On the night of the Bessemer robbery, Hinton stated that he was miles away locked in at work as was the usual practice. He was working overnight as a cleaner at a store where he was locked in from midnight to about 6 AM. At the time Hinton was still living in his childhood home with his mother in a small nearby town. In 1985, a string of fast-food restaurant robberies began in Alabama where two managers were murdered in the Birmingham area and a third manager near Bessemer was shot but survived. His arrest, conviction, and all the court proceedings were unfortunate but not unexpected. Thus he wasn’t being charged or judged by a group of his peers and given the history of Alabama, this wasn’t a surprise. Going into the justice system Hinton looked around and saw that aside from the other prisoners, there was no one there that looked like him. In the case of Anthony Ray Hinton, we have a man who at 29-years-old was accused of committing two violent murders and shooting a third. The history of the justice system makes it clear that it is not and has not been blind. A major factor is that the justice system isn’t infallible. Given the chance, regardless of how small it might be, that an innocent person could be put to death, the death penalty should not be an option. Let’s go ahead and get it out of the way from the very beginning that I don’t agree with the death penalty regardless of the crime or circumstances.
And that reality should give us all pause as years of a person’s life, their very life to be accurate, can hang in the balance.
But, the flip side of that coin is that there are also people who are not diligent and/or bring their personal biases to work. There are great members of law enforcement and the justice system who do their jobs to ensure that not just victims but also their families get justice. I enjoy the analysis that goes into solving crimes and how it translates into an opportunity to learn about the legal justice system. I have a deep interest in true crime from both the investigation side as well as courtroom proceedings. Convicted and sentenced to death, Hinton would spend the next 28 years fighting for his freedom and his life. A poor Black man living in Alabama, Hinton, could not independently afford an attorney or mount a vigorous defense. At the age of 29, Hinton was arrested in connection with a string of robberies that left two people dead. The Sun Does Shine is an autobiography written by Anthony Ray Hinton about his life and experience as a wrongfully convicted man.
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