Anthony Ray Hinton — nearly three decades on death row for a gun that never matched

In Birmingham, Alabama, Anthony Ray Hinton spent nearly thirty years on death row for two 1985 murders he did not commit, and walked free on April 3, 2015, after the only evidence against him — a claim that bullets from the crimes matched his mother’s revolver — was shown by modern examiners to be worthless. He was the 152nd person exonerated from an American death row since 1973. No physical evidence, no eyewitness to the killings, and no fingerprint ever placed him at either scene; the case rested entirely on a contested ballistics match produced by the state and never meaningfully challenged at trial, because his court-appointed lawyer believed he had too little money to hire a competent firearms expert and retained one who was legally blind in one eye and could not properly operate the comparison microscope.

The outcome is settled. On February 24, 2014, the Supreme Court of the United States, ruling unanimously in Hinton v. Alabama, found that Hinton’s trial counsel had been constitutionally ineffective for failing to seek funds for a qualified expert, and sent the case back. New examination by three independent firearms analysts — and then by the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences itself — could not connect the bullets to the weapon. With its single thread of evidence gone, the state dismissed all charges, and Hinton was released from the Jefferson County jail.

He had been arrested in 1985 and sentenced to death in 1986. He was twenty-nine when he was condemned and fifty-eight when he was freed. The Equal Justice Initiative and its founder, Bryan Stevenson, represented him for roughly sixteen of those years, fighting through a state appellate system that repeatedly declined to revisit the discredited ballistics until the nation’s highest court compelled it.

This dossier centers Hinton as the wronged party. The system failures — a defense crippled by underfunding, a prosecution built on a single forensic assertion, and appellate courts unwilling to reopen a capital case — are the mechanism of the wrong. The murders of John Davidson and Thomas Wayne Vason remain, on this record, crimes for which the State of Alabama convicted the wrong man.