-no
Q Did you shoot Mr. Smotherman at Quincy’s?
-no
Q Have you told me the whole truth since we’ve been talking?
-yes
Q Did you purposely try to lie to any of these questions?
-no
TEST VI
Q Did you know Captain D’s was going to be robbed?
-no
Q Did you point a gun at anyone in Captain D’s?
-no
Q Did you rob Captain D’s?
-no
Q Did you shoot anyone at Captain D’s?
-no
Q Have you told me the whole truth since we’ve been talking?
-yes
Q Did you purposely try to lie to any of these questions?
-no
TEST VII
Q Did you know Captain D’s was going to be robbed?
-no
Q Did you point a gun at anyone in Captain D’s?
-no
Q Did you rob Captain D’s?
-no
Q Did you shoot anyone at Captain D’s?
-no
Q Have you told me the whole truth since we’ve been talking?
-yes
Q Did you purposely try to lie to any of these questions?
-no
CONCLUSION:
It is the opinion of this examiner that the subject told the truth during this polygraph examination.
POLYGRAPH EXAMINER,
CLYDE A. WOLFE
I knew I had passed the polygraph. I heard a female guard talking to the examiner while I waited to be brought back to C block.
“How’d he do?”
The examiner hadn’t said much to me, but he spoke to the guard. “If I could go by this test, he would walk out of here with me right now. He showed no signs of deception. He didn’t do it. He doesn’t know anything about these murders, I can tell you that for a fact.”
She sort of grunted in agreement. “You know, I’ve been doing this for twenty-seven years, and I’ve seen a lot of killers. He’s no killer.”
I went to sleep that night with new hope. I didn’t know how my mom had been able to come up with $350 for the polygraph test, but I knew that as soon as I was out and could get to work, I would earn enough money to pay it back. Every day felt like being in the middle of a bad dream. I kept thinking they would catch the person who really did it. It was like the police and the judge and the prosecutors and even my own attorney were in on some bad practical joke, and I was just waiting for them to tell me they had been punking me.
When the guard next called me out for a legal visit, I thought Perhacs was finally there to tell me I could go. It was straight out of John 8:32—“And the truth shall set you free.” He had only visited me a couple of times in jail, but he had given me his phone number and said I could call him whenever I wanted. That was more than most guys in C block got from their court-appointed attorneys. He and Bob McGregor had made an agreement that whatever happened with the polygraph, whatever the results, either side could use the test to argue their case. If I failed, McGregor could use it to convict me, and if I passed, Perhacs could use it to prove my innocence and show them once and for all they had the wrong guy. I hadn’t worried about making that deal—I knew what the results would be.
“They’re not allowing the polygraph. Bob McGregor nicked on the deal.”
I watched as Perhacs’s mouth kept moving, but it sounded like a swarm of bees had gathered in my head. I couldn’t hear anything he was saying. Betrayal felt like ice under my skin. I went cold and numb, and then it felt like those bees in my head were stinging every part of my body. This was real fear. I thought of Lester and me diving into the ditches when we walked home. I thought that was what fear felt like—your heart pounding and your breath going fast, but this was different. This was ice and steel and a thousand blades carving you up from the inside out. I couldn’t make sense of what was happening. They knew I didn’t do it, but they were still going to take me to trial? They were willing to let the real killer go and pin this on me?
I had Perhacs walk me through it all again, slowly.
All the bullets from the two murders and from the Quincy’s robbery matched my mom’s gun. I knew this was impossible, because that gun hadn’t been fired in twenty-five years. Our neighbor had been there when the police went back to get the gun from my mom, and she had seen the detective put a cloth inside the gun, and when he pulled it out, he said that it was full of dust and hadn’t been fired in a long time.
Smotherman had picked me out of a photo lineup and said I was the guy who robbed him and shot at him. I was at work when this happened. I was signed in. I couldn’t understand how they were just ignoring this. There was no way I could have left work at the beginning of my shift and robbed someone. I was with other people. My supervisor gave me assignments all night long.
