“They have cheated him out of his ballot, deprived him of civil rights or redress therefor in the civil courts, robbed him of the fruits of his labor, and are still murdering, burning and lynching him. The result is a growing disregard of human life … The South is brutalized to a degree not realized by its own inhabitants, and the very foundation of government, law and order, are imperilled.”
—Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases
BIRMINGHAM, DECEMBER 17, 1986
The twenty-four-hour gap between when the judge sentenced Ray to death and when they came to take him to Holman Prison where he’d wait to be killed was a blur. He was in shock. He was officially a condemned man, and none of the guards or the other inmates would meet his eye. It was like the death penalty was a contagious disease and everyone thought they could catch it from him. Anthony Ray Hinton was now officially the worst of the worst. A human not fit for this life. Ray could feel a rage inside him bubbling below the surface. He was a child of God who was condemned to die. He couldn’t wrap his brain around it. How did he get here?
His cell in the county jail had been home for the past year and a half. Some guys who came in after Ray had already been tried and gone up to death row in Holman, and others were given life sentences. Hardly anyone was found innocent. The guys in C block who had money seemed to come in and go out a lot faster than the guys like Ray who were poor. If you had a court-appointed lawyer, like Perhacs, your case always seemed to be delayed, trial dates moved back, hearings postponed.
Why do we judge some people less worthy of justice?
Why does innocence have a price?
Decades of racial terror in the American South reflected and reinforced a view that African Americans were dangerous criminals who posed a threat to innocent white citizens … By 1915, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings in the former slave states for the first time. Two-thirds of those executed in the 1930s were Black, and the trend continued. As African Americans fell to just 22 percent of the South’s population between 1910 and 1950, they constituted 75 percent of those executed in the South during that period … Race remains a significant factor in capital sentencing. African Americans make up less than 13 percent of the nation’s population, but nearly 42 percent of those currently on death row in America are Black, and 34 percent of those executed since 1976 have been Black. In 96 percent of states where researchers have completed studies examining the relationship between race and the death penalty, results reveal a pattern of discrimination based on the race of the victim, the race of the defendant, or both.
—Lynching in America, EJI
In 1916, the NAACP partnered with a group called the Anti-Lynching Crusaders to wage a campaign against the brutal practice of lynching and advocate for antilynching legislation. The Dyer Bill, named for Missouri Republican Representative Leonidas Dyer, an opponent of lynching, passed the House in 1918 but was stalled in the Senate by Southern Democrats. In 1934, Senate Democrats Robert F. Wagner (NY) and Edward Costigan (CO) tried again with the Costigan-Wagner Bill, which aimed for federal prosecution of lynch mobs. Concerned that it would turn off white Southern voters, President Franklin D. Roosevelt balked at publicly supporting the bill, and it went nowhere. Public pressure—and lynchings—continued. It was not until 2018 that the Senate passed the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act, introduced by Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Tim Scott; it was not passed by the House.1 In 2005, the Senate passed a resolution apologizing for the absence of antilynching legislation. In 2020, the House revised the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act and passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which, as of May 2021, has been stalled in the Senate, primarily due to the opposition of Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. As of 2021, Congress has not passed any federal antilynching legislation in the United States.2
The van for death row came on Mondays and Thursdays, so Ray figured it would be the following Monday before he left. He hadn’t been able to use the phone since his sentencing, and he wanted to talk to his mom and Lester. He wanted to make sure his mom was okay. He wanted to tell her he was okay so she wouldn’t worry.
