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| Anthony Ray Hinton wipes away tears after greeting friends and relatives upon leaving the Jefferson County jail, Friday, April 3, 2015, in Birmingham, Ala. Hinton spent nearly 30 years on Alabama's death row, and was set free Friday after prosecutors told a judge they won't re-try him for the 1985 slayings of two fast-food managers. |
BIRMINGHAM, Ala.
(AP) -- A man who spent nearly 30 years on Alabama's death row
walked free Friday hours after prosecutors acknowledged that the only
evidence they had against him couldn't prove he committed the crime.
Ray
Hinton was 29 when he was arrested for two 1985 killings. Freed at age
58, with grey hair and a beard, he was embraced by his sobbing sisters,
who said "thank you Jesus," as they wrapped their arms around him
outside the Jefferson County Jail.
Prosecutors
said this week that new ballistics tests couldn't match his mother's
gun to any of the six bullets found at the crime scenes.
"I shouldn't have sat on death row for 30 years. All they had to do was test the gun," Hinton said.
The state of Alabama offered no immediate apology.
"When
you think you are high and mighty and you are above the law, you don't
have to answer to nobody. But I got news for them, everybody who played a
part in sending me to death row, you will answer to God," Hinton said.
"They just didn't take me from my family and friends. They had every
intention of executing me for something I didn't do," Hinton said.
Hinton
was arrested in 1985 for the murders of two Birmingham fast-food
restaurant managers after the survivor of a third restaurant robbery
identified Hinton as the gunman. Prosecution experts said at the trial
that bullets recovered at all three crime scenes matched Hinton's
mother's .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. He was convicted
despite an alibi: He had been at work inside a locked warehouse 15
minutes away during the third shooting.
"The
only thing we've ever had to connect him to the two crimes here in
Birmingham was the bullets matching the gun that was recovered from his
home," Chief Deputy District Attorney John R. Bowers, Jr. told The
Associated Press on Thursday.
The U.S. Supreme
Court ruled last year that Hinton had "constitutionally deficient"
representation at trial because his defense lawyer wrongly thought he
had only $1,000 to hire a ballistics expert to rebut the state's case.
The only expert willing to take the job at that price struggled so much
under cross-examination that jurors chuckled at his responses.
Attorney
Bryan Stevenson, who directs Alabama's Equal Justice Initiative, called
it "a case study in what is wrong with our system. He was convicted
because he was poor. We have a system that treats you better if you are
rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent."
The
independent experts Stevenson hired to re-examine this evidence after
taking on Hinton's case in 1999 "were quite unequivocal that this gun
was not connected to these crimes," he said. "That's the real shame to
me. What happened this week to get Mr. Hinton released could have
happened at least 15 years ago."
Stevenson
then tried in vain for years to persuade the state of Alabama to
re-examine the evidence. The bullets only got a new look as prosecutors
and defense lawyers tangled over a possible retrial following the
Supreme Court ruling.
The result: Three
forensics experts could not positively conclude whether the bullets were
fired from Hinton's revolver, or whether they came from the same gun at
all, according to the state's request to dismiss the case against
Hinton. Bowers said the "bullets were so badly mutilated that they did
not have the necessary microscopic markings to make a conclusive
determination."
Asked how the state's
conclusions could be so different this time, Bowers said they put the
same question to the experts, who said test standards have become more
"conservative."
"Some things back then that
experts would be willing to attest to, they would not be willing to
attest to now. They would need more now," he Bowers said.
The
science of bullet matching remains the same as it was 30 years ago,
even though microscopes have improved since then: A gun is test-fired
and the bullet is compared with a slug from the crime scene. Problems
can result mainly through human error, or when analysts aren't
qualified, said Pete Gagliardi, a former ATF special agent in charge and
vice president of Forensic Technology Inc.
Hinton
was one of the longest-serving inmates on Alabama's death row, and is
one of the longest-serving inmates to be released in the United States.
But Stevenson said there are many others behind bars who were convicted
"based on bad science."
"We've allowed too
many people to assert things in court that are not credible or reliable,
painted over with this kind of scientific expertise which means there
could be a lot of wrongful convictions," Stevenson said.
Hinton left the jail for a cemetery, planning to put flowers on the grave of his mother, who died in 2002.
After that comes the adjustment to the modern world after spending nearly half of his life in solitary confinement.
"The
world is a very different place than in what 30 years ago. There was no
internet. There was no email. I gave him an iPhone this morning. He's
completely mystified by that," Stevenson said.
