If you didn’t do it, one of your brothers did. One of his arresting officers explained his fate this way, after the prisoner told him he could prove he had been working at the time of one of the murders: “You know, I don’t even care whether you did or didn’t do it … In fact, I believe you didn’t do it. “My only crime was being born black in Alabama,” Hinton writes, his prosecution “nothing less than a lynching” in which the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan were replaced by the black robes of justice. That victim survived and then misidentified Hinton as his assailant then the state completed this travesty by providing completely fake ballistic evidence to tie a gun found in Hinton’s mother’s home to all three murders. There was no evidence at all to tie Hinton to two of the three murders he was accused of, and he was “locked in a supermarket warehouse cleaning floors … when a restaurant manager 15 miles away was abducted, robbed and shot”. It only takes the first two pages of the introduction by the author’s equally remarkable lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, to make the reader appalled. But that isn’t what makes this a genuine spiritual experience: that comes from the nearly biblical capacity of the author to endure, to forgive, and finally to triumph. Anthony Ray Hinton’s memoir of his wrongful imprisonment for 30 years for three murders he did not commit is a riveting account of the multiple outrages of the criminal justice system of Alabama.
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