Man freed after decades on death row
Alabama inmate released after evidence questions
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — A man who spent nearly 30 years on Alabama’s death row walked free Friday hours after prosecutors acknowledged that the only evidence they had against him couldn’t prove he committed the crime.
Ray Hinton was 29 when he was arrested for two 1985 killings. Freed at age 58, with gray hair and a beard, he was embraced by his sobbing sisters, who said, “Thank you, Jesus,” as they wrapped their arms around him outside the Jefferson County Jail.
Hinton had won a new trial last year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that his trial counsel was inadequate. Prosecutors on Wednesday moved to drop the case after new ballistics tests contradicted those done three decades ago. Experts couldn’t match crime scene bullets to a gun found in Hinton’s home.
“I shouldn’t have sat on death row for 30 years. All they had to do was test the gun,” Hinton said.
The state of Alabama offered no immediate apology.
“When you think you are high and mighty and you are above the law, you don’t have to answer to nobody. But I got news for them, everybody who played a part in sending me to death row, you will answer to God,” Hinton said. “They just didn’t take me from my family and friends. They had every intention of executing me for something I didn’t do.”
Hinton was arrested in 1985 for the murders of two Birmingham fast-food restaurant managers after the survivor of a third restaurant robbery identified Hinton as the gunman. Prosecution experts said at the trial that bullets recovered at all three crime scenes matched Hinton’s mother’s .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. He was convicted despite an alibi: He had been at work inside a locked warehouse 15 minutes away during the third shooting.
“The only thing we’ve ever had to connect him to the two crimes here in Birmingham was the bullets matching the gun that was recovered from his home,” chief deputy district attorney John R. Bowers, Jr. told The Associated Press on Thursday.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that Hinton had “constitutionally deficient” representation at trial because his defense lawyer wrongly thought he had only $1,000 to hire a ballistics expert to rebut the state’s case. The only expert willing to take the job at that price struggled so much under cross-examination that jurors chuckled at his responses.
Attorney Bryan Stevenson, who directs Alabama’s Equal Justice Initiative, called it “a case study” in what is wrong with the judicial system. He said the trial was tainted by racial bias and that Hinton, an impoverished African-American man, did not have access to a better defense.