“I’ve never thought what I do, I do just for my clients, or I’m doing just for the people who I represent or the people who know I care about them. I’ve always felt like my work, our work, is for everybody. That is, we’re trying to save everyone from the corruption, from the agony, of living lives where there is no mercy, where there is no grace, where there is no justice—where we are indifferent to suffering. Those kinds of lives ultimately lead to violence and animosity and bigotry. And I don’t want that for anybody.”
—Bryan Stevenson1
There is no “Welcome to Your Appeal” brochure that prisoners get after they are condemned. Nobody sits them down and explains what has to be filed and how much time they have to file it. A prisoner is guaranteed a direct appeal to the State appellate courts—the Court of Criminal Appeals and the Alabama Supreme Court—but that’s really it. The State of Alabama does not want to make it easy, and they offer zero assistance to death row inmates. Unfairly convicted? Prejudiced at trial? Confession coerced? Constitutional rights violated? Your attorney sucked? Good luck with that. There is no post-conviction help for the condemned. They are on their own, like Ray, and the State does everything it can to make it difficult with a whole lot of obscure procedures and rules that seem to prevent prisoners from revisiting anything once a court has ruled on it.
And in Alabama, judges are elected based on how many people they send to death row, not on how many people they let off.
Ray called Perhacs’s office whenever he could, and his secretary assured him that Perhacs was working on Ray’s appeal and promised to give him the messages. Ray had read about robberies in Birmingham that fit the same description as Quincy’s, Mrs. Winner’s, and another at a place called Captain D’s. The Cooler Killer hadn’t slowed down at all, and the times when there was a suspect description, it was the same as Smotherman’s—Black male, five foot eleven, 180 pounds. Nothing like Ray.
Somehow, it hadn’t mattered that he was six foot two and 230 pounds, and it didn’t matter that he was locked up and still, the same crimes kept happening. Ray wondered if the victims’ families were reading the papers too. Did they ever wonder if the State had convicted the wrong man? Ray sent Perhacs a note along with every crime report he found in the paper. “Just trying to help,” he wrote. “Thank you so much!”
Ray wondered if the case ever kept Perhacs awake at night. What was it like for him knowing his client was innocent and sleeping on death row? Ray didn’t know at the time that his mom had started writing Perhacs letters too, pleading and begging for him to save her baby’s life. Asking him to protect her boy. She wasn’t at all happy with what was said about her Ray in court.
Their neighbor Miss Wesley Mae brought Ray’s mom to see him at Holman after his ninety-day probation was over and he was allowed a visit. The two old ladies had never before driven so far alone, and had gotten lost trying to find their way to the prison. They showed up on a Friday night, two hours after visiting time was over—but the warden had a little bit of sympathy for them in their Sunday best making their way to the prison, so he let Ray have a visit for about twenty minutes.
Ray hugged his mom as long as he could—another thing that wasn’t usually allowed. She smelled like laundry soap and rose water, but she looked tired. There were dark circles under her eyes, and Ray could see new lines around her mouth that weren’t there a few months ago.
“God will fix this,” she kept saying. “God can do everything but fail, baby. God is going to fix this right up for you.”
“Yes, Mama,” Ray said. The guard looked up, surprised to hear Ray speak for the first time. Ray didn’t have the heart to tell his mom that he was done with God. God didn’t live in this place. If there was a God and he thought it was okay to send Ray to hell while he was still alive, well then, he wasn’t Ray’s God. Not anymore. Not ever again. “You come with Lester next time. I don’t want you two driving all this way alone. You got that?”
“You okay, baby?” His mom reached her hand out and touched his cheek. Her eyes filled with tears.
