What followed was a three-decade-long miscarriage of justice driven not by one bad cop or a single piece of flawed evidence but a system that conspired against justice. In one of them another manager was killed. State forensics experts said it not only fired the bullets that killed Davidson but had been used in two other shootings during restaurant robberies.

Hinton, then aged 29, was in the back garden of his mother’s wooden house half an hour north of the industrial city of Birmingham, Alabama, when the police arrived to question him about the murder of a restaurant manager, John Davidson. He is not hesitant, though, as he tells his story with a visceral anger not only at his own tribulations but at the state of Alabama in the 21st century.įree at last: Anthony Ray Hinton is greeted by family outside the Jefferson County Jail in Birmingham, Alabama. A computer lies on a desk in the corner of the living room, but Hinton is wary of it, uncertain how to use all but the most basic of functions. Now he is stocky with a greying beard to match his hair. The photographs of Hinton at his trial show a slender man with a trimmed moustache. I met Hinton, 61, at the rural Alabama home where he lived with his mother, Buhlar, when he was arrested in 1985. Now he has written his own book, The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row, recounting his long battle for freedom against an Alabama judicial system that showed no interest in whether it was planning to take an innocent man’s life. Hinton, who goes by Ray, was on death row for 28 years until the US Supreme Court overturned two murder convictions for which the evidence was, at best, flawed. As the prosecutor said: ‘Even if we didn’t get the right one, at least we got one off the street.’ And that was referring to a black person only he didn’t use the word black.” “The state of Alabama had every intention of killing me for a crime I didn’t commit,” said Hinton. They cared about the colour of my skinĪll the while, Hinton awaited his own appointment with “Yellow Mama”, the generator that powered the electric chair, as one attempt after another to have the overwhelming evidence of his innocence heard got nowhere.

The sun does shine hinton