“Mr. Hinton was denied effective assistance of counsel at the guilt/innocence penalty and appellate phases of his case in violation of his rights under the laws and Constitution of Alabama and the Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution.”
—Santha Sonenberg, 1990 petition for relief
Santha filed his petition the day before the deadline. In it, she listed thirty-one reasons why he should be granted a new trial—prosecutor misconduct and racial discrimination, ineffective assistance of counsel, and not being allowed to hire a real expert, to name just a few. Ray read the list over and over again, and he felt hope. She had included everything, from the polygraph test he’d passed not being allowed, to the improper seizure of his mother’s gun, to the discriminatory nature of Alabama’s death penalty laws. He let some of the other guys read it. They passed it from cell to cell.
Soon everyone was talking about his case. Ray didn’t know what some of the things on the list meant, but he used his time in the law library to research. He had studied the amendments to the Constitution in high school but definitely needed a refresher course. It was great just to have something new to read, something new to talk about. Henry seemed particularly interested in his case.
“It sounds good, Ray,” Henry said, “like you should be let go. You have a solid case. You really are innocent.”
Ray laughed. “I know everyone says it, but I really am innocent. And I’m really going to walk out of here someday. You just wait.” He didn’t tell Henry that he left the row every day in his mind. He didn’t tell anyone. He could be there for meals and when the guards needed him to do something, but the minute his mind wasn’t occupied by the routine of the row, he left. His jet plane was always waiting, and it got easier and easier for him to travel in his mind.
Sometimes Henry would ask him what he had been doing when Henry was calling out to him, and Ray would say, “I was in Spain, Henry, but I’m back now. What do you need?”
Ray knew people thought he was losing it, but escaping in his mind gave him a sort of giddy sense of freedom. He could tune out the moaning and the roaches and the smell of death and the food that had no taste and the endless worry about who would be next to burn up in that chair. Every time an hour could pass without being aware of every slow second of that hour was a gift. Every day was like the one before it and the one after it. And there were so many days when nothing at all happened. Nothing. Just silence or moaning or guys yelling nothing at each other.
They each did their time in their own way. One guy would just draw spirals on a piece of paper—all day, every day. Spirals within spirals within spirals so that you never saw where anything ended and anything began. Some guys just spent the time between meals trying not to go crazy—they would hum, or rock themselves, or moan in a way that almost sounded like chanting. Humans were not meant to be locked in a cage, and a man couldn’t survive in a box. It was cruel.
Ray knew they weren’t a collection of innocent victims. Many of the guys he laughed with had done horrible things, unspeakable things. Some had committed their crimes because their minds were different and they didn’t know better. Others had done things because they were high on drugs or desperate for money and never thought beyond the next moment.
The outside world called them monsters. But Ray didn’t know any monsters on the row. He knew guys named Larry and Henry and Victor and Jesse. He knew Vernon and Willie and Jimmy. Not monsters. Guys with names who didn’t have mothers who loved them or anyone who had ever shown them a kindness that was even close to love. Guys who were born broken or had been broken by life. Guys who had been abused as children and had their minds and their hearts warped by cruelty and violence and isolation long before they ever stood in front of a judge and a jury.
Ray was there with these guys part of the time, but the rest of the time, he left. He watched college football games in his mind, and he learned to fly a helicopter. He had a boat and a Cadillac and went on dates with lots of women. He would eat at the finest restaurants, wear the nicest clothes, and visit the most beautiful and wondrous places in the world. Traveling in his mind was like reading a good book and being transported to a completely different world, and a part of him felt a little guilty that he could escape this way when so many guys were suffering.
The State responded to his petition and basically denied everything Santha had claimed, saying that all his claims were “procedurally barred” because an issue was either already raised during his trial or in Perhacs’s direct appeal, or it could have been raised on his direct appeal but wasn’t.
