The Sun Does Shine summary

On February 23, 1985, the assistant manager of a restaurant in Birmingham, Alabama, was shot twice during a robbery and died. On July 3, an employee at Captain D’s restaurant died of a gunshot wound to the head in a similar robbery. Early in the morning of July 25, Sidney Smotherman, manager of Quincy’s steakhouse, was shot in another robbery but recovered from his injuries. Smotherman described his attacker as a Black man who was almost six feet tall, weighed 190 pounds and had a mustache. At the time of Smotherman’s shooting, Hinton was working a night shift at his warehouse job, having been signed in by his supervisor.

Six days after the Smotherman shooting, Hinton was mowing his mother’s lawn in the blazing sunshine. He looked up to see two white policemen staring at him, their hands hovering over their guns. But he wasn’t afraid. Why would he be? He had done nothing wrong.

Hinton had been brought up to have faith in justice, so he naturally hoped his lawyer could get him out of this mess. He was soon to be disappointed.

At the heart of the problem were race and money.

On December 17, 1986, Hinton was taken from his cell at the county jail. He was strip-searched, chained and cuffed at his ankles and wrists and then driven for three hours to Holman prison. He was walked through a prison doorway. Over the door were the words “death row.” This was his new home.

Hinton’s cell was seven feet long and five feet wide. It had a metal toilet, a metal sink, a shelf, a bed and a copy of the King James Bible. Nothing else.

The smell of death and burning flesh is like nothing else. It’s a smoky, putrid mixture of vomit, rotten waste and feces. And in a prison with almost no ventilation, the smell of death lingers.

One of the first men to be put to death during Hinton’s incarceration was Michael Lindsey, the man in the cell beneath Hinton’s. Convicts get one month’s notice of their execution. And in the month before Lindsey’s death, he cried constantly. In his cell and in the yard, he cried. The condemned man had to sit and watch as the guards practiced their routine for the day of his death, marching down the row, collecting a guard pretending to be Lindsey and leading him off to a holding cell. Lindsey cried as the guards practiced turning on the generator for the electric chair, and he cried as the prison lights flickered under the strain of the electricity.

Living on death row in a solitary cell, you don’t necessarily know much about the other inmates around you.

One day, Hinton was shocked to realize that one of his fellow inmates, someone he regarded as a friend, had carried out the last lynching of a Black person in the United States. In 1981, Henry Hays had kidnapped, beaten, and stabbed a young Black man, and hung him from a tree. He was a member of the white supremacist hate organization the Ku Klux Klan, and his parents had been part of the group’s leadership.

Many prisoners dream of escape, but it never happens. Hinton was lucky. He found ways to escape, even though he was never able to leave the prison.

Hinton discovered the power of his imagination while on death row.

By 1997, Hinton had gone through a couple of lawyers and a series of failed legal attempts to get a retrial. His latest lawyer had told him he thought he could get him a deal: life without parole.

Hinton’s reaction? He fired him. He had no interest in serving life in prison for a crime he hadn’t committed.

Courts do not move quickly, particularly when they are considering appeals from a death-row prisoner in Alabama.

It didn’t help that the state of Alabama was determined to keep Hinton incarcerated. The state apparently did not want to face up to its errors. To accept the mistake would be to admit that the state had knowingly and deliberately sent an innocent Black man to death row.

By February 2015, Hinton had spent 29 years in a solitary cell on death row in Holman prison. He’d watched 54 men walk past his cell door on their way to their deaths.

When he was sent back to county jail to await retrial, and he walked out of his cell, Hinton yelled out to his fellow inmates.

As Hinton’s friend Lester drove him away from the prison, Hinton jumped a little as a woman’s voice told them to turn left. Who was this woman, and where was she hiding, Hinton asked. Lester stared blankly for a second before laughing and explaining it was a GPS system. After 30 years locked away, Hinton had a lot to learn.

On his first night home, as he lay down in the softest bed he’d ever experienced, his breath began to come quicker. He started to panic. He got up and ran to the bathroom. As he sat on the bathroom floor, trying to calm himself down, he noticed the bathroom was the same size as his cell. He stretched out on the floor, his head on a bath mat and decided to sleep there for the night. It felt like home.