Exonerated death row inmate to speak at Vanderbilt

Anthony Ray Hinton

Anthony Ray Hinton spent 30 years on Alabama’s death row for a crime he did not commit.
 
Despite a credible alibi and a polygraph-backed claim of innocence, Hinton was charged with the murder of two Alabama fast-food restaurant managers in 1985 and given a death sentence.
 
In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held that Hinton had been provided substandard representation and returned his case to the state courts for further proceedings. Prosecutors decided not to retry him after the state’s new experts said they could not link the bullets from the crime scene to Hinton’s gun.
 
“Race, poverty, inadequate legal assistance, and prosecutorial indifference to innocence conspired to create a textbook example of injustice,” Hinton’s lead attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson, said. “I can’t think of a case that more urgently dramatizes the need for reform than what has happened to Anthony Ray Hinton.”
 
Hinton was one of the longest-serving death row prisoners in Alabama history and among the longest-serving condemned prisoners to be freed after presenting evidence of innocence.
 
One of 164 people exonerated from death row in the United States since 1973, Hinton was finally released from prison on April 3, 2015.
 
When he walked out of the Jefferson County Jail a free man for the first time in 30 years that day, he told his family and friends, “The sun does shine.”
 
Hinton is now a Community Educator with the Equal Justice Initiative, a leading advocate against the death penalty, and speaks nationally about the urgent need for criminal justice reform.
 
Hinton will share his story in Nashville at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 19, at Vanderbilt University’s Benton Chapel. He will discuss his experience and talk about and sign his book, “The Sun Does Shine,” which was recently selected for Oprah Winfrey’s book club.
 
The event is sponsored by Tennesseans for Alternatives for the Death Penalty and the Vanderbilt University Scholars Strategy Network.
 
For more information and to register for the event, go to: www.eventbrite.com/e/innocent-on-death-row-anthony-ray-hinton-tickets-55240756590.