A federal judge in Atlanta has thrown out the 2005 rape conviction of a state prison inmate, holding that the inmate’s lawyer, the prosecutor and the Fulton County judge who presided over his trial failed to inform him that he could testify in his own defense.

U.S. District Chief Judge Thomas Thrash Jr. opened his 36-page order with a quotation from “Hamlet”: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”