He wasn’t okay, though. How could he be? For the thirty-six hours since he’d left that courtroom, Ray had been replaying every word of the trial and sentencing in his head. He hadn’t slept, he hadn’t eaten, and he hadn’t talked to anybody. Perhacs had told the judge and prosecutors that he had gotten a call at his office and at his home from a guy saying he was the real killer, and nobody had tracked that down. They’d had a discussion about it with the jury out of the room, but nobody cared. Nobody had hunted that man down. Were they all in on it? How did they get people to lie for them? The bailiffs had lied. Reggie had lied. Clark Hayes, a grocery clerk Ray didn’t even know, had lied when he said he saw Ray following Smotherman around Food World. The State’s firearms experts, Higgins and Yates, had lied or they just plain got it wrong—there was no way those bullets matched his mom’s gun. Ray thought about poor Payne, the “ballistics expert” who was destroyed on that stand, humiliated, mocked, and made to look like a liar himself.
Around and around and around, the scenes from the trial swirled in his head. His lawyer had just let the jury sentence him to death without any discussion or testimony. Why hadn’t Perhacs put up his mom and Lester, his neighbor, his church family to tell the jury who Ray was and what he was about? Ray didn’t understand at all. He hoped Perhacs did better with his appeal—Ray was innocent, and his lawyer knew it. The lie detector test proved it!
Ray couldn’t even wrap his brain around what death row was going to be like. He’d been in prison for over a year, and he wanted to go home. He wanted to cut his mom’s grass and sit with her outside at sunset. He wanted to take her fishing. Why hadn’t he gone fishing with her more when she loved it so much? How was she going to get around? Who was going to help her keep up the house? Ray knew Lester would help, but that wasn’t the same. Ray—her son, her baby—he wanted to do it; it was his job.
He missed his girlfriend, Sylvia. He missed her sweet kisses and her skin that smelled like spring flowers after the rain. Ray hadn’t smelled anything good in a year and a half. The sweat of men forced to wear the same clothes for weeks at a time was all that filled his nostrils. He wanted to feel the rain on his neck, the sun on his face. He wanted to take a simple walk at sunrise. He wanted to play baseball and basketball. He wanted to drink sweet tea and eat his mom’s grits and, Lord, he wanted some of her cobbler. He hadn’t had real food in so long. He wanted his simple life back. He wanted to be treated like a human being. After living in his cage of a cell, Ray wanted to travel to all the places he used to imagine visiting, the places he’d thought that he might get to see one day. Places like Hawaii, England, and South America. He wanted to get married and have children and show them the same kind of love he had had as a kid. He didn’t want to be watched when he was in bed, in the bathroom, every second. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to be free.
He wanted to kill the prosecutor, McGregor.
The knowledge that he was capable of those thoughts hit Ray like a sucker punch to his gut. It scared him. This was not him, this wanting to kill. What had they done to him?
He wanted to murder McGregor the way McGregor had murdered Ray’s life. Ray wanted to make it so McGregor could never hurt another person again, until every last lie in him died with him.
He hadn’t come into this jail a murderer; was he going to let them turn him into one?
“Hinton, all the way! Hinton, all the way!”
It was time. Ray heard the automatic lock click on his cell door as it opened. “All the way” meant to pack everything up. He couldn’t believe they were taking him so soon. He wasn’t ready to go to Holman Prison. He hadn’t talked to his mom.
“Hinton, all the way! Get a move on!”
Ray packed up some legal papers and a few pictures. He didn’t know what else he could take, so he left his commissary behind for whoever wanted it. He knew that when the other guys woke up, they would be all over his cell like vultures to take whatever he had left behind.
“Let’s go, Hinton.”
Ray was supposed to roll up his mattress and bring his sheet and blanket, but he just left them there. He wasn’t going to follow the rules anymore. He had done that, and look where it had gotten him. They said he was the worst of the worst? Maybe it was time he started acting like it.
They put Ray in a holding cell and gave him a breakfast of congealed eggs and a hard biscuit and jelly. He was strip-searched and chained, extra-heavy chains around his waist that were attached to the metal cuffs on his wrists and ankles. Ray could barely walk. He wondered who had sat around and said to himself, “I should invent something that will chain a man like an animal and make those chains so heavy he can’t hold up his arms or move his legs.” Ray hated that person too.
