After serving almost 30 years on death row for a crime he did not commit, Anthony Ray Hinton (58) walked out of an Alabama jail a free man on Friday
One of Alabama’s longest-serving death row inmates went free on Friday after prosecutors acknowledged that there was not enough evidence linking him to two 1985 murders.
“Thank you Lord, thank you Jesus,” said Mr. Hinton’s sister, Darlene Gardner, as she embraced him when he walked out of the Jefferson County Jail in Birmingham. “I shouldn’t have [had to] sat on death row for 30 years… All they had to do was test the gun,” Mr. Hinton said to reporters, adding “Everybody that played a part in sending me to death row, you will answer to God.”
Mr. Hinton was referring to the fact that he was convicted of murdering two restaurant managers, but that the bullets found at the scene of crime did not connect to the gun found at his home.
In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Hinton had “constitutionally deficient” representation at his initial trial, because “Hinton’s defence lawyer wrongly thought he had only $1,000 to hire a ballistics expert to try to rebut the prosecution testimony about the bullets.”
The only defence expert willing to take the job at that price struggled so much to answer questions on cross-examination that jurors chuckled at his responses, the Associated Press reported on his case at the time.
Attorney Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a non-profit that provides legal representation to poorer defendants and inmates who it deems have been denied fair treatment, subsequently took up Mr. Hinton’s case.
EJI went on to engage three of the U.S.’ top firearms examiners who testified in 2002 that the revolver could not be matched to crime evidence, despite which State prosecutors refused to re-examine the case or admit to any error. Speaking outside the prison Mr. Stevenson said, “He was convicted because he was poor.”
Mr. Hinton said he would continue to pray for the victims’ families, since the State miscarried justice for them as well, adding, “[The State] had every intention of executing me for something I didn’t do.”
