The character arc of Anthony Ray Hinton

Who is Anthony Ray Hinton?

Twenty eight years, wrongly. He started a book club.

He was twenty nine, working at a supermarket warehouse and living with his mother Buhlar half an hour north of Birmingham, when a survivor of a third robbery picked his photograph out of a lineup. He was charged with two murders committed during armed robberies at fast food restaurants in 1985.

His account of what a detective told him after the arrest has been on the record for forty years. The detective said he did not care whether or not he did it, that he believed he had not, but that it did not matter, and that if he had not done it one of his brothers had, and he was going to take the rap. Then five reasons he would be convicted: he was black, a white man was going to say he shot him, and the district attorney, the judge and the jury would all be white.

The case turned on ballistics. His defence lawyer wrongly believed he had only a thousand dollars to hire an expert, and the only person willing to work for that was a civil engineer with almost no ballistics training who had sight in one eye and admitted in court that he had trouble with the microscope. The jury disregarded him, and disregarded Hinton boss, who testified that Hinton was at work when the crimes happened. He was convicted and sentenced to death.

He spent nearly three decades in solitary confinement at Holman. Fifty four men walked past his cell on their way to be executed, and the chair was close enough that he could smell it. His mother believed him until she died in 2002, and his friend Lester Bailey visited every week for the whole twenty eight years. He read. He started a book club that was allowed to meet in the prison law library, reading James Baldwin and Harper Lee, and it grew as word spread that reading was a way out of the cell. Then it shrank, because the members were executed, until he was the last of the original members left.

After about ten years, Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative took the case and ran it for sixteen years, producing three forensic experts, one from the FBI, who showed the crime scene bullets did not match the gun. Alabama courts refused to reopen it anyway. In February 2014 the Supreme Court of the United States vacated the conviction unanimously, finding his original lawyer assistance constitutionally deficient. On 1 April 2015 the district attorney office moved to drop the case, its own experts unable to match the bullets, and on 3 April he walked out. He is the 152nd person exonerated from death row in the United States since 1973. Alabama has never paid him the compensation he claimed. He wrote The Sun Does Shine, speaks around the country, holds honorary doctorates, and works with the Equal Justice Initiative as a community educator.

The moments

Anthony Ray Hinton's timeline.

Anthony Ray Hinton: frequently asked questions

What people ask about his line.

Sources

• Anthony Ray Hinton, English Wikipedia biography, filed under living people.
• The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row, 2018.
• The unanimous decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, February 2014.
• The Equal Justice Initiative case record, as cited there.