Acist cops framed me for murder... I alked to the Queen nd married Halle erry to stay sane n Death Row
re going to have a white prosecutor. r, you’re going to have a white judge number five, you’re going to have an white jury.’
What he didn’t say at any point was, e evidence is what’s going to convict or, ‘We have fingerprints,’ or, ‘We e an eyewitness.’ couldn’t eat, I couldn’t drink. And I w then that it was all about getting more black man off the streets.” ne investigating detective, Doug er, had been tried three years earlier beating suspects and torturing them h cattle prods to coerce confessions. nd Anthony Ray likens the treatment endured to the lynching of black es by white supremacists in Amerisouthern states in the late 1800s. The only thing they couldn’t do was w a rope and hang me like they once but they took my freedom through upted criminal procedure.” When the case reached court prosecutor Bob McGregor, who had a record of illegally excluding African-American jurors from his cases, argued the shots had all been fired from an old handgun found at Anthony Ray’s mother’s home.
His poorly paid, inept defence attorney Sheldon Parhacs then hired a one-eyed ballistics expert and McGregor lacerated his testimony.
Despite an absence of any witnesses or fingerprints, on September 17, 1986, Anthony Ray was sentenced to death in Anthony Ray with Oprah Alabama’s notorious, “Yellow Mama”, electric chair. “When the judge delivered his sentence I lost my eyesight for a split second,” he remembers.
He was sent to solitary at Alabama’s Holman correctional facility – nicknamed the Slaughter Pen and regarded as America’s most dangerous jail.
State-appointed appeal lawyers tried and failed to overturn his conviction. Weeks turned into months, then years.
But as prisoner 2468’s death row neighbours went one by one to their executions, Anthony Ray vowed to remain strong. “I sat on my bunk and told my mind, ‘This is where we’re going
confinement to be for a while. I need you to accept this because, if you don’t, you’re going to hang yourself ’. I was on death row, but I was not going to let death row live inside of me.”
Anthony Ray even asked to launch a book club for fellow inmates and soon killers, rapists and Ku Klux Klan members were meeting in the prison library to discuss novels. “I wanted them to have the knowledge I had growing up,” he says.
After 10 years on death row a group fighting racial injustice and inequality, took up the case. Their firearms experts showed the bullets could not have come from his mother’s gun. But it took a further 16 years to prove his innocence.
On April 3, 2015, Jefferson County ANTHONY RAY HINTON ON DEATH ROW HORRORS circuit judge Laura Petro finally overturned the conviction, dropping all charges immediately. “I broke down and cried. I thought about all the things I had lost. I had lost my father... mother... three of my sisters,” he says.
“I had nowhere to live, no clothes, no money. I had nothing but I would prefer to be naked and free than on death row for a crime I didn’t commit.”
His best-selling memoir, The Sun Does Shine, brought him to the attention of Oprah, who bought the film rights to his story after interviewing him on TV.
Anthony Ray, who now campaigns for the abolition of the death penalty, said: “I hope my book and the movie can promote harmony so no one ever has to go through what I went through.”
■ The Sun Does Shine, by Anthony Ray Hinton, is out now in paperback by Rider Books. RRP £8.99.
My cell was 30ft from the electric chair. I could smell the flesh burn