CharlesPaolino's Blog

The electric chair at the Holman Correctional Facility

When I was in high school, Mike Rinaldo, a history teacher and a hell of a nice guy, gave us some experience in debate. Not only did he assign the topics, but he also told us which side of the topics we were to argue. He assigned me to argue in favor of capital punishment. I was not in favor of capital punishment, but I made the best argument I could, and the faculty panel that judged the debates declared me the winner of that one. Since Mr. Rinaldo had compelled me to construct an argument against my own beliefs, I was amused when he told me privately, and with a twinkle in his eye, that he thought my argument was all wet and that it was shameless of me to include Torah references such as “an eye for an eye,” knowing that the rabbis had interpreted such references in much more nuanced ways than I had used them.

I understand support for the death penalty—I really do. I have read about murder cases that made me, for the moment, so angry that I would have pulled the switch or started the IV myself. But when I reflect calmly on it, I abhor capital punishment. To me, it represents the height of pessimism. Nathan Leopold would have been executed had it not been for Clarence Darrow; Leopold served his time and spent the rest of his life being peaceful and useful. Queen Victoria thought Edward Oxford should be hanged, but Oxford was shipped off to Australia where he became a prominent citizen of his community. Would death have served better purposes? I don’t think so. And my antipathy for the penalty wasn’t assuaged at all by The Sun Does Shine by Anthony Ray Hinton with a literary hand from Lara Love Hardin of Idea Architects.

ANTHONY RAY HINTON/slate.com

Hinton, who is from Birmingham, spent nearly 30 years on death row in an Alabama state prison for a crime he had nothing to do with. In 1985, a witness identified him as the man who shot a restaurant owner in an incident that had occurred while Hinton was 15 miles away, working on a cleaning crew in a warehouse. The warehouse was surrounded by razor-wire fence, and anyone coming or going had to check in with a guard at the gate. In addition, the workers were supervised by a foreman who assigned them task by task. Hinton was not charged with that crime but with two murders that had followed the same pattern. He was convicted on the basis of what turned out to be inaccurate ballistics test results that connected the crimes to a revolver owned by Hinton’s mother. He was convicted also because, being black, he fit Alabama’s glib profile of a criminal, and being poor, he did not receive competent defense.

HOLSOM STATE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY

Because of this best-selling book and the media attention that has been afforded Hinton, it is well known by now that he was released from prison in 2015 after the United States Supreme Court overturned his conviction and the State of Alabama declined to retry the case—not because the state finally acknowledged its mistakes but because, with the ballistics test debunked, it had no evidence against Hinton. The criminal justice system in Alabama had doggedly refused to acknowledge what was clear; its behavior leads only to the conclusion that its priority was not to establish the truth but to execute this man who, conveniently, was convicted and incarcerated.

This story is also about the unnecessary cruelty with which the State of Alabama treated the inmates on death row in the Holman Correctional Facility. Condemned men live every hour in putrid conditions with a combination of humiliation, fear, and hopelessness—there were eleven suicides on the unit while Hinton was there, and he writes that he considered that solution for himself.

And this story is about the strength of character that sustained Hinton during those decades in which 54 condemned prisoners were walked past his cell on their way to the electric chair or, in latter years, the gurney and lethal injection. In fact, the quality of the human being who emerges from this account makes the fact that he languished in prison for no reason all the greater tragedy: He was robbed of his life, and his community and friends and family, and the world at large, were denied the blessing of his presence.

ANTHONY RAY HINTON and LESTER BAILEY/gridironnow.com

He was a blessing to his colleagues on death row, though, because while he wrestled with  the frustrations and horrors of his own situation—ingeniously creating a detailed fantasy life in which he could find relief from a suffocating reality—he related to the other condemned inmates, even the former Klansman who had lynched black men, as first of all fellow human beings. He went to the length of convincing the warden to let him form a book club with a group of prisoners, opening to some of them a part of their own intellects that they had never before experienced.

Hinton is a man of such integrity that when, after many unsuccessful attempts to get the state to confront the injustice done to him, he was offered the opportunity of life without parole, he turned it down. He would rather have died than imply that he had committed those crimes.

Anthony Ray Hinton is 62 years old; to a large extent, he has missed out on life. But with this book—a tough one to put down once you start reading it—he has made a powerful statement about injustice. And if Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative had not taken up the case, the State of Alabama would have gone on its giddy way to killing—murdering, really—this insightful and gentle man.

A hero in Hinton’s life is Lester Bailey, who has been his friend since they were young children. Bailey never missed a visiting day at Holman for the entire time Hinton was incarcerated, often bringing Hinton’s devoted mother until she passed away. You can see Hinton talking about Hinton’s friendship by clicking HERE.