“I’m okay, Mama. Don’t you be worrying about me. This place is fine. They are treating me real fine.” Ray knew it was wrong to lie to her, but lies told to ease pain or protect someone’s heart are lies that need to be told. She already had to live apart from him. If Alabama had its way, she was going to have to live through the unimaginable: them putting Ray to death. He was going to comfort her every single moment that he could, even if it meant telling a million lies. “Now, we only have a few minutes. Don’t spend them crying. I’m just fine, but I could use some of your cooking. I could use a nice, juicy hamburger right now.”
His mama laughed, and he tried to memorize that sound in his mind. He wanted to hang on to that laugh and hear it in his head instead of the endless moaning he heard all day, every day on the row.
“Your attorney sent me a couple of letters. He’s going to get you out of here. He’s working real hard.”
She carefully unfolded two letters she had brought in. They were addressed to her. Ray hadn’t heard from Perhacs yet, but when he’d called his office, his secretary said that he had filed a motion for a new trial.
Ray looked at the first letter. It was dated a few weeks before his sentencing.
“Mama, this first letter is from before I came here.”
“Well, I been writing him so he knows who you are. I wanted to tell him that what they said at your trial was a lie. They lied on your name. My son is no killer.” She dabbed at her eyes with a white handkerchief.
“It’s okay. It’s okay.” He patted her hand. “Let me have a look.”
November 25, 1986
Dear Ms. Hinton:
Thank you for your letter dated November 17, 1986. I want you to know that I will continue to do everything I know how to do to protect your son. His case is going to be appealed, and I think I’m going to win the appeal. The appeal will probably take a couple of years. After that, we will probably have to try his case again. The next time we try it, we will do some things differently. I still think he has a good opportunity to be acquitted of these charges.
I will continue to do everything I know how to do.
Sincerely, Sheldon Perhacs
Ray didn’t want to sit on death row for a couple of years. Perhacs would do some things differently next time? How about getting a competent ballistics expert? Ray still cringed when he thought about his expert getting crucified on the stand. Would they give them more money for a better expert if they tried him again? It seemed like if you were poor, you were as good as guilty. Ray picked up the second letter. It was dated just a month earlier.
March 2, 1987
Dear Ms. Hinton:
I intend to continue to do everything I know how to do to protect your son. The case is in the process of being appealed. The appeal will take quite some time to complete. It is my opinion that we have a good opportunity to win this case on appeal. If we do, we will have a new trial. At the new trial I am going to hire another expert to testify about the bullets.
I also believe that your son is not guilty of killing anyone. I will continue to do everything I know how to do to protect him. I’m sorry that I missed your call when you called the other day, and I am certainly glad that you wrote to me to tell me about it. Please feel free to continue to contact me whenever you need to.
Sincerely, Sheldon Perhacs
Ray’s heart broke at what he read between the lines of his letters—his mom calling Perhacs and writing him and asking him to protect her baby. What Ray didn’t know at the time was that she was also sending Perhacs money orders for twenty-five dollars every time she wrote, pleading and begging him for help. Here is all my money—save my son. Did he laugh at those little money orders? Twenty-five dollars was nothing to a man who ate a thousand dollars for breakfast. But twenty-five dollars might as well have been a hundred thousand to Ray’s mom. Perhacs didn’t know what it meant to have just enough to make it through a month without a penny to spare. An extra ten dollars needed for an emergency would mean you had no water or no electricity for a month, or maybe even longer than a month, because you had to pay a reconnect fee to turn it back on. When Ray found out, he knew why his mom had never told him about the money—he would have put an end to it, never understanding that she needed the comfort of knowing she was doing everything she could to save her son’s life. He would have taken that comfort from her.
He knew his mom felt helpless. So did Ray.
They all felt helpless.
And at the time, Ray didn’t want to think his attorney would take advantage of that helplessness. How could he? Perhacs was his only chance. Ray didn’t tell his mom that Perhacs had already told Ray he would handle the automatic appeal and then he was off his case, back to his thousand-dollar breakfasts. It was as if he was already planning to lose. Ray was just hoping he would have a change of heart. A man had called him during Ray’s trial and said he was the killer. Maybe he would call again. Ray was hoping for a miracle but planning his escape.
