Anthony Ray Hinton spent thir­ty years con­fined on Alabama​’s death row for mur­ders he did not com­mit. Three years after his exon­er­a­tion and release, he has pub­lished a mem­oir of his life, The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row, that recounts sto­ries from his child­hood, the cir­cum­stances of his arrest, the trav­es­ty of his tri­al, how he sur­vived and grew on death row, and how he won his free­dom. The book, co-authored with Lara Love Hardin, has earned praise from Kirkus Review as an ​“urgent, emo­tion­al mem­oir from one of the longest-serv­ing con­demned death row inmates to be found inno­cent in America,” and “[a] heart-wrench­ing yet ulti­mate­ly hope­ful sto­ry about truth, jus­tice, and the need for crim­i­nal jus­tice reform.” Nobel lau­re­ate Archbishop Desmond Tutu called Hinton’s book ​“an amaz­ing and heart­warm­ing sto­ry [that] restores our faith in the inher­ent good­ness of human­i­ty.” The mem­oir begins: ​“There’s no way to know the exact sec­ond your life changes for­ev­er.” He was arrest­ed in 1985 and cap­i­tal­ly charged in con­nec­tion with the mur­der of two fast-food restau­rant man­agers, even though he had been work­ing in a locked ware­house 15 miles away when that crime was com­mit­ted. The pros­e­cu­tor, who had a doc­u­ment­ed his­to­ry of racial bias, said he could tell Hinton was guilty and ​“evil” just by look­ing at him. Hinton’s incom­pe­tent tri­al lawyer did not know and did not research the law, and erro­neous­ly believed the court would not pro­vide funds to hire a qual­i­fied bal­lis­tics expert to rebut the state expert’s unsup­port­ed claim that the bul­lets that killed the vic­tims had been fired from Hinton’s gun. Instead, his lawyer hired a visu­al­ly impaired ​“expert” who did not know how to prop­er­ly use a micro­scope, whose tes­ti­mo­ny was destroyed in front of the jury. Hinton was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death. Hinton speaks can­did­ly about the psy­cho­log­i­cal effect exe­cu­tions of oth­er pris­on­ers had on him as he feared exe­cu­tion for crimes he did not com­mit. Writing about the 1987 exe­cu­tion of Alabama pris­on­er Wayne Ritter, Hinton says, ​“I didn’t even real­ize they had exe­cut­ed [him] until I smelled his burned flesh.” Faced with this grue­some real­i­ty, Hinton real­ized, ​“I wasn’t ready to die. I wasn’t going to make it that easy on them.” In 2002, three top firearms exam­in­ers tes­ti­fied that the bul­lets could not be matched to Hinton’s gun, and may not have come from a sin­gle gun at all. In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court unan­i­mous­ly held that Hinton had been pro­vid­ed sub­stan­dard rep­re­sen­ta­tion and returned his case to the state courts for fur­ther pro­ceed­ings. Prosecutors decid­ed not to retry him after the state’s new experts said they could not link the bul­lets to Hinton’s gun. Hinton’s lead attor­ney in the efforts to over­turn his con­vic­tion and obtain his free­dom was Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy. In the for­ward to The Sun Does Shine, Stevenson writes that Hinton’s sto­ry ​“is sit­u­at­ed amid racism, pover­ty, and an unre­li­able crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem.” Hinton, he writes, ​“presents the nar­ra­tive of a con­demned man shaped by a painful and tor­tu­ous jour­ney around the gates of death, who nonethe­less remains hope­ful, for­giv­ing, and faith­ful.” Hinton—the 152nd per­son exon­er­at­ed from America’s death rows since 1973 — says he hopes his sto­ry will increase pub­lic aware­ness of the risks of exe­cut­ing the inno­cent and the irrepara­ble fail­ures of the nation’s cap­i­tal-pun­ish­ment sys­tem. ​“The death penal­ty is bro­ken,” he writes, ​“and you are either part of the death squad or you are bang­ing on the bars.”

(Anthony Ray Hinton, The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row, St. Martin’s Press, March 2018; The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row, Kirkus Reviews, December 7, 2017.) See Innocence, Race, and Representation.

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