“The sun does shine,” I said, and then I looked at both Lester and Bryan – two men who had saved me – each in their own way. “The sun does shine.”
And then the tears began to fall.
In the foreword to The Sun Does Shine, attorney Bryan Stevenson, of the Equal Justice Initiative, begins with: “On April 3, 2015, Anthony Ray Hinton was released from prison after spending nearly thirty years in solitary confinement on Alabama's death row.” Falsely convicted of capital murder on inaccurate circumstantial evidence and lies, Hinton's journey through Alabama's justice and penal systems is a harrowing cautionary tale: what happened to Ray Hinton could happen to any American – and in particular, the poor and marginalised – and it's extraordinary that he left Holman State Prison on his feet instead of in a body bag. And while Hinton's personal situation illustrates the injustice of sending an innocent man to death row, the story that follows in Hinton's own words – in which he grew to know and accept the humanity of those who were sent to the electric chair; even of those definitely guilty of the most heinous of crimes – argues against the use of capital punishment for anyone. I cried repeatedly throughout this read – not just out of empathy for Hinton's struggles, but in recognition of the grace and dignity with which he faced them. An essential and moving read.
Justice is a funny thing, and in Alabama, justice isn't blind. She knows the color of your skin, your education level, and how much money you have in the bank. I may not have had any money, but I had enough education to understand exactly how justice was working in this trial and exactly how it was going to turn out. The good old boys had traded in their white robes for black robes, but it was still a lynching.Growing up outside Birmingham, Hinton had been cautioned about the dangers of being black – white folks loosed dogs on black children, black homes were repeatedly firebombed up on “Dynamite Hill”, Hinton and his best pal Lester knew to jump into the ditch and hide if they heard a car coming along the highway on their hour-long walk home from baseball games (this same Lester would eventually visit Hinton every Friday throughout his thirty year prison stay). But through it all, Hinton's remarkable single mother (his father had been hurt in a mining accident and institutionalised) showed him unconditional love, taught him right from wrong, and gave him faith in God. When he was arrested for the murders he was eventually convicted of – crimes that available evidence and a better lawyer should have cleared him of – Hinton finally realised the real truth: every card was stacked against a poor black man in his hometown; none of the police, court officers, or jury were interested in the truth; they only wanted a conviction, and he would do. His first years on death row were filled with anger and despair as his appeal – handled by the same disinterested court-appointed lawyer as his original trial – snaked slowly through the system, but he eventually had an epiphany:
Despair was a choice. Hatred was a choice. Anger was a choice. I still had choices, and that knowledge rocked me. I may not have had as many as Lester had, but I still had some choices. I could choose to give up or to hang on. Hope was a choice. Faith was a choice. And more than anything else, love was a choice. Compassion was a choice.Hinton remembered his mother's frequent instruction to find ways to serve others and he began to reach out to his fellow death row inmates, eventually winning them small privileges (including running a book club when they hadn't previously been allowed books at all) that helped them all feel like more than animals penned in 5x7 cages, twenty-three hours a day. Hinton even befriended a former white supremacist (Henry Hays, who participated in the beating and lynching of teenager Michael Donald in 1981) and mourned the day that he was led to the electric chair (which, by the way, was in the same building as the death row prisoners, and after every execution, the inmates would be forced to breathe in the smoke and stench of death until the air cleared). Hinton befriending Hays, who grew to see the error of his former hatred and who would eventually call Ray his brother and his best friend, proves Hinton's belief that none of us are the worst thing we have ever done; that all of us deserve a chance at redemption.
Knowing right from page one that Hinton would remain on death row for thirty years, it's excruciating to watch his rollercoaster of emotions as various appeals are granted, denied, or bounced back to lower courts. But again, it's Hinton's grace and decency – even at his lowest points – that lifted him up and that shine through these pages. I think that most people agree that it's better to let ten guilty men go free than to execute one innocent man, but after The Sun Does Shine, it would be pretty hard to defend the death penalty at all.