“How could I be in two places at once?” I asked Perhacs. “What are they thinking? That’s not even possible. There was a guard. I had to check in and out!”
“They are going to say you snuck out. You drove to Quincy’s and you robbed him.” Perhacs rubbed his hand through his hair.
“That’s impossible. When we’re at trial, can we ask the judge to have the jury drive the route exactly at midnight and see that the time frame won’t work? I can’t be in two places at once. Did you drive the route? It’s not even possible for me to clock in and get my assignment and get back to Bessemer in a few minutes. It takes at least twenty or twenty-five minutes to get there. Drive the route. Can you get an expert to drive it? Clock it? That’ll prove it.” My voice was getting louder than I wanted, but I needed him to see this logically. I couldn’t be in two places at once. There was no way they could say I clocked in to work and ten minutes later was a half hour away robbing somebody. “We can show them there’s a fifteen-foot fence I would have had to have climbed. And show them where the guards are at and how you have to log in and account for your time the whole shift.”
“So what, now I have a lawyer for a client?” Perhacs said this slowly, and I got the message loud and clear. Let him figure it out. Let him put on the defense. I was just supposed to sit back and be a good boy and not make trouble.
What choice did I have?
I laughed it off, but I had to say just one more thing. “I’ve been reading the papers. You see that there’s been other holdups? Other managers getting robbed at closing? I definitely can’t be doing that when I’m locked in here.”
“Yeah, I’ll look into it. They’re only paying me $1,000 for this, and hell, I eat $1,000 for breakfast.” He laughed, but it wasn’t funny.
The other big obstacle was finding a ballistics expert. We needed someone to look at the gun and the bullets and get up there and testify. I knew the State was lying about the bullets and my mom’s gun, but it wasn’t like a judge or a jury was going to believe me. Perhacs had told me that the only thing keeping me from a good defense was money, and then he asked me if I had anyone who could pay him $15,000 to do the work. Nobody had that kind of money. I had been shocked my mom came up with the lie detector money. I told him that much, and then I pleaded with him.
“I promise you that once you prove that I didn’t do this and I get out, I’ll pay you. You have my word on it. If I have to work night and day and holidays and weekends, I will pay you. Please?” I was begging, but it didn’t matter.
“Anthony, it just don’t work like that. What proof do I have you will pay me? You don’t have money to hire me, and besides, I was appointed this job by the court. You can’t pay me.”
He had been struggling over finding a ballistics expert. The court was only allowing him $500 for each capital case to hire an expert, and he couldn’t find anyone to do the work for $1,000. He had until August to find an expert, and it wasn’t looking good.
It turned out that $15,000 was also the number that would get me a good ex
pert. Everything depended on those bullets, since they had no other evidence against me. No fingerprints. No DNA. No witnesses. Because I had no alibi for the nights of the murders—because I couldn’t account for where I was—that made me guilty. That and the bullets. They weren’t even charging me for the Smotherman case, only using it to prove I had done the other two because it was of similar plan and design. That was the magic phrase. But I read the paper every day. There were robberies of similar plan and design happening every week in Birmingham.
Perhacs made it clear that my only shot was an expert who could counter the State’s experts. I hadn’t wanted to, but I called my oldest brother, Willie, in Cleveland and asked him for the money.
“Can your attorney for sure get you off if you hire an expert?”
“I don’t think he can say for sure.”
“Well, I need to talk to him. I would need some assurance the money would put an end to this. I need him to give me a guarantee so I’m not wasting my money.”
He didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no, so that was something.
I tried not to dwell on the fact that if things were reversed and I had the money, well, I would have given it no questions asked.
