By David K. Shipler
Earlier
this month, a black man named Anthony Ray Hinton, convicted of murder thirty
years ago, finally walked free in Alabama, out of death row. The finger of
guilt now points to many others: not just the real killer, who may still roam
the land, but also hasty police officers, blinkered prosecutors, careless
ballistic examiners, politicians who won’t adequately fund criminal defense for
the poor, and judges up and down the hierarchy from trial courts to appellate
courts. The case is such a cold window on the dangers of the death penalty,
which if carried out cuts off all possibility of revision and reversal, that it
seems worth posting excerpts here of the detailed examination in my book Rights at Risk:
The law is a labyrinth, best
comprehended by the high priesthood of attorneys who fashion and interpret its
abstruse language. No unschooled layman, standing nakedly unrepresented before
the terrible engine of the criminal justice system, can possibly fathom the
hidden dangers of error—or the invisible shields that offer unnoticed protection.
Hinton’s court-appointed lawyer, Sheldon
Perhacs, was given too little money to hire a reputable firearms expert to
dispute the questionable findings of a police lab, and was still bitter about
it decades later. The “expert” he could get for the $500 the court provided, a
one-eyed retired engineer who couldn’t operate a comparison microscope, had
jurors laughing in ridicule. Perhacs needed $10,000 for a qualified toolmarks
examiner from New Orleans, because the case against Hinton for two murders
rested entirely on a dubious lab report. It purportedly matched Hinton’s gun
with bullets from the bodies, but the results were more ambiguous than
prosecutors let on. Perhacs could not mount a persuasive rebuttal without a
true expert.
