Alabama Man Freed After 30 Years on Death Row
BIRMINGHAM, Ala., April 3 (UPI) — The same bullets that put Anthony Ray Hinton behind bars some 30 years ago had him walking out of an Alabama prison a free man Friday.
Hinton, 58, one of Alabama’s longest-serving death row inmates, spent more than half his life maintaining his innocence in the 1985 shooting death of two fast-food managers in separate incidents. The prosecution’s case, which relied heavily on gun experts and eyewitnesses, fell apart when recent testing couldn’t match bullets at the crime scenes to a gun found in Hinton’s house decades ago.
“I shouldn’t have [sat] on death row for 30 years. All they had to do was to test the gun,” he said as he was being released. “But when you think you’re high and mighty and you’re above the law, you don’t have to answer to nobody. But I’ve got news for you — everybody that played a part in sending me to death row, you will answer to God.”
Hinton, who was 29 at the time of the killings, was convicted in the slayings of fast-food managers at Mrs. Winner’s Chicken & Biscuits and Captain D’s. He was sentenced to death.
More than a decade ago, the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative hired experts who discovered the revolver thought to be used in the crime could not be matched to the bullets at the scene. EJI attorneys also said Hinton was railroaded at trial because the judge ignored a polygraph test that exonerated him, and his state-funded defense ballistics expert was a “visually impaired civil engineer with no expertise in firearms identification.”
Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Hinton’s conviction after finding hisconstitutional right to a fair trial had been violated. Alabama prosecutors decided earlier this week not to retry Hinton.
