The Sun Does Shine

Anthony Ray Hinton with Lara Love Hardin

Anthony Ray Hinton spent almost 30 years on death row in Alabama. In 1985, he was arrested and charged with two counts of capital murder, but his only crime was being poor and black.

“He was a poor man in a criminal justice system that treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent.”  Bryan Stevenson

In a courtroom with an all-white judge and jury in a state where racial prejudice was rampant, represented by an incompetent court-appointed lawyer, and with the star witnesses being a bumbling ballistics “expert” and an acquaintance who lied, Hinton didn’t have a chance.

He spent his first three years in Holman State Prison in agonizing silence full of despair and anger toward all those who would send an innocent man to his death, but finally beginning to come to terms with his fate, he resolved not only to survive, but to find a way to live on death row. Sometimes that meant escaping into his imagination, but it also meant reaching out and becoming an inspiration to his fellow inmates, 54 of whom were executed mere feet from his cell.

This could have been a very depressing read, but instead it’s a story of a man who never lost his humanity, his sense of humour, or his faith in spite of all that was taken from him. It’s not an easy read. The injustice that Hinton endured at the hands of a legal system that knew he was innocent is absolutely horrifying, but it’s a story of a man who chose to forgive. It’s also a story of love and the power of friendship. Hinton’s mother, who died before he was released, never gave up hope that her “baby” would come home and his childhood friend, Lester, closer than a brother, visited him every single week for the entire time that he was incarcerated.

With the help of Bryan Stevenson, civil rights attorney and bestselling author of Just Mercy, and the Equal Justice Initiative, Hinton finally won his freedom in 2015. He was released into a world that had completely changed in the 30 years since his arrest; a bewildering world of computers, cell phones, and a woman’s voice in the car telling Lester when and where to turn on their way to visit Hinton’s mother’s grave! Now living in her house, which required significant work after sitting empty for several years, he dedicates his time to sharing his experience and speaking out against injustice and the death penalty which he calls a “form of lynching”.

He has never received an apology or any compensation from the State of Alabama and the real killer has never been apprehended.

Anthony Ray Hinton