the sun does shine by anthony ray hinton

His lawyer writes: “Never have more guards, correctional staff and prison workers pulled me aside to offer assistance … during the many years I have worked with Ray.

But something deep inside his character made it possible for him to make friends of everyone near him, from the white man next to him on death row who had lynched a black teenager to almost every single prison guard who met him. With the help of his co-author Lara Love Hardin, Hinton conveys all the horror of his years in solitary confinement, barely able to breath in 120F (49C) summer heat, eating food that tasted like dust. Hinton’s lawyer provides this ghastly statistic: “With 34 executions and seven exonerations in Alabama since 1975, one innocent person has been identified on Alabama’s death row for every five executions.” “In Alabama,” he writes, “judges are elected based on how many people they send to death row, not on how many people they let off.” Hinton was assigned an incompetent lawyer who was paid $1,000 by the state and then proceeded to hire an incompetent ballistics expert who guaranteed his conviction on fake evidence. And number five, you’re gonna have an all-white jury.” Number four, you’re gonna have a white judge. Number three, you’re gonna have a white district attorney. Number two, a white man gonna say you shot him. In Alabama, judges are elected based on how many people they send to death row, not on how many people they let off Anthony Ray Hinton If you didn’t do it, one of your brothers did. One of his arresting officers explained his fate this way, after the prisoner told him he could prove he had been working at the time of one of the murders: “You know, I don’t even care whether you did or didn’t do it … In fact, I believe you didn’t do it. “My only crime was being born black in Alabama,” Hinton writes, his prosecution “nothing less than a lynching” in which the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan were replaced by the black robes of justice.

That victim survived and then misidentified Hinton as his assailant then the state completed this travesty by providing completely fake ballistic evidence to tie a gun found in Hinton’s mother’s home to all three murders. There was no evidence at all to tie Hinton to two of the three murders he was accused of, and he was “locked in a supermarket warehouse cleaning floors … when a restaurant manager 15 miles away was abducted, robbed and shot”. It only takes the first two pages of the introduction by the author’s equally remarkable lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, to make the reader appalled.

But that isn’t what makes this a genuine spiritual experience: that comes from the nearly biblical capacity of the author to endure, to forgive, and finally to triumph. Anthony Ray Hinton’s memoir of his wrongful imprisonment for 30 years for three murders he did not commit is a riveting account of the multiple outrages of the criminal justice system of Alabama.

The sun does shine by anthony ray hinton