November 25, 1986
Re:
Dear Ms. Hinton:
Thank you for your letter dated November 17, 1986. I want you to know that I will continue to do everything I know how to do to protect your son. His case is going to be appealed, and I think I’m going to win the appeal. The appeal will probably take a couple of years. After that, we will probably have to try his case again. The next time we try it, we will do some things differently. I still think he has a good opportunity to be acquitted of these charges.
I will continue to do everything I know how to do.
Sincerely,
Sheldon Perhacs
I didn’t want to sit on death row for a couple of years. I wanted him to get me out now, but there was nothing I could do. He would do some things differently next time? How about getting me an expert with two eyes? I still cringed when I thought about my expert getting crucified on the stand. Would they give us more money for a better expert if they tried me again? It seemed like if you were poor, you were as good as guilty. I picked up the second letter. It was dated just a month ago.
March 2, 1987
Re: Your Son
Dear Ms. Hinton:
I intend to continue to do everything I know how to do to protect your son. The case is in the process of being appealed. The appeal will take quite some time to complete. It is my opinion that we have a good opportunity to win this case on appeal. If we do, we will have a new trial. At the new trial I am going to hire another expert to testify about the bullets.
I also believe that your son is not guilty of killing anyone. I will continue to do everything I know how to do to protect him. I’m sorry that I missed your call when you called the other day, and I am certainly glad that you wrote to me to tell me about it. Please feel free to continue to contact me whenever you need to.
Sincerely,
Sheldon Perhacs
My heart broke at what I read between the lines of his letters—my mom calling him and writing him and asking him to protect me. What I didn’t know at the time was that she was also sending him money orders for twenty-five dollars every time she wrote, pleading and begging him for help. Here is all my money—save my son. Did he laugh at those little money orders? Twenty-five dollars was nothing to a man who ate a thousand dollars for breakfast. But twenty-five dollars might as well have been a hundred thousand to my mom. Perhacs didn’t know what it meant to be poor. To have just enough to make it through a month without a penny to spare. An extra ten dollars needed for an emergency would mean you had no water or no electricity for a month, or maybe even longer than a month, because you had to pay a reconnect fee to turn it back on. I know why my mom never told me about the money—I would have put an end to it, never understanding that she needed to send that money, because she needed the comfort of knowing she was doing everything she could to save her son’s life. I would have taken that comfort from her.
I knew my mom felt helpless.
We all felt helpless.
And at the time, I didn’t want to think my attorney would take advantage of that helplessness. I couldn’t think about that. He was my only chance. I didn’t tell my mom that he had told me he would handle my automatic appeal and then he was off my case. It was as if he was already planning to lose. I was hoping he would have a change of heart. I was hoping the man who called him during my trial and said he was the killer would call him again. I was hoping for a miracle but planning my escape.
I hugged my mom and Miss Mae goodbye. My mom promised to come with Lester next time, and I think Miss Mae was relieved. Visiting days were every Friday at first, and then they were changed to once a month for death row visits. No weekend visits for us; they didn’t want to make it easy on our families and friends. Lester had to take the day off work, but as soon as he was allowed, he made the seven-hour round-trip drive every Friday. Sometimes he worked the night shift on Thursday and still drove all day Friday. I used to worry about him falling asleep at the wheel, but he was always the first one at the prison waiting to get in. He brought his mom and my mom, and the three of them were the only bit of light in the darkness.
I don’t remember those early visits too well, because I was so full of hatred and rage that it was all I could do to smile and chitchat. If they noticed something wrong, they never said, but every once in a while, I could see Lester watching me. He knew me better than anyone, but I don’t think he could have known what I was thinking. I had never felt such a darkness in me. I couldn’t control my thoughts. Every hour of every day, I imagined how I would kill McGregor. My days and nights were spent watching. And listening. Even at visiting hours, I was memorizing the routines of the guards. There had to be a way out. A moment where I could sneak over a fence, hide in the back of a car, take off running. It wasn’t logical, and I didn’t have a plan—but I watched and I waited because there had to be a way to escape. There just had to be.
Wouldn’t it be better if they killed me while I was trying to escape rather than killing me strapped to a chair? The only hesitation I had was that I didn’t want people to think I had run because I was guilty. I wanted to prove my innocence more than anything else. I wasn’t a killer, but I wanted to kill. Inside, I was becoming the monster the world thought I was, and I was afraid Lester and my mom would see it, so I lied to them about how things were. The food is fine. The guards are nice. The other inmates are quiet and keep to themselves. I lied to them every week. I’m sleeping just fine. I have everything I need. I lied and I lied and then I lied some more.
