The cloying stench of scorched flesh hung in the air as Anthony Ray Hinton was led to his cell on death row, barely 30 yards from the execution chamber.
“The smell of someone literally being set on fire – that alone is cruel and unusual punishment,” he says. “I was not prepared for that smell, and I’d be lying if I said I ever got used to it.”
Eighteen months earlier, on a hot summer’s day in 1985, a 29-year-old Hinton had been mowing his mother’s lawn in rural Birmingham, Alabama, when he was interrupted by two police detectives.
They accused Hinton of robbing a restaurant. It didn’t matter that he had an alibi, they tied the crime, along with two, unsolved shootings to his mother’s dusty, old .38 revolver. Hinton was saddled with an incompetent public defender. An all-white jury fell for the prosecution’s shoddy ballistics evidence, found him guilty of two counts of murder, and condemned him to death.