Ray hugged his mom and Miss Mae goodbye. His mom promised to come with Lester next time, and Miss Mae seemed relieved.
Visiting days were every Friday at first. Lester had to take the day off work, but as soon as he was allowed, he made the seven-hour round-trip drive every Friday. Sometimes he worked the night shift on Thursday and still drove all day Friday. Ray used to worry about him falling asleep at the wheel, but Lester was always the first one at the prison waiting to get in. He brought his mom and Ray’s mom, and the three of them were the only bit of light in the darkness. Then the visits were changed to once a month for death row. They didn’t want to make it easy on families and friends.
During those early visits, Ray was so full of hatred and rage that it was all he could do to smile and chitchat. If they noticed something wrong, they never said, but every once in a while, Ray could see Lester watching him. Lester was his best friend, he knew Ray better than anyone, but Ray didn’t think Lester could have known what he was thinking.
Ray had never felt such a darkness in him. He couldn’t control his thoughts. Every hour of every day, he imagined how he would kill McGregor. His days and nights were spent watching. And listening. At visiting hours, he was memorizing the routines of the guards. There had to be a way out. A moment where he could sneak over a fence, hide in the back of a car, take off running. It wasn’t logical, and he didn’t have a plan—but he watched and he waited because there had to be a way to escape. There just had to be.
Wouldn’t it be better if they killed him while he was trying to escape rather than killing him strapped to a chair? The only hesitation Ray had was that he didn’t want people to think he had run because he was guilty. He wanted to prove his innocence more than anything else.
Ray wasn’t a killer, but now, he wanted to kill. Inside, he was becoming the monster the world thought he was, and he was afraid Lester and his mom would see it, so he lied to them about how things were. The food is fine. The guards are nice. The other inmates are quiet and keep to themselves. Ray lied to them every week. I’m sleeping just fine. I have everything I need. He lied and he lied and then he lied some more.
The reality was they had to eat breakfast at 3:00 a.m., lunch at 10:00 a.m., and dinner at 2:00 p.m. And every night, Ray was hungry. Every day, he was hungry. Breakfast was some powdered eggs, a biscuit so hard you could bounce it off the floor, and a little spoonful of what was supposed to be jelly. They had a whole prison to feed, so the death row inmates had to eat early in the morning. At 2:45 a.m., the guards would start screaming, “Breakfast! Breakfast! Breakfast!” If Ray was lucky enough to have fallen asleep, he would bolt upright in the dark, thinking he was under attack. Lunch was some bland patty of an unknown meat substance. He heard it was horsemeat, but he hoped that was just a bad joke. Dinner was the same formless patty, but at night, it was called a cutlet. On Fridays, there was a soggy fish cutlet. There were canned beans or peas or some other vegetable in a watery liquid that smelled slightly of tin and mold and tasted metallic and bitter. Instant mashed potatoes that would turn into a dry powder in your mouth.
Ray was hungry every day. It was a physical hunger, yes, but it was also a mental hunger. He hungered for home, for his own bed and his family and his church, and for friends he could laugh with and sit with. He was hungry for his freedom. He was alone all day with a hunger so big it felt like he was falling with nothing to grab on to. Like when you lean back in a chair and have that moment of panic where you’ve gone too far and you have to jerk yourself upright so you flail about to try to save yourself. Ray had that panic of falling all day, every day.
He was hungry for his dignity. He was hungry to be a human again. He didn’t want to be known as inmate Z468. He was Anthony Ray Hinton. People called him Ray. He used to love to laugh. He had a name and a life and a home, and he wanted it so bad the wanting had a taste. He wasn’t going to survive at Holman. Eventually, he would hollow out so completely he would just disappear into a kind of nothingness. They were all trying to kill him, and he was going to escape. He had no other choice.