The reality was we had to eat breakfast at 3:00 A.M., lunch at 10:00 A.M., and dinner at 2:00 P.M. And every night, I was hungry. Every day, I was hungry. I weighed 220 pounds when I got there. I had lost ten pounds at county, but I could see losing a lot more than I wanted here. Breakfast was some powdered eggs, a biscuit so hard you could bounce it off the floor, and a little spoonful of what was supposed to be jelly. They had a whole prison to feed, so the death row inmates had to eat early in the morning. At 2:45 A.M., the guards would start screaming, “Breakfast! Breakfast! Breakfast!” If I was lucky enough to have fallen asleep, I would bolt upright in the dark, thinking I was under attack. Lunch was some bland patty of an unknown meat substance. I heard it was horsemeat, but I hoped that was just a bad joke. Dinner was the same formless patty, but at night, it was called a cutlet. On Fridays, there was a soggy fish cutlet. There were canned beans or peas or some other vegetable in a watery liquid that smelled slightly of tin and mold and tasted metallic and bitter. Instant mashed potatoes that would turn into a dry powder in your mouth. I was hungry every day. It was a physical hunger, yes, but it was also a mental hunger. I felt empty and hollow. I hungered for home, for my own bed and my family and my church, and for friends I could laugh with and sit with. I was alone all day with a hunger so big it felt like I was falling with nothing to grab on to. Like when you lean back in a chair and have that moment of panic where you’ve gone too far and you have to jerk yourself upright so you flail about to try to save yourself. I had that panic of falling all day every day. I was hungry for my freedom. I was hungry for my dignity. I was hungry to be a human again. I didn’t want to be known as inmate Z468. I was Anthony Ray Hinton. People called me Ray. I used to love to laugh. I had a name and a life and a home, and I wanted it so bad, the wanting had a taste. I wasn’t going to survive here. I felt like eventually I would hollow out so completely, I would just disappear into a kind of nothingness. They were all trying to kill me, and I was going to escape. I had no other choice.
* * *
Perhacs’s motion for a new trial was postponed for over six months, until finally, on July 31, 1987, it was denied. It was exactly two years to the day that I got arrested.
In Alabama, at that time, you had forty-two days to file a notice of appeal and another twenty-eight days to file a brief. Did I find this out because Perhacs came to death row to visit with me and talk about a strategy for my appeal? No. I found this out by listening to the other death row inmates
talking about their appeals.
It was like a legal class going on all day long, and while I still wasn’t speaking, I did listen to the other inmates talking to each other.
“Man, you got to call Bryan Stevenson. He’ll get you a lawyer in here.”
“Bryan Stevenson sent my lawyer from up in Ohio. And another guy came from D.C.”
“You have to tell him to read your transcript and see if they prejudiced the jury.”
“Tell him about the guy who lied.”
It went on all day, and I could hear the other inmates arguing case law with each other and talking about their appeals. I learned that Alabama had just started electrocuting people again in 1983 after taking a break for eighteen years. Now people were afraid they were going to start giving out dates to everyone who had been there a minute and who didn’t have an attorney trying to stop the State.
“He’s got a bunch of lawyers helping him out. A whole resource center.”
“I heard he’s watching every single person on the row—tracking everybody. He’s like Santa Claus, and he’s gonna know if you are naughty or nice.”
All day long I heard the name Bryan Stevenson, but I didn’t care about Bryan Stevenson. I cared about Perhacs and what he was doing for my case. I had an attorney, and for that, I was grateful. It sounded like a lot of the guys were waiting for one to magically show up from the good graces of this one attorney named Stevenson. I didn’t believe in God, and I didn’t believe in Santa Claus. And I didn’t ask any questions, because one thing I had learned from my trial was that if you said anything, people would lie about it if it helped their cases out. I didn’t trust the other inmates. I didn’t trust the guards. I didn’t even trust Perhacs, but he was better than nothing. If I had to ask the guards for something, I wrote it down on the inmate stationery and handed it to them. I don’t know if they thought I was dumb or what, but they knew I spoke when I had my visits. I think they were happy I didn’t speak—it was one less inmate they had to deal with.
The guards brought me to the shower every other day, sometimes at 6:00 P.M. Other times it would be at midnight. There was no schedule. A guard walked in front of me, and a guard walked behind me. My hands were cuffed for the first three months, and after that I could go to the shower without being cuffed. There was no privacy in the shower, and there were always two guys showering at once and two guards watching. The water would be scalding hot or icy cold—it just depended on the day, or maybe what the guards felt like doing to entertain themselves. You had to soap up and get out fast, in under two minutes. The guards watched us the whole time—even the female guards. There was no pleasure in a female seeing me naked. It was humiliating. We were like farm animals being hosed off outside the barn. Once a day, we were brought out to individual cages in the yard that we could exercise in, or pace back and forth. Nobody had to “walk” as the guards called it, and a lot of guys just stayed in their cells. They didn’t want to change or shower or exercise. I always took my fifteen or twenty minutes outside. I was looking for an escape. I could see the prison parking lot from my cage on the yard and the road that led away from Holman. I just needed to get to it. Every moment of every day, I was watching for a weakness in the system—despite what the prosecutors had said, I couldn’t scale a fifteen-foot razor-wire fence. And certainly not one with guards and guns trained on it. I thought about digging a tunnel. There were rats and roaches that crawled in and out of my cell through a little vent near the ceiling. If they could get in, I thought, then I should be able to get out. I stared at that vent every day. There was always something lurking there—always an antenna or a whisker peeking through. Every night, I could hear the rats scratching and scurrying across the floors. I imagined the roaches swarming the walls at night and hiding back in the vent during the day to watch me. I was the trapped insect. Those roaches had more freedom than I did. The sounds at night were like being in the middle of a horror movie—creatures crawling around, men moaning or screaming or crying. Everyone cried at night. One person would stop and another would start. It was the only time you could cry anonymously. I blocked out the sound. I didn’t care about anyone’s tears or their screams. Sometimes there was laughter—maniacal laughter—and that was the most frightening. There was no real laughter on death row. Those that could sleep yelled out in their dreams, as if they were being chased. Sometimes they cursed. I don’t think I slept more than fifteen minutes at a stretch ever in those first months and years. It makes you crazy to never sleep. It makes you go to a place where there is no light, and no hope, and no dreams, and no chance for redemption. It makes you think of shadows and demons and death and revenge and of killing before you can be killed.
