This is the story of a man in Alabama who was railroaded by Alabama’s unjust legal system in 1985 when he was convicted for two murders he didn’t commit. murder for which he was sentenced to die. He sat on death row, in solitary confinement for 28 years. His prison cell was a 40 square feet rectangle of terror and anguish, as he waited day by day, year by year for the State of Alabama to put him to death. He is 58, the same age as me. He’s an African American man who spent half his life in prison because state prosecutors refused to consider evidence of his innocence after they obtained a conviction of him based solely on faulty expert testimony and racist statements made to the jury by the trial prosecutor.
His name is Anthony Ray Hinton and he is the 152nd person condemned to die in the United States since 1973 who has been exonerated. yesterday he was released from prison after all charges against him were dismissed.
You might think that this is a story with a happy ending. If you do think that, you could not be more wrong.
Please follow me below the fold for a detailed history of this travesty of justice denied, and its tragic consequences for Mr. Hinton.
In February, 1985, in Birmingham, Alabama, two fast food managers, John Davidson and Thomas Wayne Vason, were gunned down during an armed robbery. No eyewitnesses. No fingerprints to connect anyone to the crime. No suspects. Nada. In separate incident on July 25th of that year, however, a third restaurant manager in Bessemer, Alabama was also shot during a robbery, but he survived. He picked Anthony from photographs shown to him by the police. Bad news for the police – Hinton had an alibi for the Bessemer robbery. He was at work “in a locked warehouse fifteen miles away at the time of the crime.”
This inconvenient fact did not deter the police from looking for another crime to pin on him. Nor did it deter the prosecutor from indicting Anthony Hinton – not for the shooting of the restaurant manger in Bessemer – but for the murders of Davidson and Vinson back in February. When police searched Anthony’s home, they discovered a six shot, 38 caliber revolver that belonged to his mother, with whom he shared the house. This gun became the “break” in the murder case for which police and the prosecutor had been praying. They sent the gun to be examined by the states ballistic experts, and soon thereafter Anthony was on trial for his life.
The prosecution alleged that ballistics evidence showed the same gun had been used in all three crimes. The Bessemer manager, a Mr. Smotherman, was permitted to testify in order to identify Anthony as the man who shot him in July. Two other witnesses testified as to facts that “tended to link Hinton to the Smotherman robbery.” In Anthony’s defense, witnesses testified that he had been working at a secured warehouse at the time Mr. Smotherman was shot.
Again, keep in mind, Anthony Hinton was never tried on charges he robbed and assaulted Mr. Smotherman. All the testimony regarding the Bessemer assault was intended to show Anthony was guilty of two murders that occurred in a different city six months earlier. Prejudicial much? Yes indeed.
The only hard evidence that linked Hinton to the two Birmingham murders in February was the testimony given by the two ballistics experts from the Alabama’s Department of Forensic Sciences. They claimed that their analysis of the six bullets recovered from the murder scene, along with bullets they test fired from the gun owned by Anthony’s mother, confirmed her gun was the weapon used in all three crimes. The implication could not have been more clear. Despite having an air tight alibi for the July shooting, and despite no other evidence at the scene that could implicate Anthony in the murders of Davidson and Vason, the prosecution believed he would be convicted anyway based on this one tenuous tie the crime. It turns out their faith in Alabama’s justice system ability to convict an innocent man was not misplaced.
Anthony’s attorney, whether out of incompetence or a genuine mistake did not hire a qualified expert to contest the states two forensic examiners. Correspondence from the trial judge stated that only $1000 could be authorized to pay for an expert, though the defense attorney could make a request for additional funds if he wished. In any event, Anthony’s lawyer did not request additional funding for a proper, accredited ballistics expert. Instead called as a rebuttal witness a one-eyed “civil engineer with no expertise in firearms identification who admitted he could not operate the machinery necessary to examine the evidence.”
As you can imagine, things went downhill from there.
The prosecutor—who had a documented history of racial bias and said he could tell Mr. Hinton was guilty and “evil” solely from his appearance—told the court that its experts’ asserted match between Mrs. Hinton’s gun and the bullets from all three crimes was the only evidence linking Mr. Hinton to the Davidson and Vason murders.
Thus, though Anthony Hinton had “no history of violent crime” and had passed a polygraph test administered by the police, he was found guilty of both murders by the jury and sentenced to death by “the [trial] judge (now-retired Circuit Judge James Garrett).” The case was appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court, on the following issues:
I. Whether the accused was deprived of a fair trial when two capital cases against him were consolidated for trial.
II. Whether it was error to allow evidence of ballistics tests when the bullets from the victims were introduced into evidence but the test bullets were not.
III. Whether it was error to allow a ballistics expert to testify about the test bullets when they had not been admitted into evidence.
IV. Whether the evidence was sufficient to sustain the convictions.
V. Whether the accused should have been allowed to introduce polygraph results at the guilt and sentencing phases of the trial.
Unsurprisingly, the Alabama Supreme Court in it’s 1989 opinion, ruled against Anthony on each one of the asserted grounds of error by the trial court, and confirmed his conviction. Anthony Hinton would remain on death row for another 25 years. Years of torment endured by an innocent man.
