Anthony Ray Hinton, 58, spent half his life on
Alabama’s death row, sentenced to die for two
1985 murders that for decades he insisted he
did not commit.
Over 28 years, the outside world changed
while Hinton spent his days largely in a 5ft by
8ft prison cell. Children grew up. His mother
died. His hair turned gray. Inmates he knew
were escorted off to the electric chair or the
lethal-injection gurney.
He was set free on Friday after new ballistics
tests contradicted the only evidence – an
analysis of crime-scene bullets – that
connected Hinton to the slayings.
As he left the jail, Hinton said he would pray
for the victims’ families as he has done for the
past 30 years. They have suffered a
“miscarriage of justice” as well, he said. He
had less kind words for those involved in his
conviction.
“When you think you are high and mighty
and you are above the law, you don’t have to
answer to nobody. But I got news for them,
everybody who played a part in sending me to
death row, you will answer to God,” Hinton
said.
According to the Death Penalty Information
Center, Hinton is the 152nd person
exonerated from death row since 1973 and
the sixth in Alabama .
“They had every intention of executing me for
something I didn’t do,” Hinton said outside
the Jefferson County jail in Birmingham.
Friends and family members rushed to
embrace Hinton after his lawyers escorted
him outside of the jail on Good Friday
morning. His sisters wiped tears, saying
“Thank you, Lord,” as they wrapped their
arms around their brother.
Equal Justice Initiative director Bryan
Stevenson, who waged a 16-year fight for
Hinton’s release, said while the day was
joyous, the case was tragic.
“Not only did he lose his life, he lived a life in
solitary confinement on death row,
condemned in a five-by-eight cell where the
state was trying to kill him every day,”
Stevenson said.
Hinton was convicted of killing two fast-food
restaurant workers – John Davidson and
Thomas Wayne Vason – during separate 1985
robberies at Mrs Winner’s and Captain D’s
restaurants in Birmingham. Investigators
became interested in him after a survivor at a
third restaurant robbery picked Hinton out of
a photo lineup.
The only evidence linking him to the slayings
were bullets that state experts then said had
markings that matched a .38-caliber revolver
that belonged to Hinton’s mother. There were
no fingerprints or eyewitness testimony.
Stevenson said a defense analysis during
appeal showed that bullets did not match the
gun. He then tried in vain for years to
persuade the state of Alabama to re-examine
the evidence.
A breakthrough came last year when he won a
new trial after the US supreme court ruled
Hinton’s trial counsel “constitutionally
deficient”. His defense lawyer wrongly
thought he had only $1,000 to hire a ballistics
expert to rebut the state’s case. The only
expert willing to take the job at that price – a
one-eyed civil engineer with little ballistics
training who admitted he had trouble
operating the microscope – was obliterated on
cross-examination.
The Jefferson County district attorney’s office
on Wednesday moved to drop the case after
their forensics experts were unable to match
crime-scene bullets to the gun.
Stevenson called Hinton’s conviction a “case
study” in what is wrong with the American
justice system.
“We have a system that treats you better if
you are rich and guilty than if you are poor
and innocent and this case proves it. We have
a system that is compromised by racial bias
and this case proves it. We have a system that
doesn’t do the right thing when the right thing
is apparent,” Stevenson said.
“Prosecutors should have done this testing
years ago.”
The Alabama attorney general’s office
declined to comment.
Chief deputy district attorney John R Bowers
Jr said three experts with the Alabama
Department of Forensic Sciences examined
the bullets ahead of the anticipated retrial in
the case.
Bowers said all three reached the same
conclusion: they couldn’t conclusively
determine whether or not any of those bullets
were fired from the revolver taken from
Hinton’s home, or even if they had been fired
from the same gun.
Hinton planned to put flowers on his mother’s
grave. After that comes the adjustment to the
modern world after spending nearly half of
his life in solitary confinement.
“The world is a very different place than what
it was 30 years ago,” Stevenson said. “There
was no Internet. There was no email. I gave
him an iPhone this morning. He’s completely
mystified by that.”
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