Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Anthony Ray Hinton spent 30 years on Alabama’s death row for two murders he did not commit. And it wasn’t new forensic technology that ultimately exonerated him. It was the perseverance of a handful of men and women willing to turn a mirror on the system itself. If there are books and there are novels, this is a story. It’s a powerful story full of loss, love, pain, honesty, hope, and, ultimately, survival. There is, however, no redemption here. There was no reason to ever believe that Anthony Ray Hinton was guilty of these crimes. None. But that’s not what the legal system is all about. And ultimately it is only the system that can be redeemed. The rest is just human tragedy. I have been a peripheral witness to the legal system for a long time. And I have known many who are intimately involved in the service of justice who can say little more in defense of the system than, “It’s the best of the alternatives.” That is seldom an acceptable standard for much of anything, but it should never be an acceptable standard when we are consciously and deliberately executing people. The problems are not simple. Thugs walk free every day for the same reasons that people like Anthony Ray are wrongly sent to death row. Truth is seldom binary. Scientific discovery is a function of probabilities, not absolutes. Facts always exist in context and must be evaluated within that context. And that context is never as simple or as one-dimensional as it seems—or we would like it to be. The system is over-worked, the ‘jury of peers’ that may have existed in an 18th Century New England farm town is an illusion today, and our politics and our legal system have been corrupted by money at a time when the divide between rich and poor is rapidly expanding. This is a story with elements of legal injustice, racism, and the plight of the poor. But none of these exist in isolation or is as personal, in the end, as we make them out to be. All of these things do exist at a personal level. The cause and effect, however, are structural. And that’s where both the injustice starts and where it must be confronted. The author claims that one in ten prisoners sitting on death row today is innocent. If you doubt that I encourage you to go to your local courthouse today and observe a trial in process. You will find a lot of hard-working people; some good and some bad. But you will not find a search for truth. You will find an urgent commitment to justice as defined by the institution itself. In the end, this is Anthony Ray Hinton’s story. And it is beautifully and simply told by Anthony Ray and Lara Love Hardin. It is, however, a story about us. We are the context. Anthony Ray and the people around him simply shine a light inside the institution that we live within. But it’s up to us to open our eyes and see. “The sun does shine.” But you have to open your eyes to see it. And that, ultimately, is the message of this book. This is more than a must read. If this book does not become a best seller, shame on us; things are worse than I feared. It’s that important.