Along with exposing bias in the criminal justice system, Anthony Ray Hinton also uses The Sun Does Shine to explore the issue of the death penalty, which was legal in 32 states as of the book’s publication in 2018. Ray examines the death penalty from a moral perspective, illustrating how it is wrong to take a life for a life. Furthermore, he illustrates through his own wrongful conviction that the death penalty does not always carry out justice—and he also recognizes that even those who are guilty of the crimes for which they’ve been sentenced are still human beings who do not deserve to die. In examining the death penalty’s flaws and its questionable morality, Ray explicitly argues that death penalty should be abolished.
Ray uses the fact that he could have been killed, despite being innocent, to illustrate the inherent flaws of the death penalty. Ray understands that the death penalty is a punishment for people guilty of the worst crimes. But he uses his own case—in which he was wrongfully convicted of two murder-robberies and another attempted murder—to prove that “the system didn’t know who was guilty,” and that the death penalty could easily be used to murder innocent men like him. Ray references arguments from his lawyer Bryan Stevenson, who writes that “With 34 executions and seven exonerations since 1975, one innocent person has been identified on Alabama’s Death Row for every five executions. It’s an astonishing rate of error.” This statement argues that the death penalty’s errors are high enough that the punishment is not worth preserving in the law. Ray concludes definitively, “Until we have a way of ensuring that innocent men are never executed—until we account for the racism in our courts, in our prisons, and in our sentencing—the death penalty should be abolished.” In this way, Ray also ties the death penalty to the problem of the U.S.’s discriminatory criminal justice system. He makes the case that, until the court system can guard against discrimination, the death penalty should not be used, since the punishment can be doled out based on a biased system.
Ray also approaches the issue from a moral perspective, suggesting that the death penalty is just as immoral as any other kind of murder. Ray reasons that no killing is justified by the law—a statement that also applies to the death penalty. He explains, “Man didn’t have the right to take a life. The State didn’t have the right to take a life either.” In suggesting that killing is wrong in all cases, Ray argues governments shouldn’t be able to carry out that kind of punishment. Ray also uses his faith to argue against the morality of the death penalty. He asserts that “Life [is] a gift given by God. I believe[] it should and could only be taken by God as well.” This statement alludes to one of the Bible’s Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13), implying that people should not kill others as Ray states. In alluding to the Bible, Ray uses Judeo-Christian morality to illustrate his stance that while God has the right to take lives, people and governments do not. In addition, Ray refutes the death penalty using other logical arguments. He writes that “When you took a life, it didn’t bring back a life. It didn’t undo what was done” and later, “death has never deterred death.” In both cases, Ray undermines other common justifications for the death penalty by arguing that it neither remedies murders that have already been committed, nor does it prevent future murders from happening.
Lastly, Ray demonstrates that all lives are worthwhile, even the lives of those who are guilty on death row—and thus, no one should be put to death for their crimes. Ray recognizes that although he is innocent, not all of the men on death row are. However, he illustrates that they, too, can be redeemable. For instance, Ray (who’s Black) befriends a man named Henry Hays, a former Ku Klux Klan member who lynched a young Black man in 1981. Ray explains that, despite Henry’s crime, he carries no animosity toward Henry, who has since understood the racist hatred he was taught growing up. Ray notes, “No one is undeserving of their own life or their own potential to change,” illustrating that even those whom the outside world considers horrific criminals have the capacity to show remorse and find redemption. Ray broadly applies this idea to all death row inmates, arguing that the inmates are “Not monsters. Not the worst thing we had ever done. We were so much more than what we had been reduced to.” By using the word “we”—even though Ray himself has not committed a capital offense—he reminds the reader that the other inmates are human beings just like he is and are therefore worthy of life.
In the book’s final pages, Ray lists each of the 2,813 names of the men and women who are on death row in the U.S. as of November 2018. He writes, “Statistically, one out of every ten people on this list is innocent,” which amounts to 281 people. He argues that if one in 10 planes crashed, society would stop flights and reform the planes—and it must do so with the death penalty. Ending the book in this way highlights the scale and stakes of the issue, driving home Ray’s belief that “it’s time we put a stop to the death penalty.”
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Death Penalty ThemeTracker
The Death Penalty Quotes in The Sun Does Shine
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.
I didn’t know Michael Lindsey, but I wanted him to know he wasn’t alone. I wanted him to know that I saw him and knew him and his life meant something and so did his death. We yelled until the lights stopped flickering and the generator that powered the electric chair turned off. I banged on the bars until the smell of Michael Lindsey’s death reached me, and then I got in my bunk and I pulled the blanket over my head and I wept. I cried for a man who had to die alone, and I cried for whoever was next to die.
We weren’t a collection of innocent victims. Many of the guys I laughed with had raped women and murdered children and sliced innocent people up for the fun of it or because they were high on drugs or desperate for money and never thought beyond the next moment. The outside world called them monsters. They called all of us monsters. But I didn’t know any monsters on the row. I knew guys named Larry and Henry and Victor and Jesse. I knew Vernon and Willie and Jimmy. Not monsters. Guys with names who didn’t have mothers who loved them or anyone who had ever shown them a kindness that was even close to love. Guys who were born broken or had been broken by life. Guys who had been abused as children and had their minds and their hearts warped by cruelty and violence and isolation long before they ever stood in front of a judge and a jury.
Compassion doesn’t know what color you are, and I think Henry felt more love from the black men on death row than he ever did at a KKK meeting or from his own father and mother.
We had met a few more times in book club and had read Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. All the books talked about race in the South, and Henry at first had shied away from the subject, almost pretending not to know how unfairly blacks were treated until we called him out on it. He was ashamed of how he had been brought up and ashamed of the beliefs that had brought him to the row. “You never knew what a person could grow up to become,” he’d say.
Some days, I could see he was tired, and I wondered about the wear on a person when so many lives depend on what you do each day. He carried a big burden, and it wasn’t just mine. He spoke of justice and of mercy and of a system that was so broken it locked up children and the mentally ill and the innocent. “No one is beyond redemption,” he would say. No one is undeserving of their own life or their own potential to change. He had such compassion for victims and for perpetrators, and an intolerance and even anger for those in power who abused that power.
When you took a life, it didn’t bring back a life. It didn’t undo what was done. It wasn’t logical. We were just creating an endless chain of death and killing, every link connected to the next. It was barbaric. No baby is born a murderer. No toddler dreams of being on death row someday. Every killer on death row was taught to be a killer—by parents, by a system, by the brutality of another brutalized person—but no one was born a killer. My friend Henry wasn’t born to hate. He was taught to hate, and to hate so much that killing was justified. No one was born to this one precious life to be locked in a cell and murdered. Not the innocent like me, but not the guilty either. Life was a gift given by God. I believed it should and could only be taken by God as well.
Alabama’s death penalty is a lie. It is a perverse monument to inequality, to how some lives matter and others do not. It is a violent example of how we protect and value the rich and abandon and devalue the poor. It is a grim, disturbing shadow cast by the legacy of racial apartheid used to condemn the disfavored among us. It’s the symbol elected officials hold up to strengthen their tough-on-crime reputations while distracting us from the causes of violence. The death penalty is an enemy of grace, redemption and all who value life and recognize that each person is more than their worst act.
Read the names out loud.
After every tenth name, say, “Innocent.”
Add your son or your daughter’s name to the list. Or your brother or your mother or your father’s name to the list.
Add my name to the list.
Add your own.
The death penalty is broken, and you are either part of the death squad or you are banging on the bars.
Choose.
