If the Glove Doesn´t Fit...

My last few entries have been a little on the silly side, and trust me, for as much as I love to bring you strange stuff I've found on the web, I think it's time to turn back to some more serious matters. I promise I'll bring back the bizarre and ridiculous just as soon as I can.

For now, let's talk about injustice. Our justice system is, ironically, ripe with injustice. Now I know a lot of people, maybe even you, believe in the death penalty. I'm against the death penalty, but not just on principle (an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind), rather more importantly, because I think a lot of innocent people are being put to death due to racism, economic inequality and good old botched evidence.

Don't get me wrong, I deffinately think OJ was guilty, but I think that case brought up a lot of good points, such as money can buy you freedom, while dark skin can buy you a lifetime ticket to the clink. Anyhow, here's a case that's being dealt with currently by Amnesty International. Now, I trust Amnesty whole-heartedly, and if they say this trial was screwy and that an innocent man may be on death row, it's probably worth your while to give what they have to say a thought.

Anthony Hinton has been on death row in Alabama for 19 years for crimes he may not have committed. Three leading experts have concluded that the state’s crucial ballistics evidence at the trial was wrong. Hinton’s lawyers have recently filed an appeal in the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals seeking to get his conviction and death sentence overturned. If this fails, the case will go to the federal courts. Because of the deference that federal courts are required to give state court decisions in the USA, the current appeal is seen as his best chance to obtain a judicial remedy for his claim of innocence.

In 1985, there were several robberies of fast food restaurants in and around Birmingham, Alabama. During one, in February 1985, night manager John Davidson was fatally shot. An assistant manager of another restaurant, Thomas Vason, was shot and killed on 2 July 1985.

Then, on 25 July, Sidney Smotherman, the night manager of Quincy’s restaurant, was shot, but survived. He later identified Anthony Hinton as his assailant from a police photo line-up. However, there are serious questions about the reliability of this identification. Smotherman had originally described to police someone substantially smaller than Hinton. Furthermore, on the night of the crime, he had initially thought that a passing driver who offered help was the assailant. He later misidentified this man’s car, described his attackers as “they”, and gave varying descriptions of the weapon used to shoot him. Research shows that eyewitness identifications, especially where the circumstances are traumatic and the identification cross-racial, as in this case, are unreliable.

Police took a .38 revolver belonging to Anthony Hinton’s mother, Beulah Hinton, from her home, and sent it to the state Department of Forensic Sciences (DFS) to be tested against the six bullets recovered from the three crime scenes. The DFS concluded that the gun had fired the bullets. Anthony Hinton was charged with the murders of John Davidson and Thomas Vason. The only evidence linking Hinton to those two crimes was the DFS ballistics evidence. The trial court only approved $500 for the defence to do its own ballistics investigation. The defence lawyer was forced to hire a visually-impaired civil engineer with no firearms identification expertise.

Anthony Hinton had no history of violent crime, maintained his innocence, and even passed a police lie detector test. On the night of the Quincy’s shooting, he had been at his workplace, a secure warehouse, 15 miles (24km), or at least 20 minutes' drive from the crime scene. His employer and co-workers confirmed that he had arrived at the security gate at 11.57pm, clocked in to work at midnight, been given a work assignment at 12.10am, checked by his supervisor at 12.40am, and again at least once every hour during the six-hour shift. The Smotherman crime began at 12.14am. However, the jury convicted Anthony Hinton and sentenced him to death.

Alabama provides no legal assistance to indigent death row prisoners so it took Anthony Hinton years to obtain volunteer counsel to challenge his conviction. Finally, in June 2002, an evidentiary post-conviction hearing was held in the trial court. Three of the USA’s leading gun experts, who had examined and tested the state’s evidence, testified at the hearing. They concluded that the bullets recovered from the three crime scenes could not be matched to Beulah Hinton's gun. They also concluded that the bullets could not be linked to a single weapon.

Anthony Hinton’s appeal lawyers have also discovered work reports contradicting the DFS examiners’ contention that they were able to match the bullets to Beulah Hinton’s gun. These reports were not provided to Hinton’s trial lawyer.

At the trial, Sidney Smotherman had said that he had left Quincy’s shortly after midnight, bought food at a nearby store, and soon after leaving there had been forced at gunpoint to return to Quincy’s where the shooting occurred. At the June 2002 hearing, a Quincy’s employee who was working with Smotherman on the night of the robbery testified that the time the restaurant was locked varied from night to night, and sometimes occurred as early as 11pm. This further undermined the state’s theory that Anthony Hinton had planned the crime and its timing, and had left his work to wait for Smotherman to close Quincy’s. The state’s theory suggests that Hinton drove from the warehouse to Quincy’s in less than five minutes, was away from work for at least an hour and was not missed.

Two and a half years after the June 2002 hearing, the trial court ruled against Anthony Hinton. That decision is now on appeal to the state Court of Criminal Appeals. The state has been repeatedly asked by Anthony Hinton’s lawyers to re-examine its evidence against him, but it has so far refused to do so.

The United Nations Safeguards Guaranteeing Protection of the Rights of Those Facing the Death Penalty (1984) state: “Capital punishment may be imposed only when the guilt of the person charged is based upon clear and convincing evidence leaving no room for an alternative explanation of the facts.” On the current evidence, Anthony Hinton’s death sentence clearly violates this standard.

The US capital justice system is marked by arbitrariness, discrimination and error. Since executions resumed in the USA in 1977, more than 100 people have been released from death rows around the country on grounds of innocence, five of them in Alabama. Other people have been executed despite serious doubts about their guilt in the crimes for which they were sentenced to death.

Source: Amnesty International

How sickly sad is all of this? If you think there is some serious reasonable doubt going on here, please email Alabama Governor Bob Riley and Senator Jeff Sessions. Clicking on their names will take you to the sites where you can copy and paste and send the following message:

Dear _______________,

I urge you to ask the Attornery General to drop his opposition to judicial relief for Anothy Hinton. I am deeply concerned that the state continues to seek the execution of Mr. Hinton despite serious doubts about the reliability of his conviction. I am troubled to learn that three of the USA’s leading gun experts have concluded that the state’s ballistics evidence at trial was wrong. Furthermore, this ballistic evidence was the only evidence linking Mr. Hinton to the crimes. This evidence against Mr. Hinton was only circumstantial and now appears to be entirely unreliable.

While I have sympathy for the family and friends of John Davidson and Thomas Vason, I believe that the evidence against Anthony Hinton must be re-examined by the state as the defense has requested.

Please demonstrate your respect for life by ensuring that innocent people are not wrongfully accused in the state of Alabama. Thank you for your attention to this serious matter.

Sincerely,

Your name

Thanks everybody!