The Sun Does Shine

In 1985 Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested for two murders he did not commit, convicted by an all-white jury in Alabama, and sent to death row — where he spent thirty years waiting to die for something he didn't do. He was exonerated in 2015 after Bryan Stevenson took his case to the Supreme Court. This memoir is the record of those thirty years: how he survived through imagination, through the friendships he built with other men on death row, through an absolute refusal to let the state take his spirit when it had already taken everything else. The most accessible and compelling case against the death penalty ever written for this age group — not an argument but a life, one specific man's thirty-year experience of a system that was wrong about him and would have killed him anyway.