DEATH PENALTY FACTS
Perhacs’s motion for a new trial was postponed for over six months, until finally, on July 31, 1987, it was denied. It was exactly two years to the day that he had gotten arrested.
In Alabama at that time, you had forty-two days to file a notice of appeal and another twenty-eight days to file a brief. Did Ray find this out because Perhacs came to death row to visit with him and talk about a strategy for his appeal? Nope. He found this out by listening to the other death row inmates talking about their appeals.
It was like a legal class going on all day long, and while Ray still wasn’t speaking, he did listen to the other inmates talking to each other.
“Man, you got to call Bryan Stevenson. He’ll get you a lawyer in here.”
“Bryan Stevenson sent his lawyer from up in Ohio. And another guy came from D.C.”
“You have to tell him to read your transcript and see if they prejudiced the jury.”
“Tell him about the guy who lied.”
It went on all day, and Ray could hear the other inmates arguing case law with each other and talking about their appeals. He learned that Alabama had just started electrocuting people again in 1983 after taking a break for eighteen years. Now people were afraid they were going to start giving out dates to everyone who had been there for a while and who didn’t have an attorney trying to stop the State.
“He’s got a bunch of lawyers helping him out. A whole resource center.”
“I heard he’s watching every single person on the row—tracking everybody. He’s like Santa Claus, and he’s gonna know if you are naughty or nice.”
All day long, Ray heard the name Bryan Stevenson, but he didn’t care about Bryan Stevenson. He cared about Perhacs and what he was doing for Ray’s case. He had an attorney, and for that, he was grateful. It sounded like a lot of the guys were waiting for one to magically show up from the good graces of this one attorney named Stevenson. Ray didn’t believe in God, and he sure didn’t believe in Santa Claus. And he didn’t ask any questions, because one thing he had learned from his trial was that if you said anything, people would lie about it if it helped their cases out. Ray didn’t trust the other inmates. He didn’t trust the guards. He didn’t even trust Perhacs, but he was better than nothing. If Ray had to ask the guards for something, he wrote it down on the inmate stationery and handed it to them. He didn’t know if they thought he was dumb or what, but they knew he spoke when he had his visits. Ray figured they were happy he didn’t speak—it was one less inmate they had to deal with.
The guards brought him to the shower every other day, sometimes at 6:00 p.m.
Other times it would be at midnight.
There was no schedule. A guard walked in front of him, and a guard walked behind him. His hands were cuffed for the first three months, and after that he could go to the shower without being cuffed. There was no privacy in the shower, and there were always two guys showering at once and two guards watching. The water would be scalding hot or icy cold—it just depended on the day, or maybe what the guards felt like doing to entertain themselves. The prisoners had to soap up and get out fast, in under two minutes. The guards watched them the whole time—even the female guards. It was humiliating. They were like farm animals being hosed off outside the barn.
Once a day, they were brought out to individual cages in the yard that they could exercise in, or pace back and forth. Nobody had to “walk” as the guards called it, and a lot of guys just stayed in their cells. They didn’t want to change or shower or exercise. Ray always took his fifteen or twenty minutes outside. He was looking for an escape. He could see the prison parking lot from his cage on the yard and the road that led away from Holman. He just needed to get to it. Every moment of every day, Ray was watching for a weakness in the system—despite what the prosecutors had said, he couldn’t scale a fifteen-foot razor-wire fence. And certainly not one with guards and guns trained on it. He thought about digging a tunnel. There were rats and roaches that crawled in and out of his cell through a little vent near the ceiling. If they could get in, Ray thought, then he should be able to get out. He stared at that vent every day. There was always something lurking there—always an antenna or a whisker peeking through. Every night, he could hear the rats scratching and scurrying across the floors. He imagined the roaches swarming the walls at night and hiding back in the vent during the day to watch him. He was the trapped insect. Those roaches had more freedom than Ray did.
