“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.”
—Prosecutor Bob McGregor
Ray had often heard of people pinpointing the exact moment that their lives had “changed forever.” But what did that really mean? How could anyone really know when their life changed … forever? And could anyone ever see it coming? When had it happened for him?
The day he was arrested for murder?
Or had it happened before that, in tiny ways, day by day, without him even realizing that bad luck and a few mistakes had brought him to a cell the size of a bathroom?
Maybe what he did didn’t matter, maybe the choices he made didn’t count—when you were born Black and poor in the South that still was so often on the wrong side of civil rights, maybe then it meant that men like Anthony Ray Hinton would have always ended up right where he was.
It was hard to know.
But Ray had plenty of time to think about it, living his entire life in a room five feet wide by seven feet long—oh yeah, he had plenty of time to think about what could have been, what he could have done, what he could never be. Just like anyone else, Ray had grown up with dreams. A baseball scholarship, maybe marriage and kids. A fancy job, a nice car. He had dreamed of so much, but nothing like this nightmare he was living.
The thing was, he’d been a pretty good guy. He’d always believed that if you did the right thing and lived a decent life, you’d be okay. But now he knew that pain and tragedy and injustice happen—to anyone, even the good guys. And when he thought back on the horrors he’d lived through, Ray wanted so much to believe that what mattered most was how you chose to live after the pain, after the tragedy. That was when you could choose to change your life forever.
But still, he wondered: Did it matter at all? Did he?