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.

Cameron Todd Willingham — executed on arson science that was not science

Cameron Todd Willingham was executed by the State of Texas on February 17, 2004, for the deaths of his three young daughters in a 1991 house fire in Corsicana — a conviction built on arson “indicators” that fire scientists have since shown were not evidence of arson at all. He was 36. Unlike the other subjects in this archive, Willingham was never exonerated: no court has vacated his conviction and no perpetrator has been identified, because the central question is not who set the fire but whether any fire was set. The case has become the most-cited example in the United States of a person put to death on forensic conclusions that later analysis discredited as scientifically baseless.

The factual outcome is not in dispute, and it is grim: he was killed, and he remains convicted. What changed after his death is the evidentiary ground beneath the verdict. On December 23, 1991, a fire swept the Willingham home and killed his daughters — Amber Louise, age 2, and one-year-old twins Karmen Diane and Kameron Marie. Investigators read the burn patterns as proof of a deliberately set, accelerant-fed blaze, and a jury convicted Willingham of capital murder in 1992. He maintained his innocence through twelve years on death row and refused a plea that would have spared his life.

In the years before and after the execution, the science collapsed. Fire expert Gerald Hurst reviewed the case days before the execution and found no valid indication of arson. In 2009, fire scientist Craig Beyler, reporting to the Texas Forensic Science Commission, concluded that the original investigators relied on discredited folklore and that a finding of arson could not be sustained. The state’s other pillar — a jailhouse informant who claimed Willingham had confessed — was later undermined when the informant recanted and evidence emerged of undisclosed favorable treatment.

This dossier centers Willingham as a man very likely executed for a crime that may never have occurred. The system failure — junk forensic science presented as expertise, a self-interested informant, and an execution carried out despite a contrary expert report — is the mechanism. The framing here is precise: this was a contested, likely-wrongful execution. It was not an exoneration, and it must not be described as one.