Hinton was convicted in 1985 of the attempted murder of a restaurant manager in Alabama. Stevenson is the closest the real world offers to Atticus Finch – except that his work never really has a beginning, a middle and an end.Īnthony Ray Hinton’s story was perhaps the longest running case on Stevenson’s books. He has saved more than 100 men from the electric chair through forensic re-examination of evidence in this way, as well as successfully campaigning to overturn a law that allowed juveniles to be incarcerated, often in solitary confinement, for life. He has spent his working life practising out of an office over the road from a former slave market, trying to right some of the ingrained injustice of the penal system in the American south in particular, he has campaigned on behalf of young black men sentenced to death, based on trials of dubious merit. Stevenson, a black, Harvard-educated lawyer who grew up in segregated Delaware, is a man of immense personal courage. I first came across the name Anthony Ray Hinton when I wrote about the extraordinary civil rights campaigner Bryan Stevenson and his Equal Justice Initiative based in Montgomery, Alabama.
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