Over 28 years, the outside world changed while Hinton spent his days largely in a 5ft by 8ft prison cell. Children grew up. His mother died. His hair turned gray. Inmates he knew were escorted off to the electric chair or the lethal-injection gurney. […]
Equal Justice Initiative director Bryan Stevenson, who waged a 16-year fight for Hinton’s release, said … the case was tragic.
“Not only did he lose his life, he lived a life in solitary confinement on death row, condemned in a five-by-eight cell where the state was trying to kill him every day,” Stevenson said.
Finally, in 2014, the United States Supreme Court heard another appeal on the sole issue of whether, under the Sixth Amendment, Anthony’s right to counsel had been violated because his trial attorney’s performance failed to meet an “objective standard of reasonableness” resulting in “a reasonable probability that the result of the trial would have been different absent the deficient act or omission.” In an unsigned, unanimous per curiam opinion, the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) stated that in the case of Anthony Ray Hinton v. Alabama:
The trial attorney’s failure to request additional funding in order to replace an expert he knew to be inadequate because he mistakenly believed that he had received all he could get under Alabama law constituted deficient performance. […]
The … inadequate assistance of counsel here was the inexcusable mistake of law—the unreasonable failure to understand the resources that state law made available to him—that caused counsel to employ an expert that he himself deemed inadequate.
That the State presented testimony from two experienced expert witnesses that tended to inculpate Hinton does not, taken alone, demonstrate that Hinton is guilty. Prosecution experts, of course, can sometimes make mistakes. Indeed, we have recognized the threat to fair criminal trials posed by the potential for incompetent or fraudulent prosecution forensics experts, noting that “[s]erious deficiencies have been found in the forensic evidence used in criminal trials. . . . One study of cases in which exonerating evidence resulted in the overturning of criminal convictions concluded that invalid forensic testimony contributed to the convictions in 60% of the cases.” Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U. S. 305, 319 (2009) (citing Garrett & Neufeld, Invalid Forensic Science Testimony and Wrongful Convictions, 95 Va. L. Rev. 1, 14 (2009)). This threat is minimized when the defense retains a competent expert to counter the testimony of the prosecution’s expert witnesses; it is maximized when the defense instead fails to understand the resources available to it by law.
Because no court has yet evaluated the prejudice question by applying the proper inquiry to the facts of this case, we remand the case for reconsideration of whether Hinton’s attorney’s deficient performance was prejudicial …
SCOTUS overturned Anthony’s conviction and remanded the case to the Alabama state courts for further consideration, that is, to either grant Anthony Hinton a new trail or dismiss all charges and release him from prison. A state court judge, Laura Petro, ordered a new trial.
Chief deputy district attorney John R Bowers Jr. stated that “three experts with the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences examined the bullets ahead of the anticipated retrial in the case.” When those experts completed their examination of the only evidence that could link Anthony Hinton to the murders of John Davidson and Thomas Wayne Vason they concluded the bullets could not be tied to the gun owned by Anthony’s mother, the gun the original prosecutor claimed justified Anthony’s conviction for murder and the death penalty. Not a big surprise, since prior experts who examined the gun had already concluded the bullets from the murder scene could not be matched to her gun:
The State’s evidence of a match was wholly discredited by three highly qualified firearms examiners, including the former chief of the FBI’s firearm and toolmarks unit, who testified in 2002 that the bullets from all three crimes could not be matched to a single gun at all, much less to Mrs. Hinton’s gun, and found that her gun could not have fired the bullets from the third uncharged robbery [referring to the shooting of Mr. Smotherman in July, 1985].
This injustice and this tragedy was not Anthony’s alone. It brought great sorrow and distress to his family, but it also denied justice to the families of the victims, as Anthony noted when interviewed after his release:
As he left the jail, Hinton said he would pray for the victims’ families as he has done for the past 30 years. They have suffered a “miscarriage of justice” as well, he said.
Confronted with the fact that they no longer had any hope of a conviction, the prosecution filed a motion to dismiss all charges, one which “Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge” Laura Petro granted.
I suppose we should be grateful that Anthony was finally released from prison and from the death sentence that hung over him lo these many years. Yet, I cannot find much to celebrate here. This is what happens every day in America to poor defendants charged with crimes by overzealous and hasty prosecutors who look for any excuse to rack up their conviction numbers. From the statement issued by the Equal Justice Initiative regarding Anthony’s long ordeal:
“Race, poverty, inadequate legal assistance, and prosecutorial indifference to innocence conspired to create a textbook example of injustice,” Mr. 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.”
Stevenson also said this about the case to free Anthony Ray Hinton for which he worked so tirelessly these many years:
“We have a system that treats you better if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent and this case proves it. We have a system that is compromised by racial bias and this case proves it. We have a system that doesn’t do the right thing when the right thing is apparent,” Stevenson said.
“Prosecutors should have done this testing years ago.”
In closing, I’ll let Anthony Ray Hinton have the final word. He certainly deserves it.
“All they had to do was to test the gun, but when you think you’re high and mighty and you’re above the law, you don’t have to answer to nobody,” Hinton told reporters.
“But I’ve got news for you — everybody that played a part in sending me to death row, you will answer to God.”
The Alabama attorney general’s office declined to comment.
I suppose no words from them were needed. Their silence regarding the mistreatment of Anthony Hinton speaks volumes.
