Overview

Anthony Ray Hinton spent nearly 30 years on Alabama's death row for two 1985 fast-food restaurant murders he did not commit; making his case one of the most egregious wrongful convictions in American history. In 1985; two managers at separate Birmingham-area Quincy's restaurants were shot and killed during robberies. Police linked the crimes to an old .38 caliber revolver belonging to Hinton's mother; even though the gun had not been fired in over 25 years. Hinton had an ironclad alibi; he was clocked in at his warehouse job 15 miles away during one of the murders; and his supervisor confirmed he was working a locked overnight shift. Despite this; prosecutors pursued the case using fundamentally flawed ballistics testimony from a single state firearms examiner who claimed the bullets matched his mother's gun. Hinton's court-appointed defense attorney was paid just $1;000 for the entire case and hired a visually impaired retired civil engineer with no firearms expertise to serve as the defense ballistics expert; a choice the attorney later admitted was made because $500 was all the budget allowed. The trial judge reportedly told Hinton's lawyer: "If you can't find a [ballistics expert] for $500; that's just too bad." Hinton was convicted by an all-white jury in 1986 and sentenced to death. For 28 years; Hinton's appeals were denied at every level of the Alabama courts. In 1999; Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative took his case. In 2002; EJI hired three of the nation's top firearms examiners; all three independently concluded that the bullets could not be matched to the revolver. Despite this; Alabama courts refused to grant a new trial for over a decade. The case finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court; which ruled unanimously 9-0 in Hinton v. Alabama (2014) that his original defense counsel was constitutionally ineffective for failing to obtain a competent ballistics expert. On retrial; the prosecution's own new testing confirmed the bullets could not be matched to the gun. All charges were dropped on April 3; 2015; and Hinton walked free after 29 years; 6 months; and 3 days on death row. He subsequently wrote the memoir "The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row" (2018); which became a bestseller and was selected for Oprah's Book Club. Hinton became a powerful advocate for death penalty abolition; testifying before Congress and speaking internationally about the failures of the American criminal justice system. His case is considered a landmark example of how inadequate defense funding; prosecutorial tunnel vision; junk science; and racial bias can combine to send an innocent person to death row.

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Sources & Documentation

4 documented sources from official records, investigations, and reports