Anyone who has hired a lawyer knows $1,000 doesn’t buy you much. But when Anthony Ray Hinton was on trial for his life in Alabama, that’s the total amount his court-appointed attorney thought he could spend on a key expert witness in firearms evidence. All he could find for that price was an elderly one-eyed man with a degree in civil engineering who was laughed out of court for his inability to answer basic questions.

As it turned out, the lawyer was wrong — under Alabama law he would’ve been reimbursed for any reasonable expenses he incurred in presenting the defense. Of course that fact didn’t help Mr. Hinton, who was convicted and sentenced to death. He has sat on Alabama’s death row for 28 years, maintaining his innocence.



On Monday, he got another chance when the Supreme Court, in a unanimous ruling, ordered Alabama courts to reconsider whether Mr. Hinton’s lawyer’s mistake was decisive to his conviction.

The story began in 1985, when Mr. Hinton was charged with two separate robbery-murders of restaurant managers in Birmingham. The prosecution’s case was based primarily on a single piece of evidence: bullets from the crime scenes, its experts said, matched a revolver found in Mr. Hinton’s house.

But Mr. Hinton’s lawyer, Sheldon Perhacs, thought he had to hire an expert witness on the cheap, which led him to Andrew Payne, who he knew was unqualified.

At trial, Mr. Payne was “badly discredited” by the prosecutor, who pointed out that he had testified on firearms evidence only twice in the previous eight years, that he had struggled with the microscope in the forensic lab, and that he had only one eye.

In post-conviction proceedings, Mr. Hinton claimed that his lawyer’s mistake in thinking he had no choice but to hire Mr. Payne constituted ineffective assistance of counsel under the Sixth Amendment. To support this claim he produced three experts who all testified that they could not conclude Mr. Hinton’s gun had fired any of the bullets. The state did not rebut the new evidence, and one of Mr. Hinton’s experts testified that the state’s expert refused to show him how he’d concluded that Mr. Hinton’s gun had been the murder weapon.

The Supreme Court agreed that the lawyer’s failure very possibly altered the outcome of the case. The jury clearly did not believe Mr. Payne, the Court reasoned, but they well may have believed a qualified expert witness, if only Mr. Hinton’s lawyer had known he’d be reimbursed for hiring one. (Mr. Perhacs wasn’t well-compensated, either. He was paid a total of $1600 for defending Mr. Hinton — or what top corporate lawyers now charge for about 75 minutes of work.)

Bryan Stevenson, Mr. Hinton’s attorney since 1999 and the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., said that as prosecutors rely increasingly on complex scientific evidence and expert witnesses, the Sixth Amendment’s role in assuring that poor defendants have the ability to mount a proper defense has only grown. “The Sixth Amendment’s requirements are not just formulaic and minimal,” Mr. Stevenson said. “There’s dramatic evidence that he’s been wrongly convicted and no one can credibly assert that a capital defendant can get the assistance he needs for $1000.”