ANTHONY RAY HINTON

Anthony Ray Hinton

Anthony Ray Hinton is a Community Educator for the Equal Justice Initiative, and was falsely accused of committing two murders outside of Birmingham, Alabama, in 1985. He was wrongly convicted and spent nearly 30 years on Alabama’s death row before he was exonerated and freed in April 2015. A deeply compelling speaker, he has become a powerful advocate against the death penalty and speaks nationally about the urgent need for criminal justice reform.

Oprah Winfrey has chosen The Sun Does Shine as her summer 2018 Book Club pick.

 

BOOK TITLES IN COLLABORATION WITH IDEA ARCHITECTS

  • The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row

THE SUN DOES SHINE: HOW I FOUND LIFE AND FREEDOM ON DEATH ROW

 

In 1985, Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested and charged with two counts of capital murder in Alabama. Stunned, confused, and only twenty-nine years old, Hinton knew that it was a case of mistaken identity and believed that the truth would prove his innocence and ultimately set him free.

But with no money and a different system of justice for a poor black man in the South, Hinton was sentenced to death by electrocution. He spent his first three years on Death Row at Holman State Prison in agonizing silence—full of despair and anger toward all those who had sent an innocent man to his death. But as Hinton realized and accepted his fate, he resolved not only to survive, but find a way to live on Death Row. For the next twenty-seven years he was a beacon—transforming not only his own spirit, but those of his fellow inmates, fifty-four of whom were executed mere feet from his cell. With the help of civil rights attorney and bestselling author of Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson, Hinton won his release in 2015.

With a foreword by Stevenson, The Sun Does Shine is an extraordinary testament to the power of hope sustained through the darkest times. Destined to be a classic memoir of wrongful imprisonment and freedom won, Hinton’s memoir tells his dramatic thirty-year journey and shows how you can take away a man’s freedom, but you can’t take away his imagination, humor, or joy.

The Sun Does Shine book cover