A federal judge has dismissed portions of lawsuits brought by four people who spent decades behind bars for a 1985 murder that DNA evidence proved they didn't commit.

But U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf's ruling this week allows the lawsuits against Gage County and officials tied to the initial murder investigation to continue.

DNA testing conducted last year cleared Thomas Winslow, JoAnn Taylor, Kathy Gonzalez, James Dean and two others of raping and murdering Helen Wilson in her Beatrice apartment. They are the first people in Nebraska to be exonerated of murder based on DNA evidence.

The four filed a lawsuit in July in U.S. District Court in Lincoln claiming that investigators and the former county attorney manufactured evidence and coerced them into confessing to murder. Each is seeking $500,000, the maximum amount allowed by state law.

Kopf ruled the statute of limitations has expired for claims that their prosecutions amounted to unreasonable seizure and that they were forced to incriminate themselves. The group may still argue that their guilty pleas were involuntary and that investigators manufactured evidence, among other things.

Kopf also dismissed the Gage County attorney's and sheriff's offices from the lawsuit, saying they cannot be sued under state law.

Joseph White, who also was convicted in the Wilson case, has filed a similar lawsuit.

Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning has acknowledged problems in the way the case was investigated and prosecuted. Bruning helped secure pardons for five of the six in January. The conviction of the sixth person was overturned last year.

Investigators say the real killer was Bruce Allen Smith, a former Beatrice native who returned to the city days before the murder, then went back to Oklahoma days later.

He was among the original suspects in the case, but DNA tests performed as part of the original investigation appeared to exclude him as a suspect. Newer DNA tests performed recently showed that the earlier test result was flawed.

Smith died of AIDS in 1992 at age 30.