There was death and ghosts everywhere. The row was haunted by the men who died in the electric chair. It was haunted by the men who chose to kill themselves rather than be killed. Their blood flowed in the cement cracks of the floors like a slow river, until it dried and then split apart under the weight of the creatures that crept over it in the night. The roaches had blood on them, and they carried it from cell to cell. The rats nibbled at the dried blood and carried it back into the walls and vents where it blew around in the air like darkened dust and settled over us all. It was hard to hang yourself in death row but easy to bash your own head open against the cement wall, over and over again, until it splattered the cell red and your pulpy flesh filled in the cracks and divots like spackle and hardened into a stain that would never come clean. The row was haunted by remorse and regret and the deaths of all who had died at the hands of the guilty, and of all those who had not died at the hands of the innocent but wanted justice and for their killers to be found. Freedom was a ghost that haunted us all on the row, but most of all we were haunted by a past we could not go back and change. Loss and grief and a cold madness that defied words floated in the grime and filth that we were all coated in. Hell was real, and it had an address and a name.
Death Row, Holman Prison.
Where love and hope went to die.
* * *
In 1988, the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed my conviction. I didn’t hear from Perhacs, but I got a copy of my appeal and the court’s response. There were five issues Perhacs raised in my appeal. He said Judge Garrett made an error in combining the two capital cases and not granting his motion to sever. He also said that there were two more errors when there were no test bullets entered into evidence. Finally, he said that the court never proved I was linked to the two murders, because they had no direct evidence I was there, and finally, that we should have been allowed to submit the polygraph test into evidence. The Court of Criminal Appeals disagreed with everything. Perhacs sent me a letter in April of 1989. He was appealing my case to the Alabama Supreme Court. I had been on death row for over two years.
April 11, 1989
Mr. Anthony Ray Hinton, #Z468
Holman Unit #37
Atmore, Alabama 36506
RE: Your case
Dear Anthony:
I presented oral argument for you to the Alabama Supreme Court yesterday. I got the impression that they were interested in the argument that I made, and I think we’ve got a pretty good opportunity to reverse your convictions to get a new trial. The court has ordered that additional briefs be filed, and that will require approximately 2 weeks. After that they will take the case for their consideration. I’m unable to tell you exactly when to expect an opinion from them, but I’ve got a good feeling about this case. If the convictions are overturned, then we will have to prepare to defend these cases again. We will also have to prepare to defend the Quincy’s cases. I’ve got a number of ideas about some things that we will do that will be new to each of the cases. All of the cases continue to have very serious legal problems within them, and I expect to take advantage of every legal opportunity that is presented to us.
One of the things that I think we will have to do is hire another expert. Even though our expert was willing to help us, I don’t think he was too persuasive with
the jury. I thought our presentation to the jury with Mr. Payne was excellent, but he crumbled under their cross-examination. There really are a lot of other things that we can do in addition to getting a new expert.
If the Supreme Court does not order a new trial to you, then I still think that we’ve got an excellent opportunity to appeal this case to the United States Supreme Court. The appeal I would take to the U.S. Supreme Court is not financed or paid for by anybody. Someone in your family would have to find a way to pay some attorney’s fees. Your case is so unique that I think the U.S. Supreme Court would listen to your appeal. I really think that sooner or later we are going to win these cases.
Contact me if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Sheldon Perhacs
I read the letter at least five times. I did have a question. Why didn’t he do all these “other things” the first time around? And what about my innocence? Why didn’t my appeal say anything about the fact that they had the wrong guy? The U.S. Supreme Court? That was crazy. And he knew nobody in my family had any money to give him. I had to hope that the Alabama Supreme Court ruled soon and ordered a new trial. I still hadn’t found a way to escape, and I still wasn’t ready to take my own life.
I wanted to prove I was innocent.
But I didn’t know how much more I could take. I had to get out of this place.
One way or another.
10
THE DEATH SQUAD
I may not be here, but you remember these words. God is going to show you that I didn’t do it.
—ANTHONY RAY HINTON
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 circulation, 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.
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