It didn’t make any sense to Ray. It didn’t seem to matter that he was innocent, that people lied, that there were real issues with his trial—the State didn’t want to admit that anything was wrong, and unless you knew it was wrong or should have known it was wrong or could have known it was wrong but didn’t, you couldn’t argue it. Henry explained it to Ray. “If your attorney could have raised something during your trial and first appeal but didn’t, it’s barred by the State. If it was raised at trial or in your first appeal, and you were still convicted and denied, it’s also barred by the State.”
“But doesn’t that cover everything?” Ray asked. “I mean everything that you would appeal on?”
“Pretty much.”
It didn’t seem fair or right that the odds were stacked against him—against all of them. If you couldn’t afford to get an attorney at your trial or appeal, it seemed like you would never be able to prove you were innocent. A hearing was set for April 23, 1991, but then at the beginning of the month Ray got a note from Santha saying that his hearing was being postponed. She sent him a copy of the official notice she filed with the court withdrawing as his attorney. She couldn’t represent him anymore because of a new job in D.C., but she said that another attorney would be taking over. Bryan Stevenson’s office would send someone. She told him that they were going to amend his petition and change the hearing date and that it was now called a Rule 32 hearing because Alabama changed the rules of appellate law, but not to worry.
Not to worry.
Ray tried not to take it too hard. He called Lester and asked him to check in with the resource center in Montgomery. “Try to get hold of this Bryan Stevenson and see if he knows anything about a new attorney,” he asked. “Tell him I’m innocent and that I was supposed to have a hearing on my petition.” Lester always took care of things for Ray. He still drove to Holman every week, even though he had been turned away a few times because the prison was on lockdown or there weren’t enough guards at work that day.
Ever since Ray had passed around his petition, guys were sharing their appeals as well. They started to have lively legal debates on their side of the row, but it was hard to yell to each other and know exactly who was talking and to who.
“Listen to this!” Ray yelled out his cell as he read aloud from the petition. “‘The kind of justice a criminal defendant has cannot depend on how much money he has.’”
The guys debated this up and down the row all day.
Money determined everything, and none of them had any money.
One night a guy named Jimmy told Ray, “Hays has money. If anyone’s going to get out of this place, it’s Hays.”
“Who’s Hays?” Ray asked.
“Henry. Henry Hays. The KKK guy. You know the KKK has money. He will get out.”
Henry Hays?
Ray couldn’t believe it. He knew who Henry Hays was. Everybody in Alabama knew that he and a couple of other white guys had lynched a Black boy named Michael Donald in Mobile in 1981. (It was the Ku Klux Klan’s last “official” lynching; the civil suit that Donald’s mother later won against them effectively bankrupted the organization.) The kid had been a teenager, nineteen years old, and the KKK was mad that a Black guy on trial might get away with killing a white policeman. Ray thought it had been a mistrial, but he couldn’t remember. Henry Hays’s father was rumored to be the head of the KKK or something. That poor Donald boy had been randomly picked up and beaten and brutally murdered. His mother had sued the Klan or taken some other legal action. He couldn’t remember exactly, but he remembered being sickened by the murder. Michael Donald hadn’t been much younger than Ray was—five or six years—and the story had reminded him of the bombs growing up and the kids who had the dogs let loose on them and the girls who had been murdered in the church. The news about the lynching had angered him.
All this time, Ray had had no idea that his friend Henry was actually Henry Hays.
Ray went back to his cell that night and stared at the ceiling. He was Henry’s friend. Henry knew Ray was Black. Ray wanted to talk to him. He wanted to understand.
“Henry!” he yelled.
“What you want, Ray?”
“I just figured out who you are. I didn’t know.” There was no answer right away, and Ray wondered what Henry was thinking.
“Everything my mom and dad taught me was a lie, Ray. Everything they taught me against Blacks, it was a lie.”
Ray didn’t know exactly what to say back to him. “You know, just about everything I believe about people, I learned from my mom.”
“So you know what I mean,” he said.
“Yeah. I do. I guess I was just lucky that my mom taught me to love people, no matter what. She taught me to forgive.”
“You was lucky, Ray. You was really lucky.”
“She taught me to have compassion for everybody, Henry, and I have compassion for you. I’m sorry your mama and your daddy didn’t teach you the same. I really am.”
