Anthony Ray Hinton was convicted of murdering two fast-food managers in separate robberies in 1985. He was 29 years old at the time. The only evidence linking Hinton to the crimes were bullets that allegedly had markings matching a revolver that belonged to Hinton’s mother. There were no fingerprints or eyewitness testimony. After Hinton was convicted, subsequent tests found the bullets at the scene could not be matched to the gun he was accused of using.
Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out his conviction, concluding Hinton had been inadequately represented at trial. Hinton could not afford a defense lawyer. His court-appointed attorney used as a witness a firearms expert he knew to be incompetent. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, which won his release, Hinton is among the longest-serving death row prisoners ever to be freed after presenting evidence of innocence.
Bryan Stevenson talking:
in many ways, this is a very powerful demonstration of the critique of the American criminal justice system which we contend treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. There was a great deal of concern in the community because these restaurant managers had been murdered. They had these bullets. They falsely claimed that these bullets could be linked to a single weapon. They then falsely claimed that that weapon was Mr. Hinton’s. Because his lawyer was only paid $1600 to represent him, he couldn’t get an expert that was competent to disprove that. He got someone with visually impaired, a civil engineer, and the jury convicted Mr. Hinton. Had he had the resources to get the kind of legal help he needed, he would have never been convicted.
The real problem was years later, when we developed the evidence that showed that these bullets could not be matched to a single gun and that it wasn’t Mr. Hinton’s gun, the state then refused for 16 years to even retest the evidence. And that, for me, was the most distressing part of this case. It was indifference, it was irresponsible. It was really unconscionable that they chose to risk executing an innocent person over risking the perception that they were somehow making a mistake or not being tough on crime. And they fought us tooth and nail. And I have to say, it was quite an unlikely and rare occurrence that we could get the United States Supreme Court to intervene when we did. Had they not intervened, I think the risk of a wrongful execution would have been very, very high. There is been no accountability. The experts have not been held accountable. The prosecutors have not been held accountable. There’s been no apology. There has been no offer of any kind of assistance. And I think this case is a really shameful example of all the reforms that are desperately needed.
I might also say, Amy, that race was a factor here, too. I can’t leave that out. The investigators who worked on this case would been previously charged in federal court for torturing black prisoners. They had been using cattle prods to coerce statements out of black prisoners. The prosecutor claimed that Mr. Hinton was innocent by looking at him he said he could tell he was evil, just by looking at his face. That prosecutor had been reversed many times for excluding African-Americans from serving on juries. Mr. Hinton was convicted in part because of the burden of — the presumption of guilt that gets assigned to too many black and brown people in this country when they are accused of a crime.
Anthony Ray Hinton talking:
when you is placed on death row, you have to have strong faith. And the lawyer that I had that represented me during trial, once the case go through the Alabama criminal court of appeal and you lose there, you on your own. So, I had wrote Mr. Stevenson and asked for assistance from them. He got me an attorney out of Boston. To be perfectly honest with you, the lawyer from Boston come down and talk to me and he stayed on the case maybe a year or so, a couple years. And it just wasn’t working out the way I thought the case should be going. I remember specifically, he told me he was trying to get me life without. And I told him get that for someone that is guilty, I’m innocent. I need someone that would believe in me and would fight for my life as hard as they could, and that is when Mr. Stevenson came in.
money was very important. Not only the expert than I had at the time of my trial — he was blind in one eye. When he went to the forensic science to check the gun, he didn’t even know how to turn on the basic machine. He had to ask for help to turn on the machine. That should have been a red flag for those men sitting there watching this man ask for help. And not only that, he said that once he got up under the microscope, all he could see was his finger. So, he testified in court that he had very limited eyesight, he had very limited in the telescope he was using. I just don’t understand how a judge or anyone could qualify him as being an expert. They kept using the term, well, he knows more than the average person.
I think there’s some laws need to be changed around here. Just because you read a magazine about surgery, don’t mean I can come up to New York and give you open heart surgery. And so, this is what we need to try to change in Alabama. People just getting up on the stand and testifying, considering theyselves an expert.