Perhacs couldn’t give him that guarantee. Who in their right mind could make any guarantee like that? I knew my brother was raised like I was—raised to trust the police, the lawyers, and the judges. He was an upright citizen, never had any trouble and never wanted any. I’d like to think he didn’t help because he knew I didn’t do it and believed the courts would provide everything I needed. My heart broke when Perhacs told me that Willie wouldn’t give the money. I would have moved heaven and earth to help him or to help any of my siblings in the same situation. That’s what you do when you are a family. It’s what you should do. It would be almost thirty years—without seeing or hearing from him—before I would come to accept the truth. My older brother must, in some small place within him, have believed that I was a killer. There are families of sinners and families of saints, and all are deserving of love and help. The sinners even more than the saints. It hurt inside to not have his help. It was like everything good was being taken away, one small chunk at a time. Belief. Family. Truth. Faith. Justice. I wondered who I would be when this was all over—how could I be the same person? Would there be anything left after this trial? And what if they actually found me guilty? What then? Nobody believed me, and some days it felt like the whole world, except for Lester and my mom, was conspiring against me. Sometimes late at night, I would lie in my bunk and think about the trial to come and imagine the jury. Were they going to be against me too? Would they really be fair and impartial? I could feel the paranoia seeping around the edges of my mind, fighting to get in like a poison gas slipping in through the vents. I willed myself to think of other things, but there was a darkness pushing up against my hope that I couldn’t keep at bay.
I knew my last and only and best hope was going to be my attorney. He held my life in his hands, because it became clear that this wasn’t about them having the wrong guy. They weren’t making a mistake. They were setting out to send an innocent man to death row. And they were willing to lie to do it.
I made sure to call Perhacs later that week just to tell him how much I appreciated him and how great he was doing. He was my only voice. And I needed his voice to get loud in that courtroom. I needed him to show that jury the truth. Show them who Anthony Ray Hinton was—a boy who loved his mama, who grew up in a community that loved him, a man that had never had a violent moment in his life. I was a lover. I was a joker. I was a man who would help anyone who needed help.
Not a man who would hide in the dark to take your money and your life.
Not a cold-blooded killer.
I wasn’t that man.
I wasn’t.
7
CONVICTION, CONVICTION, CONVICTION
He is cloaked in innocence, and you should not consider him anything but innocent until and unless the State of Alabama proves beyond a reasonable doubt to you the facts alleged in these indictments.
—PROSECUTOR BOB MCGREGOR
Jefferson County Courthouse, September 12, 1986
It’s amazing what money and revenge will do to people—it can change them from the inside out. Make their ugly shine through in ways that God himself would be ashamed of. I watched Reggie up on the stand, and I wondered how rejection by one girl could make a man so small-hearted and mean. Lord knows, if I could go back in time and not date two sisters at once, I would. If I had known that it had created in him such jealousy and rage that he was willing to lie and frame me for murder—actually put me to death over it—well, I would have paid for them to go out on a date myself. He worked at Quincy’s and had told Smotherman that he knew a guy who fit the description of the man who robbed him. At least now I knew how my name had come up in all this mess. And I also knew what my life was worth to Reginald Payne White—$5,000—the amount of the reward I heard he was getting for cracking the case and helping to catch a killer. I imagine this was just icing on the cake for Reggie. The snake was finally ready to strike after all these years.
DEFENSE TESTIMONY TO BEGIN IN RESTAURANT SLAYINGS TRIAL
The first person to identify Hinton as the robber was Quincy’s employee Reginald White. White, who has known Hinton since 1979, said that two weeks before the robbery Hinton questioned him about how good Quincy’s business was, and the time the restaurant closed.1
The lawyers had argued about Reggie taking the stand when the jury was out of the room. My lawyer lost. I’d like to believe that the reason Reggie wouldn’t look at me while he testified was because he had a conscience and wouldn’t have been able to lie as well if he’d had to do so while looking into my eyes. Did he know they wanted to kill me? Did he understand what he was saying? Did he know how much bigger this was than any girl he wanted to date when we were kids? Or was he, like every other young and poor black man in Jefferson County, just trying to get a little extra scratch to make it through? I couldn’t understand how a life could mean so little. We weren’t friends, but until that day, I had no idea we were mortal enemies. I watched him on the stand, feeling important, maybe for the first time ever.
“State your name, please, Mr. White.”
“Reginald Payne White.”
“Where do you live? What county, that is?”
“Jefferson County. Bessemer.”
“Where do you work?”