“Me too.”
They didn’t say much after that, but the row was pretty quiet that night. Sometimes you need to make family where you find it, and Ray knew that to survive he had to make a family of these men and they had to make a family of him. It didn’t matter who was Black and who was white—all that kind of fell away when you lived a few feet away from an electric chair. They all faced execution. They all were scrambling to survive.
Not monsters.
Not the worst thing they had ever done.
They were so much more than what they had been reduced to—so much more than could be contained in one small cage.
On the next visiting day, Henry had a visit too. Ray sat with Lester and Sylvia, and they were laughing about something when Ray heard Henry call his name.
“Ray! Ray, come here for a second.” He gestured Ray over. Henry sat with an older couple; Ray assumed they were his parents.
Ray glanced toward the guard, but he wasn’t paying him any mind, so Ray walked over to Henry’s table.
“Ray, I want you to meet my father, Bennie. Dad, this is Ray Hinton. My friend.”
Ray held out his hand to Henry’s father. He just looked at him and then down at the table. He didn’t say hello, and he wouldn’t shake Ray’s hand.
“He’s my friend. My best friend.” Henry’s voice shook a little bit.
His mom smiled at Ray faintly, and then the guard yelled to Ray to go sit down.
“Nice to meet you both,” Ray said, and he walked back to his table.
“What was that all about?” asked Lester.
“That was about some progress, my friend, some crazy progress on death row.”
Ray imagined it took a lot for Henry to stand up to his dad. To tell him that this large Black man was his best friend. They never talked about the fact that Henry’s father wouldn’t shake his hand. They just kept on living next to each other and surviving as best they could.
Ray’s new attorney came to see him a few months later. His name was Alan Black. He was from Boston.
Ray had always been a Yankees fan.
“I’m going to ask Bryan Stevenson for some money to hire someone to test the bullets again. We need a new expert. We need to prove there’s no way your mother’s gun was used to kill those men.”
Ray nodded. He had thought about this before. Payne had been destroyed on the stand, and even though he had told the truth, no one believed him. No one would ever believe him when he couldn’t even operate the machinery or find the light on the microscope.
“I need you to get the best of the best,” Ray said.
Alan Black nodded and kind of laughed nervously. He didn’t look Ray in the eye, so while he wasn’t who Ray would pick as his attorney, Ray was grateful he was there.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “I think I know a guy out of Jersey. I’ll talk to Bryan.”
“Okay, you do that. It might be good if you find someone from the South, though. Judges around here don’t really like guys from out of town.” Ray didn’t want to tell him what to do; that hadn’t worked out so well with Perhacs.
Ray went back to his cell after the visit, and Henry asked how it went.
“Well, Henry, it’s like this. I can get over the fact that you used to be in the KKK, but I’m not sure I’m going to be able to get over the fact that my life is now in the hands of a Red Sox fan.”
Henry and some of the other guys started laughing.
Ray smiled. As long as he was making them laugh, they were all still alive.
He was tired of talking through the bars, though. He was tired of standing with his mouth pressed against dirty mesh wire every time he wanted to talk to another human.
Ray thought about Wallace and his Project Hope. He thought about passing his list of thirty-one reasons up and down the row.
“Henry!” he yelled.
“Yeah?”
“I’m thinking about starting a book club.”
“A what?”
“A book club. I’m going to see if we can meet in the library once a month and have ourselves a book club. You in?”
Henry paused a moment. “I’m in,” he said.
“I want in!” yelled a guy named Larry.
“Me too!”
“Who’s that?” Ray asked.
“It’s Victor. I want in. What are we going to read, though? Wouldn’t your book club just be a Bible study?”
“No, I’m going to get some real books in here. I’m going to talk to the warden, and we’re going to get some real books,” Ray said. “And we’re going to have ourselves a little club.”
He closed his eyes. He could leave the row in his mind, and now he was going to show these guys that they could leave too. Ray could remember being in school and reading a book about California and getting so lost in it, he swore he could smell the salt water of the Pacific Ocean.
He just needed to get some books.
Then they could all leave that place together.