The guards who walked Ray out to the van tried to chitchat with him, but Ray said nothing. They looked uneasy. Ray had been nice and cooperative since he’d been there. But no more. He wasn’t going to make their jobs any easier. He let himself go limp when they tried to hoist him up the first step of the van. Ray weighed over two hundred pounds. Let them lift him. He would let them feel his weight as they carted him off to his death. He was somebody. He was a person. He was going to make them feel it.
After he finally got into the van, Ray didn’t say a word. He wasn’t going to speak to them or to anyone ever again. What was the point? When no one believes a word you say, the best thing to do is stop talking.
The ride to Holman took over three hours. Ray had never been that far south before, and it felt like a ride to the end of the world. Two guards sat up front, and there was a mesh cage separating Ray from them. The windows had wire mesh over them as well, but Ray could see out. He hadn’t been given a chance to call anyone before they’d left; no opportunity for goodbyes to his mom and Lester. Ray hated them even more for not giving him that chance. The guards were joking and laughing up front, and he watched the countryside he loved pass by. Would he ever feel grass under his feet again?
Ray had always said this was God’s country, but where was God now? Ray was chained and shackled like an enslaved man being taken to auction.
He was cargo, less than human.
When something good happened to a neighbor, his mom always said, “God blessed this family. God did this for our neighbor. Praise be to God for looking out for that family.” If God blessed people, then did he also punish people? Ray wanted to know why God was punishing him. Why had God blessed that person but put him in the back of a van, wrapped in chains?
What had Ray ever done to God?
Ray imagined the van crashing and rolling over and over again so that his chains came off and he could escape. He would run and run and run until there was no death penalty and he wasn’t a condemned man. He would keep running until he was out of Alabama and in some place where freedom was real and his life couldn’t be taken away from him.
It had been a long time since Ray had seen cars and people and open road and open sky. As they went on, he tried to capture pictures in his mind. A little boy looking bored in the back seat of a station wagon. A pretty girl driving a blue car. A restaurant with a CLOSED sign. A family laughing as they whizzed past. There was a whole world out there enjoying a Wednesday morning, without fear. They were free to do what they wanted, and Ray wondered if they understood what that meant. He saw a Black man, about his age, drive by in a Buick.
“Watch out,” Ray murmured out loud. “They’re going to come for you too. Hey!” he yelled up to the guards.
“What?”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
Eventually, they pulled into a store with a gas station out front. They parked around the side, and one guard took Ray into the bathroom while the other went and filled up with gas. Ray could see some Black kids outside the store staring at him like he was a strange animal in the zoo. Ray wanted them to see what a Black man looked like chained from head to toe. He wanted them to remember.
When they pulled up to the parking lot of Holman Prison, Ray saw inmates on the other side of a tall wire fence. Two guards opened a big gate, and they drove through. Guards brought Ray in through a heavy door and took the chains off but cuffed his hands. He was at the place where they wanted him to die.
“He’s all yours,” the county guard said, and turned Ray over to a short, squat man with long sideburns and a comb-over.
They sat him down in a chair and asked for his name.
Ray said nothing.
“What’s your social?”
Ray just shrugged.
The guard read it off a paper. “Is that your social?”
Ray nodded. He wasn’t going to talk to them. He wasn’t going to make this easy.
“We’re gonna send you to the infirmary to get checked out, and then you’ll get a real physical at another time. You gonna put these whites on, and then you’ll be escorted to your cell.”
Ray didn’t say a word.
He changed into a white prison jumpsuit that said ALABAMA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS on the back. He was given his inmate number—Z468.
He was Anthony Ray Hinton. People called him Ray.
The infirmary weighed him, asked if he took any medication, if he was on drugs. If he had any medical problems they needed to know about.
Ray shook his head to everything they asked but still didn’t speak.
After his medical examination, he was brought down a hall. There were some other inmates in the hall, but they were told to turn and face the wall with their noses against it. Ray couldn’t understand why they did this, but then he saw one of the guys look up at him from the wall, and Ray saw fear in his eyes.
