As a result, all death sentences pending at the time were reduced to life imprisonment. Georgia) as unconstitutional, deeming the cases in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. As for the death penalty, capital punishment was legal in the United States until 1972, when the United States Supreme Court struck down a series of death penalty cases ( Furman v.

Laws enacted during the War on Drugs of the early 1970s, which led to mass incarceration, similarly discriminate and disenfranchise Black people and particularly Black men. Many of the policies enacted in the criminal justice system were extensions of Jim Crow Laws enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, designed to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by Black people during the Reconstruction Era. Two key contexts are important to understanding Ray’s story: the history of discrimination in the criminal justice system and the history of the death penalty. After being released, Ray published his memoir, The Sun Does Shine, in 2018, and he now advocates for the abolition of the death penalty. As a result, the state of Alabama dropped all charges against him and he was released in 2015.

The court ruled that Ray had received a constitutionally deficient defense, and he was given a new trial to review the ballistics evidence. He subsequently spent almost 30 years on death row fighting his conviction until he and his lawyer Bryan Stevenson brought an appeal to the U.S. When Ray was 29 years old, he was wrongfully convicted of two murders and sentenced to death by the state of Alabama, despite the fact that he had a strong alibi and little evidence connected him to the murders. Ray graduated high school and worked in the coal mines for several years before working for Manpower, a labor company in Birmingham, Alabama. During Ray’s childhood, his father received a severe head injury in a mining accident and was sent to live in an institution for the rest of his life, leaving Ray to be raised solely by his mother, Buhlar. Anthony Ray Hinton, who goes by the name Ray, was born in Praco, Alabama, in 1956 and was the youngest of 10 siblings.

The sun does shine hinton