I think I was born with this sense of humor. And that’s something that 20, 30 years that they took from it, they couldn’t take my soul. They couldn’t take the fact that I love to make people laugh. I think that you can find humor in anything. And I used that as a tool to make other people forget their problems. I think it was my biggest asset that I had, that I — having a sense of humor. I recall some time, just sitting up there and a correction officer would come by and I’d say, hey, I need to go home for an hour and I promise you I’ll come right back. Or just different little stuff that I would say every day to try to get myself through it and as well as my other inmates that were surrounding me — with me.
Bryan Stevenson talking:
the state’s evidence of a match discredited by three highly qualified firearms examiners, including the former chief of the FBI’s Firearm and Toolmarks Unit who testified in 2002 that the bullets from all three crimes could not be matched to a single gun at all, much less to Anthony’s mother’s gun.
We rely on the integrity of prosecutors and the integrity of law enforcement officials to do what is required. And in this case, there was an absence of integrity. There was an absence of leadership, there was an absence of goodwill. That’s the challenge that we face right now. Mr. Hinton is the 152nd person to be exonerated after being sentenced to death. That means for every 9 people that have been executed in this country, we have now identified one innocent person. And if we had integrity, we would stop executing people until we dealt with these problems of unreliability. But that’s what was missing in this case.
We went to every attorney general and the state of Alabama during four administrations. We repeatedly asked the prosecutor. And they just decided to see if they could get away with holding onto this conviction. And it really is shameful, because, while Mr. Hinton’s remarkable human being who had just incredible resolve, he was on death row when 53 other people were executed. They took them just a few feet from where he was housed and put them in the electric chair and strapped them on gurneys. And they tried to kill them every day of his time on death row. I still think we have got great challenges. There are some parts of the country that have created conviction integrity units; we don’t have them in Alabama. I’d love to see the Supreme Court actually create some requirements that would make it easier for us to insist on the kind of testing we were denied for 16 years.
Anthony Ray Hinton talking:
mother died in 2002. I went to her grave. That was, that was my rock. That was everything I had. And I would have loved to been able to say, they finally got it right, mama, and I’m home. And I know she would’ve been the happiest person. She probably would have cooked me all my favorites. And we would just sit down and hugged. I wouldn’t have — probably, I know she wouldn’t have let me left. And I definitely wouldn’t have left her arms. When you come up, my mother had to be my father. My father lost his mind when I was very young. My mother instilled in us to do the right thing to do at all times. She was just an extremely ordinary woman. And I loved her more than life itself. I just felt that I owed it to her to fight as hard as I could because she didn’t raise no killer. I thank God that he brought me through, and I’m pretty sure that she is jumping around in heaven saying, thank you, Jesus.
Bryan Stevenson talking:
there is no amount of money that can totally compensate you for that. They took something from him that they don’t have the power to give back, but I think that they ought to, one, to initiate anything they can do to pay for some of the outrageous injustice this case creates. But I think if there’s really going to be any kind of meaningful response to this, not only should he be compensated, but people should be held accountable. People should apologize. People should do some soul-searching. We should create some procedures that mandate that when there is evidence that suggests the person is in wrongly convicted, that that evidence has to be reviewed.
Mr. Hinton passed a polygraph test when he was first arrested. He was locked in a warehouse working when one of these crimes took place, and they simply ignored that. And we need to change those procedures. The Supreme Court has actually immunized prosecutors and law enforcement officers and judges. And the Thompson case that was decided to couple of years ago, I think that was a wrongly decided decision that should be changed. We have got to incentivize greater commitment and responsibility in these kinds of cases.
And then finally, I think, there has to be the creation of the kind of integrity conviction units that are too infrequent in this country. We’re going to have to mandate some reforms here. I just don’t believe that we can rely on the goodwill of the people who have been elected, particularly, when they have acted as a irresponsibly as they have acted in Mr. Hinton’s case.
