Bryan Stevenson and Anthony Ray Hinton

Bryan Stevenson’s relationship with Anthony Ray Hinton grew out of a case in which an innocent man remained on Alabama’s death row for nearly thirty years despite evidence that undermined the conviction. Stevenson and his team challenged the state’s gun evidence, assembled proof that Hinton could not have committed one of the crimes, and persisted through repeated refusals and close appellate losses. Their work ultimately led to new testing, confirmation of Hinton’s innocence, and his release in 2015.

A conviction built on questionable evidence

Hinton was already on death row when Walter McMillian arrived there in the 1980s. He had been convicted of two robbery-murders outside Birmingham after state forensic employees concluded that a gun recovered from his mother’s home had been used in the crimes. The weapon became the central physical link between Hinton and the killings, but the quality of the defense challenge to that evidence had been severely limited.

Hinton’s appointed lawyer received only $500 from the court to hire a gun expert. The expert retained was a mechanical engineer who was blind in one eye and had almost no experience testifying as a firearms expert. Stevenson’s later investigation therefore confronted not only a disputed conclusion but also the inadequacy of the resources available to test it at trial. The case showed how a forensic claim could carry the force of certainty in court even when the defense lacked the means to examine it effectively.

The state also relied on a witness who identified Hinton in connection with a third crime. Stevenson’s team found about half a dozen people, along with security records, establishing that Hinton had been locked inside a secure supermarket warehouse, where he worked as a night laborer, fifteen miles away when that crime occurred. This was concrete alibi evidence against the identification. It did not automatically undo the convictions, but it gave Stevenson a separate, independently documented basis for challenging the state’s account.

Testing the state’s case

Stevenson brought some of the nation’s leading experts to review the gun evidence. They concluded that the weapon associated with Hinton could not be matched to the murders. The expert review directly weakened the forensic premise on which the state’s case depended, while the warehouse records and witnesses challenged the identification evidence surrounding the third crime. Together, these lines of inquiry made the conviction increasingly difficult to reconcile with the evidence Stevenson had gathered.

In 2000, Stevenson presented test results confirming Hinton’s innocence and urged prosecutors to retest the gun evidence, the sole basis for the conviction. For fifteen years, prosecutors refused. Stevenson hoped the state would reopen the case, but instead it continued moving toward execution. The distinction between what the evidence showed and what the state was willing to reconsider became a defining feature of the relationship: each new investigative step strengthened the case for relief, yet none by itself stopped the machinery of punishment.

A long struggle under the threat of execution

The appeals brought repeated, close decisions denying relief, and Hinton remained on death row facing execution. The media showed little interest, often dismissing the case through what Stevenson described as public fatigue with stories of innocence. As the years passed, the prospect of correcting a wrongful conviction seemed to recede even as the evidentiary challenge grew sharper. Stevenson wrote that he was increasingly desperate to find a way to overturn the case.

Hinton’s presence in the relationship was not defined only by the pressures of litigation. When Stevenson met with him, Hinton remained upbeat and encouraging, even as his own case approached its thirtieth year on death row. That steadiness contrasted with Stevenson’s growing desperation to secure a legal remedy. The relationship thus joined two forms of persistence: the lawyer’s continued search for a way through the courts and the condemned man’s capacity to encourage his advocate while facing the possibility of execution.

Reexamination and release

In February 2015, Stevenson and his colleagues finally won a unanimous ruling from the United States Supreme Court compelling prosecutors to reexamine the evidence. The ruling did not itself establish Hinton’s innocence; it forced the long-delayed testing that could resolve the dispute. The new tests confirmed that the gun could not support the state’s case, and Hinton became the 152nd person exonerated after being wrongly convicted and sentenced to death.

On a warm Good Friday morning in 2015, Stevenson walked out of a Birmingham jail with Hinton, who had spent nearly thirty years condemned in Alabama. For much of that time Hinton had been held in solitary confinement at Holman Correctional Facility, in a cell measuring five by seven feet. The execution chamber was down the hall; more than fifty condemned people were executed there during Hinton’s years on death row. In the years when executions were carried out in the electric chair, he complained that he could smell burning flesh after midnight executions. His release therefore ended not merely a legal case but a prolonged confinement lived within immediate reach of the state’s execution chamber.

Continuing significance

Hinton later worked as a community educator at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery. His case also became the subject of a book, but its significance within Stevenson’s work rests especially on the distance between early proof of innocence and eventual freedom: tests presented in 2000 did not prompt a retest until a unanimous Supreme Court ruling fifteen years later. Stevenson’s representation transformed a forensic challenge into a sustained effort to compel the state to look again, while Hinton’s release marked the outcome that the legal struggle had sought for decades.