A man who spent nearly 30 years on Alabama’s death row walked free two days after prosecutors said that the only evidence they had against him could not prove he committed the crime.
Anthony Ray Hinton was 29 years old when he was arrested for two murders in 1985. Freed on Friday aged 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 won a new trial last year after the US 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 could not match crime-scene bullets to a gun found in Hinton’s home.
Photo: Reuters
“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 said.
ALIBI
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 Bowers said on Thursday.
The US Supreme Court ruled last year that Hinton had “constitutionally deficient” representation at trial because his defense lawyer wrongly thought he had only US$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 US 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.
“We have a system that doesn’t do the right thing when the right thing is apparent. Prosecutors should have done these tests years ago,” Stevenson said.
The independent experts Stevenson hired to re-examine this evidence after taking on Hinton’s case in 1999 “were quite unequivocal that this gun was not connected to these crimes,” he said.
“That’s the real shame to me. What happened this week to get Mr Hinton released could have happened at least 15 years ago,” he added.
Stevenson then tried in vain for years to persuade the state of Alabama to re-examine the evidence. The bullets only received a new look as prosecutors and defense lawyers tangled over a possible retrial following the Supreme Court ruling.
The result was that three forensics experts could not positively conclude whether the bullets were fired from Hinton’s revolver, or whether they came from the same gun at all, according to the state’s request to dismiss the case against Hinton. Bowers said the “bullets were so badly mutilated that they did not have the necessary microscopic markings to make a conclusive determination.”
Hinton was one of the longest-serving inmates on Alabama’s death row, and is one of the longest-serving inmates to be released in the US. However, Stevenson said there are many others behind bars who were convicted “based on bad science.”
“We’ve allowed too many people to assert things in court that are not credible or reliable, painted over with this kind of scientific expertise, which means there could be a lot of wrongful convictions,” Stevenson said.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of