Anthony Ray Hinton

Anthony Ray Hinton

(c/o Equal Justice Initiative)

By Anthony Ray Hinton, Alabama death row survivor and a community educator with the Equal Justice Initiative

I spent 30 years on Alabama's death row for a crime I did not commit. If proposed changes to Alabama's postconviction procedures under consideration by the state legislature had been enacted, I would have been executed despite my innocence.

I was wrongly convicted of two murders that took place in Jefferson County in

1985. Contrary to an inaccurate op-ed published by the Attorney General this

week, there were no eyewitnesses to these crimes. I was convicted solely on the State's assertion that a gun in my mother's home was the weapon used to commit these two murders. Because my appointed lawyer failed to get adequate expert assistance to prove that the prosecutor's claims about this weapon were false, I was convicted and sentenced to death.

Death row prisoners face enormous challenges in finding lawyers who will assist

them. State law in Alabama limits compensation to lawyers to $1500 for this kind of representation and lawyers are unwilling to take on complex cases that will last years for that kind of pay. For 14 years, I could not find volunteer lawyers capable of providing the legal assistance I needed to prove my innocence.

Because the so called "Fair Justice Act" now pending before the state legislature

puts time restrictions on how long death row prisoners have to prove their

innocence or a wrongful conviction, this legislation increases the risk of executing innocent people and makes our system even less fair.

In my case, I was able to finally get the legal assistance I needed in 1999 when

lawyers from the Equal Justice Initiative got some of the nation's best firearm

experts to test the weapon in my case and examine the bullets recovered from the crime scene. These experts had all agreed that there was no match between my mother's gun and the crime evidence and no basis for convicting me of these

murders. Instead of the State conducting it's own tests as my lawyers requested, I spent another 16 years on death row because the Attorney General's office refused to retest the evidence even though ethical conduct for state forensic experts dictated that such testing was required.

Only after the United States Supreme Court intervened and ruled in my favor did prosecutors finally retest the evidence and confirm the results my experts had presented 16 years earlier. I was released within a week after prosecutors agreed to drop the charges against me.

No one knows the hardship created by our inefficient system more than I do, no

one. We do need significant reforms in Alabama but the legislation pending before the state House of Representatives is not the right way to proceed and would almost certainly have gotten me killed. Executions are carried out in the

name of the people of Alabama and we should all be concerned if we make our

system less reliable and the execution of innocent people more likely.