They only charged him with the two murders, but there was a third crime where the surviving victim — where there was a surviving victim. And that took place at a Quincy’s restaurant in Bessemer. Mr. Hinton — it took — the crime took place around 12:15 in the morning. Mr. Hinton was working at a Bruno’s warehouse, a supermarket warehouse. He clocked in at 11:57 p.m., he was seen by the security guard going in. His supervisor gave him his work instructions for the night, a guy named Tom Dahl, at 12:10. The supervisor saw him repeatedly over the next several hours. There was no way that he could have committed this crime. They knew that. They absolutely knew that. But because they had this gun and this false testimony, they decided to persist. They gave him a polygraph. He passed the polygraph. They said that the car that was used in this crime was a big Oldsmobile — a big Buick which had been reclaimed. He didn’t own a car like that. He was driving a small — a Nissan. And they just ignored all of that. That is where this presumption of guilt that gets assigned to black and brown people became a barrier. If he had been presumed innocent, no reasonable jury would have convicted him. He was presumed guilty
There are some offices that have basically made a commitment to begin looking at cases where there is evidence of innocence. We’ve got — our prison population has gone from 300,000 in 1972 to 2.3 million people today. There’s never been a time in America when we have had more innocent people in jails and prisons than we have right now. We have invested in prisons. We have invested in policing. We have invested a prosecutors. We’ve invested in judges. We have not invested in the defense function to protect people from wrongful convictions. They don’t have a right to counsel. They can’t get to court. So, only when you create these units can you really push the state to take seriously these claims. There’s a prosecutor in Dallas that has done this. There is some places across the country where, if you have compelling evidence that you have been wrongly convicted, they will initiate the investigation. That does not exist in Alabama. It doesn’t exist in most states, but it needs to, given the incredible evidence that we have. That there are so many wrongly convicted and condemned people in our jails and prisons.
Anthony Ray Hinton talking:
The cell five by seven. You have a bed that is mounted to the wall, you have your toilet, and you’ve got mesh wire in front of the cell. You’ve got a little slot where they bring you your trays. The floors is concrete. You don’t have no ventilation for air. It was dark, but now they have put some lights — come through and fix the lights. So, it’s just the smallest cell, the smallest room that you can imagine being on death row.
When I was there — first got there in ’87, the method was primarily the electric chair. It was about 30 yards, I would say, from my cell. And the next morning, by using the electric chair, you could actually smell the flesh of the person they’d executed the night before. So, they probably executed may be 20, 25 in the electric chair in a few — in the — with the gurney.
Bryan Stevenson talking:
connection between lynching and death row. there’s a narrative of racial difference that emerged in this country, actually during the time of slavery. When Mr. Hinton and I got together this morning, we paused outside our office where we have these signs that talk about the slave trade. And we dehumanize people of color. We demonize them. We said that they were different. We said that they were dangerous. We said that we could own them to civilize them and that narrative of racial difference was never really confronted. The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t deal with it, the 13th Amendment didn’t deal with it. And then we have these decades of lynching, of terrorism directed at African Americans because that same presumption of dangerousness and guilt made people comfortable doing horrific things to people during the course of these lynchings.
When the federal government threatened to intervene again in the South, there was great pressure to move the lynchings indoor. And that was really the beginnings of the modern death penalty. The short, unreliable, meaningless trials where people were presumed guilty and quickly sentenced to death. And that legacy of inadequate justice that begins with the Scottsboro Boys and continues in the 1940’s and 1950’s and 1960’s and 1970’s and was on display in the 1980’s when Mr. Hinton was wrongfully convicted, has never really been challenged. And so, yes, I don’t understand why the state of Alabama, who has killed so many people of color, wrongly, the bodies of thousands of black men and women are buried in the ground where we are sitting as a result of racial injustice and bigotry and ignorance, and yet we persist.
Our death penalty — 84 percent of the people that have been executed by capital punishment in this state are black. We have a death penalty that is racially biased in so many ways. The prosecutor who prosecuted Mr. Hinton had been reversed several times for intentionally excluding in an illegal manner African-Americans from serving on juries, and yet he was allowed to keep prosecuting cases. We’ve got 65 percent of all murder victims in the state are black, but 80 percent of the people on death row are there for crimes involving victims who are white. The evidence of racial bias is so extreme and so overwhelming, and yet we do nothing. And you can’t understand that without understanding lynching, without understanding slavery, without understanding segregation. And we won’t overcome these problems until we start talking about these issues differently. And I hope that Mr. Hinton’s case can really begin the kind of soul-searching and honest dialogue that we need to have, not only about our bias criminal justice system, but about the way we tolerate inequality and unfair treatment of the poor and people of color.
— source democracynow.org
Anthony Ray Hinton, spent nearly 30 years on death row. He was released on Friday after evidence was presented of his innocence.
Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. He is an attorney who has worked on death penalty cases in the deep south for decades. He has represented Anthony Ray Hinton since 1999. He is the author of “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.”