improperly convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in Missouri. His jury
was illegally selected, excluding African Americans. I argued two cases at the Mississippi
Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the convictions and sentences of young children
were illegal. Demarious Banyard was a thirteen-year-old who had been bullied into
participating in a robbery that resulted in a fatal shooting in Jackson, Mississippi. He was
given a mandatory death-in-prison sentence after his jury was illegally told that he had to
prove his innocence beyond a reasonable doubt and the State introduced impermissible
evidence. He was resentenced to a finite term of years and now has hope for release.
Dante Evans was a fourteen-year-old child living in a FEMA trailer with his abusive father
in Gulfport, Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina. His dad, who had twice before nearly killed
Dante’s mother, was shot by Dante while he slept in a chair. Dante had repeatedly told school
officials about his father’s abuse, but no one ever intervened. I discussed Dante’s prior
diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder following the attempted murder of his mother in
my oral argument before the Mississippi Supreme Court. The Court emphasized the trial
court’s refusal to permit introduction of this evidence and granted Dante a new trial.
Our death penalty work had also taken a hopeful turn. The number of death row prisoners in
Alabama for whom we’d won relief reached one hundred. We had created a new community
of formerly condemned prisoners in Alabama who had been illegally convicted or sentenced
and received new trials or sentencing hearings. Most never returned to death row. Starting in
2012 , we had eighteen months with no executions in Alabama. Continued litigation about
lethal injection protocols and other questions about the reliability of the death penalty slowed
the execution rate in Alabama dramatically. In 2013 , Alabama recorded the lowest number of
new death sentences since the resumption of capital punishment in the mid- 1970 s. These
were very hopeful developments.
Of course, there were still challenges. I was losing sleep over another man on Alabama’s
death row, a man who was clearly innocent. Anthony Ray Hinton was on death row when
Walter McMillian arrived in the 1980 s. Mr. Hinton was wrongly convicted of two robbery-
murders outside Birmingham after state forensic employees mistakenly concluded that a gun
recovered from his mother’s home had been used in the crimes. Mr. Hinton’s appointed
defense lawyer got only $ 500 from the court to retain a gun expert to confront the state’s
case, so he ended up with a mechanical engineer who was blind in one eye and who had
almost no experience testifying as a gun expert.
The State’s primary evidence against Mr. Hinton involved a third crime where a witness
identified him as the assailant. But we found a half-dozen people and security records that
proved that Mr. Hinton was locked inside a secure supermarket warehouse working as a night
laborer fifteen miles away at the time of the crime. We got some of the nation’s best experts
to review the gun evidence, and they concluded the Hinton weapon could not be matched to
the murders. I had hopes that the State might reopen the case. Instead they persisted in
moving toward execution. The media was not interested in the story, citing “innocence
fatigue.” “We’ve done that story before,” we heard again and again. We kept getting very
close decisions from appellate courts denying relief, and Mr. Hinton remained on death row
facing execution. It would soon be thirty years. He was always upbeat and encouraging when
I met with him, but I was increasingly desperate to find a way to get his case overturned.