Author Anthony Ray Hinton opens his memoir at his sentencing on December 15, 1986, at the Jefferson County Courthouse in Alabama. Ray is on trial for two murders, and even though all of the evidence points away from Ray, he is going to be convicted. His defense attorney, Sheldon Perhacs, put in little effort for his case, and Ray knows that the white judge, jury, and attorneys are all biased against him because he is Black. After Ray makes an impassioned speech explaining that they are convicting the wrong person, Judge Garrett sentences him to death.
Ray flashes back to his late teen years, providing some background on his life. His father sustains a head injury in the coal mines when Ray is young, so Ray’s mom, Buhlar, raises him and his nine siblings alone. They are poor, but Ray has a happy childhood. He loves his mother more than anything and is very religious, going to church every Sunday. After high school, he works in the coal mines in Praco, Alabama, which he hates. The only way he tolerates the dark, suffocating space is by imagining that he is traveling across the country while he works.
Frustrated with the harsh conditions of the mine, Ray decides to quit. He then goes to a dealership and steals a car, knowing that having a car is the only way that he can travel to a higher-paying job. He keeps the car for two years before growing worried that the police might discover what he’s done, so he returns the car and turns himself into the police. He spends a brief time in prison, and afterwards, he resolves that he never wants to go back to jail.
In 1985, there is a string of robberies and murders across the Birmingham, Alabama, area at various restaurants, and the police arrest Ray at his home in July for the crimes. While Ray protests his innocence, Lieutenant Acker openly says that it really doesn’t matter if Ray did or didn’t do it—one of his “brothers” did, and because Ray will have a white judge, jury, prosecutor, and defense attorney, he will likely be convicted. Ray’s court-appointed lawyer, Sheldon Perhacs, grumbles that he is only being payed $1,000 for the case.
Ray also has an alibi for the night of the third incident—he was working a night shift at a warehouse with a guard at the entrance and timestamped paperwork—but the state simply argues that he snuck in and out of the facility. Meanwhile, the prosecutor gets a person who was injured in one of the incidents to say that Ray was the one who shot him. The state also refuses to allow a polygraph test that Ray takes, which proves that he is innocent and telling the truth. Lastly, the police declare that a gun that they found at Ray’s mom’s house was the murder weapon and matched the bullets in all three incidents, but Ray knows the gun hasn’t been fired in years. Perhacs also only has $500 to pay a ballistics expert to testify on Ray’s behalf, and the only one they can get, Andrew Payne, is blind in one eye and doesn’t know how to use the testing equipment. Because the state discredits Payne’s testimony so easily, the jury decides that Ray should be sentenced to death.
For the first three years on death row, Ray is despondent. His mom and his best friend, Lester, visit every week, but Ray doesn’t speak to anyone else in the prison. Ray lives in a five-by-seven-foot cell with a bed, a toilet, and a sink. The food is terrible, the guards treat him like an animal, and all through the night the other men on death row scream and cry. Ray constantly worries that he might be executed, and he even contemplates killing himself, as many men do on the row.
Perhacs works on Ray’s appeal, but he constantly laments that he doesn’t have the money to put up a good case. When Perhacs asks if Ray’s mom can mortgage her house to pay for his legal fees, Ray fires the lawyer. Soon after, a woman named Santha Sonenberg meets Ray in the jail and asks to represent him. She explains that she doesn’t want money—Bryan Stevenson at the Equal Justice Initiative sent her to work on Ray’s case. She also tells Ray that he cannot be executed while his appeals are ongoing, which is a huge relief for Ray.
One evening, Ray hears a man crying—an inmate’s mother just passed away. Ray decides to offer sympathy; he talks to the man for two hours to comfort him, and other inmates do the same. Ray realizes in that moment that he has been choosing hate and fear over hope and love, and he makes a choice to improve his outlook. After this resolution, he gets to know the other inmates more, including a man named Henry Hays, whom Ray eventually realizes was a former member of the KKK who lynched a young black boy in 1981. When Ray confronts Henry about this, Henry acknowledges that everything he was taught about Black people was a lie. Ray recognizes Henry’s genuine remorse, and he has compassion for the fact that Henry was taught to hate growing up.
Ray also spends more time in his mind, imagining as he did in the coal mines that he is in beautiful places, winning the World Series, and marrying famous actresses. He realizes the importance of having this kind of mental escape from his bleak reality, and he asks the warden if he can start a book club in the jail. The warden agrees, and the book club meets once a month to discuss books like To Kill A Mockingbird, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Even outside of the book club meetings, the inmates discuss the books inside their cells, shouting to one another. Ray sees how liberating it is to be able to discuss politics, relationships, violence, and other important issues.
Over the next several years, Ray’s appeals process is stuck in a variety of petitions, many of which the state of Alabama denies. Santha leaves for another job and Alan Black takes over Ray’s case. Over the same years, several members of book club are executed, including Henry. In 1997, Alan finally brings good news for Ray: he thinks he can get the State of Alabama to knock down Ray’s sentencing to life without parole. But Ray wants to prove his innocence—he doesn’t want to just lighten his sentence—so he fires Alan and writes to Bryan Stevenson, hoping that the man will represent Ray himself. After reviewing Ray’s case and meeting with him, Bryan sees that Ray is innocent. They make a plan together as to how to appeal Ray’s case, and they grow to be friends.
As Bryan works on Ray’s case, Ray’s mom’s health worsens—she has cancer and hasn’t visited Ray in a long time. In September 2002, she passes away, and Ray is devastated. He loses all hope and once again considers killing himself, but he hears his mom’s voice in his mind telling him not to give up, and so he decides to keep fighting for his life.
Years pass, and Ray’s case bounces around the Circuit Court, the State Supreme Court, and the Jefferson County Court, with little traction. Meanwhile, Bryan starts to put pressure on the courts with press. He writes op-eds about the injustice of the death penalty—explaining that one innocent person has been identified for every five executions in Alabama, and that the courts are full of injustice and bias.
In 2013, when the State Supreme Court of Alabama definitively denies Ray’s appeal, Bryan has a final idea: to take the case to the Supreme Court and try to argue for Ray’s innocence. In 2014, the justices unanimously decide that Perhacs rendered a constitutionally deficient defense for Ray, and therefore Ray must be granted a new trial. Soon after, the district attorney quietly decides to drop all charges against Ray—he will be released the same Friday, after nearly 30 years on death row. As Ray leaves prison, friends and family greet him and he weeps with joy.
In the aftermath of Ray’s release, he tells his story to anyone who will listen, fighting to end the death penalty. He also carries the scars of his experience: he creates alibis for every day of his life in the case he’s wrongly accused of something again, he has trouble adjusting to new technology, and he doesn’t trust people easily. But, he says, he forgives the people who unjustly arrested and convicted him.
Ray concludes his book with the names of each person who remains on death row as of November 2018. He says that statistically, 1 in 10 of them are innocent, and he argues that until the criminal justice system can render a fair process for every person, the death penalty should be abolished.