The guard started yelling at the other inmate, who was a white man, about Ray’s age. “Don’t look at him! You can’t look at him! On your knees! On your knees, hands behind your back, nose against the wall! All of you!”
Ray had no idea what was going on or why the guard reacted that way. Then it hit him. They all thought he might attack. The regular inmates were being protected from the death row inmate. Ray was the scariest person in that prison.
Ray was taken to another guard—the captain of the guards. He told Ray he was in charge of death row.
“I didn’t ask for you to come here, and I have but one job, and that’s to keep you here. As long as you are at Holman Prison, you are going to see these blue uniforms and you are going to respect them. You will abide by the rules and regulations and do anything these blue uniforms tell you to do. Is that clear?”
Ray nodded.
“Now, you can make it easy on yourself or you can make it hard on yourself. However you decide to do it. You are on ninety-day probation. You will be cuffed at all times when you are out of your cell. If we get no trouble, you can have the cuffs off when you shower and when you walk. You walk fifteen minutes a day in a cage on the yard. The rest of the time, you are in your cell. We don’t want no trouble. Okay?”
Fifteen minutes. In a cage on the yard.
Ray kept his eyes down and nodded again.
“Sergeant, take him to his cell.”
They walked Ray down a long hall and through a doorway that said DEATH ROW at the top. They walked up a flight of stairs, and the guard started yelling out row numbers. Finally, he stopped in front of cell number 8.
“Number 8!” he yelled.
Ray heard a voice from behind them call the number back, and then there was a loud clank and the door opened. Inside was a small, narrow bunk with a thin plastic mattress. Another guard walked in and put a sheet, blanket, towel, and washcloth on the bed. He also set down a brown bag of Ray’s stuff from the county jail. It had his Bible, some letters, and legal papers from his trial. He could hear guys yelling, and he saw some mirrors sticking out of the other cells—that was so the inmates could see what was going on, who the guards were bringing in.
From somewhere far off, Ray could hear a man screaming. Another man was laughing. Another one just kept saying, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” over and over again.
Ray walked into the cell, and the guards stepped out.
“When we close the door, stick your hands out through here and we’ll take off the cuffs.”
Ray didn’t say anything and the guard gave him a look, then continued. “It’s too late for you to order a Christmas package this year, but maybe next year.”
Christmas? The last thing Ray was thinking about was Christmas. He didn’t want to order a Christmas package, and he didn’t want to celebrate Jesus’s birthday. What was the point?
The door slammed shut, and the sounds began to echo in Ray’s head. He could feel his stomach doing flips, and his knees began to shake. He thought he might throw up. He stuck his hands through the small slot so the guards could take off the cuffs. He flexed his wrists and turned back around to face his new home: his cell. It was five feet wide and about seven feet long. A metal toilet with a sink on top, and a shelf and the bed.
That was it.
Ray sat down on the edge of the bed and looked in the bag of his stuff. He pulled out the King James Bible. All of it was a lie. There was no God for him anymore. His God had forsaken him. His God didn’t love him. His God was a punishing God who had failed and left him to die. Ray had no use for God. Forgive me, Mama, he thought to himself as he threw the Bible under the bed.
Ray didn’t bother making his bed; he just lay down and closed his eyes. When they tried to pass his dinner through the slot in his door, Ray didn’t bother getting up to take it. He wasn’t going to talk to anyone or take anything from anyone. He was full of a hate too big for that little cell.
He was completely alone.
Ray decided he would find a way to escape, and find a way to put right all that had been made wrong. He would prove his innocence.
He would get his revenge. He lay there for hours until he woke up in darkness, except for a light coming from outside his cell.
The only other sound was someone on death row screaming out in the darkness.
“No, no, no, no, noooo!”
Ray pressed his hands against his ears, but the screaming went on.
It never stopped.