On Sunday, January 10, 60 Minutes aired an inter­view with Anthony Ray Hinton, who was exon­er­at­ed on April 3, 2015 after spend­ing near­ly 30 years on Alabama​’s death row. In the inter­view, Hinton described how issues of race per­me­at­ed his case. Hinton told 60 Minutes cor­re­spon­dent Scott Pelley about a con­ver­sa­tion he had with a police lieu­tenant after hav­ing been arrest­ed: ​“I said, ​‘You got the wrong guy.’ And he said, ​‘I don’t care whether you did it or don’t.’ He said, ​‘But you gonna be con­vict­ed for it. And you know why?’ I said, ​‘No.’ He said, ​‘You got a white man. They gonna say you shot him. Gonna have a white D.A. We gonna have a white judge. You gonna have a white jury more than like­ly.’ And he said, ​‘All of that spell con­vic­tion, con­vic­tion, con­vic­tion.’ I said, ​‘Well, does it mat­ter that I did­n’t do it?’ He said, ​‘Not to me.’ ” Hinton went on to explain how he felt about the racial bias in his case: ​“I can’t get over the fact that just because I was born black and some­one that had the author­i­ty who hap­pened to be white felt the need to send me to a cage and try to take my life for some­thing that they knew that I did­n’t do.” Bryan Stevenson, Hinton’s attor­ney and the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Equal Justice Initiative, joined Hinton for the inter­view, and spoke about the sys­temic issues sur­round­ing the case. ​“This isn’t luck, this was a sys­tem, this was actu­al­ly our jus­tice sys­tem, it was our tax dol­lars who paid for the police offi­cers who arrest­ed Mr. Hinton. Our tax dol­lars that paid for the judge and the pros­e­cu­tor that pros­e­cut­ed him. That paid for the experts who got it wrong. That paid to keep him on death row for 30 years for a crime he did­n’t com­mit. This has noth­ing to do with luck. This has every­thing to do with the way we treat those who are vul­ner­a­ble in our crim­i­nal justice system.”

(S. Pelley, ​“Life After Death Row,” 60 Minutes, January 10, 2016.) See Innocence and Race.

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