“What happened to me could happen to anyone,” Anthony Ray Hinton said.
It’s a chilling thought, for what happened to Hinton was a wrongful conviction for murder that put him on Alabama’s Death Row for three decades. He was freed in 2015; since then, he has been telling his story and advocating for criminal justice reform.
Last week, Hinton, now 66, addressed a capacity crowd at Elizabethtown College as the featured speaker for the institution’s annual Leffler Lecture, followed by a Q&A moderated by Professor Conrad Kanagy.
Speaking with quiet dignity, under which the intensity of his passion was evident, he called out the racism that sent him to prison and kept him there.
Hinton was arrested for the 1985 murders of two men in separate fast-food robberies in Birmingham after a witness in a third, nonfatal shooting picked him out of a photo lineup. He says one of the detectives detaining him told him he didn’t care if he was guilty or not and that it wouldn’t matter: He would be tried in a White-dominated legal system, so his conviction was certain.
In theory, Hinton had a solid alibi: He was working at a locked warehouse at the time, as attested by his supervisor. The only evidence prosecutors had were bullets from the murders, which they claimed were fired from a .38 revolver belonging to Hinton’s mother. In fact, the gun hadn’t been fired in years, Hinton said. But his court-appointed attorney didn’t want to do pro bono work, and mistakenly thought he was not allowed to spend the money needed to hire a qualified ballistics expert.
Instead he hired a one-eyed civil engineer without forensic experience. The prosecution made short work of his testimony, and the jury returned a guilty verdict. Hinton went onto Death Row on Dec. 17, 1986.
Initially so consumed with anger and despair that he spoke to no one for three years. It was the sound of another prisoner crying because his mother had just died that made Hinton take stock and determine not to let his spirit be defeated.
He recovered his faith in God. He used his imagination to escape his immediate surroundings, daydreaming about having tea with Queen Elizabeth and marrying Halle Barry. He started a book club for Death Row inmates. And he held fast to the idea that the truth mattered, and that it could set him free.
Because of that, he fired an attorney who had suggested he plead guilty to have his death sentence commuted to life in prison. The attorney had been put on Hinton’s case by justice advocate Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. Stevenson. Hinton asked Stevenson to represent him directly.
With Stevenson’s assistance, Hinton was able to have the ballistics evidence in his case re-examined. He told Stevenson to find ballistics experts who were White, Southern and pro-death penalty. Otherwise, he said, their statements would carry no weight in Alabama.
Three experts who fit that description agreed the bullets could not have come from the .38 revolver Hinton supposedly used. Yet the district attorney refused to reconsider Hinton’s conviction. Things dragged on for 12 more years until a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision forced the Alabama court system to grant Hinton a new trial. Even then, prosecutors dragged their heels as long as they could before finally admitting they didn’t have a case.
Hinton has written a memoir, “The Sun Does Shine,” that was picked for Oprah’s Book Club. He said he believes he has a moral obligation to share the truth about what happened to him.
Stevenson also authored a memoir, “Just Mercy,” which was made into a 2019 movie starring Michael B. Jordan. Hinton is a character in it, played by O’Shea Jackson Jr.
Pennsylvania has 128 inmates on Death Row, the seventh most in the U.S., according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Unlike other states, it has only executed three people in the modern death penalty era, the most recent in 1999.
Gov. Tom Wolf maintained a death penalty moratorium throughout his two terms. Governor-elect Josh Shapiro, who previously supported the death penalty in limited circumstances, now says he supports abolishing it.
Since 1973, 190 Death Row inmates have been exonerated, the Death Penalty Information Center says. Multiple studies have found that the death penalty is imposed more frequently when victims are White and when defendants are not.
It’s time for Americans to have an honest conversation about race and the justice system, Hinton said. Moreover, he said, it’s unconscionable for a justice system to make so many errors in imposing the ultimate punishment, Hinton said: “All of us should be ashamed.”
He said he struggles every day with the emotional pain from what he endured. But while it rankles him that no one responsible for his wrongful imprisonment has ever apologized, he said he has forgiven them.
“I was condemned, yet I still have love in my heart. … You can do the same,” he said.
