The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row

by Anthony Ray Hinton

We need to think about the fact that we are all more than the worst thing we have done.

But more so than the evidence, I have never had as strong a feeling in trying any other case that the defendant just radiated guilt and pure evil as much as in the Hinton trial.

But pain and tragedy and injustice happen—they happen to us all. I’d like to believe it’s what you choose to do after such an experience that matters the most—that truly changes your life forever.

There’s no sadder place to be in this world than a place where there’s no hope.

But justice is a funny thing, and in Alabama, justice isn’t blind.

Martin Luther King once said, “A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.”

I had just turned twenty-nine, and honestly, I still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. Sometimes it felt like life was more a process of elimination than a series of choices.

At trial, McGregor had asked me what I thought the appropriate sentence would be for someone who did what I was accused of doing, and I had said the death penalty would be appropriate. But was it? Who was I to say who was worthy of life or death?

I didn’t want to make him feel bad for making me feel bad. That’s what real friendship was all about. Or any relationship, for that matter. You wanted the other person’s happiness as much as, or more than, your own. Lester deserved love. Hell, everyone deserved love.

I was on death row not by my own choice, but I had made the choice to spend the last three years thinking about killing McGregor and thinking about killing myself. Despair was a choice. Hatred was a choice. Anger was a choice. I still had choices, and that knowledge rocked me. I may not have had as many as Lester had, but I still had some choices. I could choose to give up or to hang on. Hope was a choice. Faith was a choice. And more than anything else, love was a choice. Compassion was a choice.

I was born with the same gift from God we are all born with—the impulse to reach out and lessen the suffering of another human being. It was a gift, and we each had a choice whether to use this gift or not.

Everything, I realized, is a choice. And spending your days waiting to die is no way to live.

“I like how you think the people are all a certain way, but then you find out their stories, their histories, and you see how they got to be that way.

We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our humanity.

It was a powerful thing to be listened to like that.

Some nights are just made for crying.

There is a point in a struggle where you have to surrender. You have to stop trying to swim upstream, stop fighting the current. I hadn’t given up the idea of walking out of prison, but I couldn’t fight it every single day and survive. You try your best to get home, and then at some point, you decide to make a home where you are.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

The pain one man can cause another is limitless, but I didn’t see—I couldn’t see—how creating more pain made anything better. When you took a life, it didn’t bring back a life. It didn’t undo what was done. It wasn’t logical. We were just creating an endless chain of death and killing, every link connected to the next. It was barbaric. No baby is born a murderer. No toddler dreams of being on death row someday. Every killer on death row was taught to be a killer—by parents, by a system, by the brutality of another brutalized person—but no one was born a killer.

I learned that fear and joy are both a choice. And every morning when I opened my eyes at 3:00 A.M. and saw the cement and the mesh wire and the sadness and filth of my tiny cell, I had a choice. Would I choose fear, or would I choose love? Would I choose a prison, or would I choose a home?

“I think it’s because only the child cries when an innocent man is convicted. All the adults just accept it. It’s happened before, and it will happen again. What do you think?” I asked. “I think that’s right, Ray. I think that’s right. But here’s what I want to say. Just because they’ve done it before and they’ll do it again doesn’t mean you stop fighting, right? I don’t think it’s something people should ever get used to, do you?”

With 34 executions and seven exonerations since 1975, one innocent person has been identified on Alabama’s Death Row for every five executions. It’s an astonishing rate of error.

How many sunrises and sunsets could one man miss in his life and still have a life?

But laughing puts people at ease in a way that helps them to listen. It was true on death row, and it’s true outside of death row.

I forgive because not to forgive would only hurt me.

It’s hard not to wrap your life in a story—a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A story that has logic and purpose and a bigger reason for why things turned out the way they did. I look for purpose in losing thirty years of my life. I try to make meaning out of something so wrong and so senseless.

Because there’s no way to know the exact second your life changes forever. You can only begin to know that moment by looking in the rearview mirror. And trust me when I tell you that you never, ever see it coming.