Anthony Ray Hinton’s exoneration and release in 2015 ended nearly thirty years of wrongful imprisonment on Alabama’s death row. His freedom came only after new testing confirmed that the gun evidence at the center of his conviction could not connect him to the crimes, and after the United States Supreme Court forced prosecutors to revisit evidence they had resisted reexamining for fifteen years.

Conviction and Evidence

Hinton was convicted of two robbery-murders outside Birmingham, Alabama, after state forensic employees concluded that a gun recovered from his mother’s home had been used in the crimes. The defense was poorly equipped to challenge that conclusion: Hinton’s appointed lawyer received only $500 from the court to hire a gun expert and retained a mechanical engineer who was blind in one eye and had little experience testifying as a firearms expert.

The prosecution also relied on a witness who identified Hinton in connection with a third crime. The defense investigation later found a half-dozen people and security records establishing that Hinton had been locked inside a secure supermarket warehouse, working a night shift fifteen miles away when that crime occurred. Experts among the nation’s best also reviewed the gun evidence and concluded that Hinton’s weapon could not be matched to the murders.

Decades on Death Row

Hinton arrived at Holman Correctional Facility in the 1980s, before Walter McMillian was sent to death row. He spent almost thirty years in solitary confinement in a five-by-seven-foot cell, just down the hall from the execution chamber. More than fifty condemned people were executed during his time on the row. In the years when the electric chair was used, Hinton complained that after midnight executions he could smell burning flesh.

The evidence of innocence did not quickly change his circumstances. In 2000, Bryan Stevenson presented test results confirming Hinton’s innocence and urged prosecutors to retest the gun evidence, the sole basis for his conviction. They refused for fifteen years. As the State continued moving toward execution, appellate courts issued a series of close decisions denying relief, while media outlets turned away from the case, describing the public as tired of innocence stories. Hinton nevertheless remained upbeat and encouraging when Stevenson visited him, even as Stevenson grew increasingly desperate to overturn the conviction.

Reexamination and Release

In February 2015, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled in a way that compelled prosecutors to reexamine the evidence. The resulting tests confirmed that Hinton was innocent. On a warm Good Friday morning that year, he walked out of a Birmingham, Alabama, jail after nearly three decades under a death sentence. He became the 152nd person to be exonerated after being wrongly convicted and sentenced to death.

The release reversed the meaning imposed on Hinton by the conviction: the forensic claim that had helped place him on death row could not be sustained, while evidence of his whereabouts contradicted the identification used against him. Yet the correction came only after years of confinement and repeated refusals to reopen the evidence. His exoneration was both a return to freedom and a measure of how long an unsupported conviction could endure.

Life After Exoneration

Hinton went on to work as a community educator at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. His story also became the subject of the book The Sun Does Shine. The postscript’s account of his release follows a long campaign to establish what the evidence could show; it closes not with the death-row sentence that had defined his legal status, but with Hinton’s life and work after prison.