The sounds at night were like being in the middle of a horror movie—creatures crawling around, men moaning or screaming or crying. Everyone cried at night. One person would stop and another would start. It was the only time you could cry anonymously. Ray blocked out the sound. He didn’t care about anyone’s tears or their screams. Sometimes there was laughter—maniacal laughter—and that was the most frightening. There was no real laughter on death row. Those that could sleep yelled out in their dreams, as if they were being chased. Sometimes they cursed. Ray never slept more than fifteen minutes at a stretch ever in those first months and years. It makes people crazy to never sleep. It made them go to a place where there was no light, and no hope, and no dreams, and no chance for redemption. It made him think of shadows and demons and death and revenge and of killing before you can be killed.
Death and ghosts were everywhere. The row was haunted by remorse and regret and so much death. Freedom was a ghost that haunted them all on the row, those who had committed crimes, and those who hadn’t—but most of all they were haunted by a past they could not go back and change. Loss and grief and a cold madness that defied words floated in the grime and filth that they were all coated in. Hell was real, and it had an address and a name.
Death Row, Holman Prison. Where love and hope went to die.
In 1988, the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed his conviction. Ray didn’t hear from Perhacs, but he got a copy of his appeal and the court’s response. There were five issues Perhacs raised in his appeal. He said Judge Garrett made an error in combining the two capital cases and not granting his motion to sever. He also said that there were two more errors when there were no test bullets entered into evidence. Finally, he said that the court never proved Ray was linked to the two murders, because they had no direct evidence he was there, and finally, that they should have been allowed to submit the polygraph test into evidence. The Court of Criminal Appeals disagreed with everything. Perhacs sent Ray a letter in April 1989. He was appealing his case to the Alabama Supreme Court.
At that point, Ray had been on death row for over two years.
April 11, 1989
Mr. Anthony Ray Hinton, #Z468 Holman Unit #37
Atmore, Alabama 36506
RE: Your case
Dear Anthony:
I presented oral argument for you to the Alabama Supreme Court yesterday. I got the impression that they were interested in the argument that I made, and I think we’ve got a pretty good opportunity to reverse your convictions to get a new trial. The court has ordered that additional brief be filed, and that will require approximately 2 weeks. After that they will take the case for their consideration. I’m unable to tell you exactly when to expect an opinion from them, but I’ve got a good feeling about this case. If the convictions are overturned, then we will have to prepare to defend these cases again. We will also have to prepare to defend the Quincy’s cases. I’ve got a number of ideas about some things that we will do that will be new to each of the cases. All of the cases continue to have very serious legal problems within them, and I expect to take advantage of every legal opportunity that is presented to us.
One of the things that I think we will have to do is hire another expert. Even though our expert was willing to help us, I don’t think he was too persuasive with the jury. I thought our presentation to the jury with Mr. Payne was excellent, but he crumbled under their cross-examination. There really are a lot of other things that we can do in addition to getting a new expert.
If the Supreme Court does not order a new trial to you, then I still think that we’ve got an excellent opportunity to appeal this case to the United States Supreme Court. The appeal I would take to the U.S. Supreme Court is not financed or paid for by anybody.
Someone in your family would have to find a way to pay some attorney’s fees. Your case is so unique that I think the U.S. Supreme Court would listen to your appeal. I really think that sooner or later we are going to win these cases.
Contact me if you have any questions.
Sincerely, Sheldon Perhacs
Ray read the letter at least five times. He did have a question. He had many questions. Why didn’t Perhacs do all these “other things” the first time around? And what about Ray’s innocence? Why didn’t his appeal say anything about the fact that they had the wrong guy? The U.S. Supreme Court? Yeah, right. And he knew nobody in his family had any money to give him. Ray had to hope that the Alabama Supreme Court ruled soon and ordered a new trial. He still hadn’t found a way to escape, and he still wasn’t ready to take his own life.
Ray wanted to prove he was innocent.
But he didn’t know how much more he could take. He had to get out of Holman.
One way or another.