to walk out of prison a free man for the first time in 25 years.



"We've been praying for this for so long and now it's finally happening," said Caine's cousin, Tuneshia Lockett, 36.



Caine's plans remain uncertain, Lockett said, but he has family in Chicago and will likely stay with them.



"I'm going to hug him, and we're going to plot out the rest of his life together," Ainsworth added.



Tribune reporter Annie Sweeney contributed.