Anthony Ray Hinton spent thirty years on death row in Alabama for crimes he did not commit. He was released in 2015. According to his attorney, Bryan Stevenson, that makes him “one of the longest-serving condemned prisoners facing execution in America to be proved innocent and released.” In this exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row, Hinton describes some of his earliest days at Holman prison in Atmore, Alabama, awaiting his turn to be killed.
I didn’t even realize they had executed Wayne Ritter until I smelled his burned flesh. I didn’t know Wayne—I didn’t know anyone yet—but in the middle of the night on August 28, 1987, there was the sound of a generator kicking on and then hissing and popping, and the lights in the hall outside my cell flickered on and off. And then through the night, the smell came.
It’s hard to explain what death smells like, but it burned my nose and stung my throat and made my eyes water and my stomach turn over. I spent the next day dry heaving, my stomach retching and twisting. All up and down the row, you could hear men blowing their noses, trying to get the smell away.
There was no real ventilation or air circulating, so the smell of death—like a mixture of shit and rotting waste and vomit all mixed up in a thick smoke of putrid air that you couldn’t escape—seemed to settle into my hair and in my throat and mouth. I rubbed at my eyes until they were red and gritty. I heard one of the guys complain to a guard about the smell.
“You’ll get used to it.” The guard laughed. “Next year or one of these days, somebody’s going to be smelling you just the same.” I felt my stomach turn over and heave as I ran to the toilet. I was swallowing Wayne Ritter every time I took a breath.
How long had he been there?, I wondered. Did they kill people every week? Every month? Did Ritter know they were killing him that day? I didn’t know when they would come for me. Could they come kill me even though I was on appeal? If my appeal failed, would they come take me right away—pull me from my cell in the middle of the night and strap me to a chair and electrocute me until I lost control of my bowels and my heart stopped and the smell of my burning flesh and fried organs drifted up and down the row to remind men of what was to come?
I couldn’t stop my mind from imagining what it would feel like to be sitting in that chair, known as Yellow Mama, and the fear crushed my chest until I thought I would stop breathing. Everything in me was fighting to run, but there was nowhere to go. It was like when you have a dream where you open your mouth to scream but no sound comes out and you stand there, mouth open and helpless, as danger descends.
I had never thought about the death penalty too much before being on death row. It was never in my world as something to think about. At my trial, the prosecutor had asked me what I thought the appropriate sentence would be for someone who did what I was accused of doing, and I had said the death penalty.
But was it? Who was I to say who was worthy of life? How could I or anyone know if someone was guilty or innocent? What happened to Ritter seemed like murder to me, and how was it okay to murder someone for murdering someone?
These thoughts swirled in my head all day and all night. I waited to see who the guards would come for next.
The Death Squad would line up, twelve of them in all, and march solemnly down the row. One guard would pretend to be the inmate, and the other would lead him to the holding cell...
They started practicing a couple of months before the next execution. They called themselves the Execution Team, but everyone knew what they really were—the Death Squad.
The Death Squad would line up, twelve of them in all, and march solemnly down the row. One guard would pretend to be the inmate, and the other would lead him to the holding cell that you stayed in before being executed. The death chamber was only about thirty feet or so from my cell. I was upstairs, or 8U as they called it—which stood for Eight Side Up. There was a guy a little younger than I was in the cell below. I had never talked to him, but I knew his name was Michael Lindsey, and I knew he was the next to be executed.
In the month before his execution, Lindsey cried every day. He cried on the yard. I had never heard anyone cry like that before. He cried as the Death Squad practiced marching in front of his cell, and he cried as they went into the death chamber and turned the generator on to test Yellow Mama. He cried as the lights flickered, and he cried at night when the lights went out.
The guards practiced their ritual for killing him, and then they would ask him how he was doing and did he need anything—as if they weren’t rehearsing his murder. It was gruesome to watch, and it only made Michael Lindsey’s terror grow.
On the Monday before his execution, you could hear him begging and pleading with a guy who had just started something called Project Hope to fight the death penalty...
On the Monday before his execution, you could hear him begging and pleading with a guy named Jesse who had just started something called Project Hope to fight the death penalty from within Holman. Jesse had no power. He was on death row too. But Michael Lindsey begged him to save his life. It was heartbreaking and painful.
In the days before their execution, the condemned were allowed to have visitors all day, every day. They could hug and hold hands—things not allowed on regular visits. In nearly eight years on death row, Michael Lindsey never had a visitor. He was twenty-eight years old when the Death Squad came for him in May of 1989. He had been convicted of murdering a woman and stealing her Christmas presents.
Michael Lindsey was only five years younger than I was. He was healthy. A jury had recommended life in prison, but his judge had overruled that jury recommendation and sentenced him to death. Judges could do that in Alabama. Lindsey had been on death row for almost eight years. It was hard not to do the math—comparing how long the person being killed had been there compared to how long you had been there.
Condemned prisoners, I learned, are given an execution date around a month in advance. A month to feel terror. A month to beg and plead for your life. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to spend my last month on this earth crying and begging. I didn’t want to count down to my death. It was hard not to know when the Death Squad would come for you, but I think it was even harder for the guys who knew.
Michael Lindsey had no last words. On Thursday night, when they took him to the death chamber, I could hear him crying. We all could. He had no visitors in the days and hours before his death. He was completely alone. Shortly before midnight, when we knew he was being strapped into that chair, we began to make some noise. Up and down the row, men began banging on the bars and doors of their cells. I heard some men yell, “Murderers!” to the guards.
We made a noise like I had never heard before. Some men screamed. Others called out Michael’s name. Others just roared and growled like feral animals. I made a fist, and I slammed it against the door of my cell until my hand was red and raw. The noise was intense.
I didn’t know Michael Lindsey, but I wanted him to know he wasn’t alone. I wanted him to know that his life meant something and so did his death. We yelled until the lights stopped flickering and the generator that powered the electric chair turned off. I banged on the bars until the smell of Michael Lindsey’s death reached me, and then I got in my bunk and I pulled the blanket over my head and I wept.
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but all I heard was Michael Lindsey begging somebody, anybody, to save him.
From The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row by Anthony Ray Hinton with Lara Love Hardin. Copyright © 2018 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.