“Quincy’s Family Steak House.”
“How long have you worked there?”
“Nine years.”
After baseball ended, I had seen Reggie at Quincy’s. My mom and I liked to go there sometimes, for the salad bar mainly. The brother of the sisters I was dating also worked at Quincy’s. I hadn’t been to that Quincy’s in years, not since it came out I was dating the sisters. Their brother didn’t want to see me. Neither did their mom. Because of me, that family was torn apart for a while, and I regretted the harm I had caused. I had put all that behind me, as had the family, but it must have stayed fresh in Reggie’s mind. He and I had run into each other at the beginning of July, a few weeks before I was arrested. We had a harmless conversation, but Reggie was taking that little bit of truth and creating a whole drama out of it. My stomach turned over. I wondered if anyone had ever thrown up in open court before.
“Directing your attention to the month of July 1985. Sometime during that month, did you have an occasion to have a conversation with a man named Anthony Ray Hinton?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And do you see Anthony Ray Hinton in court today?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where is he?”
“Right there.” He pointed at me, but made sure his gaze went over the top of my head.
“The man sitting at the end of the bench, the defendant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How long have you known Anthony Ray Hinton?”
“Maybe a total of about six years.”
I wa
tched Reggie fidget as they asked him about running into me. I had been waiting for Sylvia to get off work, and he had driven up and parked near me. We said hello, talked about what we were doing. He told me he still worked at Quincy’s, and I asked if the brother still worked there and the manager that I knew. Then I went on my way, and he went on his way. A chance encounter. A bit of chitchat at the end of a hot day in the middle of summer. And now he said I was there waiting for him, as if I knew he would be there, and he was so scared when he saw me he reached for his gun he kept in the car? I could feel my legs begin to shake as he testified. He was making things up. Straight-up lying under oath.
“All right, anything else?”
“Then he asked me about how was business. I told him it was normal, and then he asked me did we still close at the same time, and I told him yeah we closed at 10:00 through the week and 11:00 on weekends.”
“He asked you what time you closed at Quincy’s?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you tell him anything about any personnel at Quincy’s?”
“I told him about Sid—Mr. Smotherman. I didn’t call him no name. I told him we had a nice old manager. He had just bought a new Fiero.”
“You told him that you had a what now?”
“A nice old manager that had just bought a new Fiero.”
“You told him the type of car?”
“Yes, sir.”
So that was it. I had used Reggie to find out when the place closed and what kind of car. I looked at Perhacs. Was he catching this? Say this craziness were true, did it make sense that Reggie told me they closed at 11:00 but I had chosen a night when I started a work shift at midnight behind a razor fence with a guard and locked doors to sneak out, rob, and murder a man, and then sneak back in? Did they think I was the Terminator? Why wouldn’t I have just robbed him on a night I had off? It couldn’t be for an alibi, because I certainly hadn’t been clever enough to set up alibis for myself on the other two murders. All of this ran through my head, and I wanted to stand up in court and become my own lawyer. Walk the jury through it. There was no logic to the story they were creating. It was like they had picked me as the killer and then went about twisting reality to make me fit into the plot they were creating. Why wouldn’t I have just gotten there early and waited for Smotherman to leave like I was supposed to have done at the first two murders? Why would I follow him around a grocery store and then carjack him in the road while in my car? I didn’t sound like the cleverest, coolest killer to walk these streets—I sounded like the dumbest criminal in the world. Somehow I had missed him at point-blank range with my gun but had been amazing at scaling fences, switching cars, traveling at supersonic speed, and making it back over the fence, past the guard, through the locked doors, all in time to scrape gum off the bathroom floor. Where was the money? Where were my bloody clothes? Where were the snags on my clothing from climbing over a fifteen-foot razor-wire fence? Where was the heavy, dark sedan with which I had carjacked Sid Smotherman? Where did I get it from, and when did I switch from my small red Nissan? Was I a superhero? Was I James Bond? I must have been to accomplish all of this and still clean out under the Dumpster when my supervisor asked me to.
The Sun Does Shine Page 8