Mark Millican: Kept alive on death row

Published 2:30 pm Tuesday, January 23, 2024

“It is a fact verified and recorded in many histories that the soul capable of the greatest good is also capable of the greatest evil.” — John Steinbeck, “Tortilla Flat”

For some reason Steinbeck is considered neither a vaunted nor illuminating figure of American letters, at least according to literary critics primarily ensconced in academia. It would seem his elevation of the common man — à la “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Cannery Row,” “Tortilla Flat” — might win accolades similar to “taking up for the underdog” writers like Leon Uris and Great Britain’s Charles Dickens. But no, perhaps Steinbeck was too common for the critics. Still, it leaves those of us who enjoy his descriptive powers and insights into human nature continuing to go back to his books and short novels.

A New Year’s resolution continues to be not only to read more spine-and-leaf real books, but to delve back into some classics that have provided “perusing pleasure,” so to speak.

The quoted sentence that began this column made me hearken back to something I read years ago, pre-internet. (It’s interesting if we have a few decades behind us how we can at times remember whether something we read was “pre” or “post” internet, the former not as readily labeled urban legend.) Anyway, the memory was something I read about Adolf Hitler, that before his rise to power he was considered an accomplished artist in the genre of architectural rendering. If this seems a unique category, think of the imagery Victor Hugo devotes pages to in his descriptions of Parisian buildings in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

However, I recall reading when Hitler painted people into his works they appeared unanimated and sticklike, and the art critics scoffed. Just to make sure I was remembering this correctly, I used the internet to look it up. Here’s what I found on quora.com, written by an observer: “One modern art critic was asked to review some of his paintings without being told who painted them and he judged them ‘quite good.’ The different style in which he drew human figures, however, the critic said, represented a profound uninterest in people.”

Ah, so memory did serve somewhat in this case. But why talk about any possible talents of a madman ultimately bent on destroying life? It simply verifies Steinbeck’s statement, but what if the opposite was true? What if a soul capable of the evil of taking life indiscriminately — as the author implies we are able — is actually accused of it although he didn’t do it? Such is the case with Anthony Ray Hinton, who tells his story in “The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life on Death Row.”

Hinton, an African American man in Alabama, spent 30 years on death row “for a crime he didn’t commit,” according to the liner notes of the book published in 2018. He was actually indicted, tried and convicted in the murders of two restaurant managers and the wounding of another — all late at night — in the first six months of 1985. Hinton, a Christian, lived with his mother and was actually clocked in at work on third shift when the last murder was committed.

Amazingly, it didn’t matter. In Hinton’s own words, relating an interview with a detective:

“Man, you got the wrong person.”

“Man, we’re not even done with you yet …”

“(The detective) turned around and looked me in the eye for the first time since I had told him I was at work on the 25th. ‘You know, I don’t care whether you did or didn’t do it. In fact, I believe you didn’t do it. But it doesn’t matter. If you didn’t do it, one of your brothers did. and you’re going to take the rap. You want to know why?’

“I just shook my head.

“‘I can give you five reasons why they are going to convict you. Do you want to know what they are?

“I shook my head, no, but he continued.

“‘Number one, you’re black. Number two, a white man gonna say you shot him. Number three, you’re going to have a white district attorney. Number four, you’re gonna have a white judge. and number five, you’re gonna have an all-white jury.’

“He paused and smiled at me then. ‘You know what that spell?’

“I shook my head, but I knew what he was saying. You couldn’t be raised in the South and not know what he was saying. My whole body went numb, like I was under an ice-cold shower in the middle of winter.

“Conviction. Conviction. Conviction. Conviction. Conviction.”

The ballistics found on the pistol at his mother’s home didn’t even match the murder weapon, but it didn’t matter as the detective’s words proved prophetic. Hinton spent his first three years on death row understandably “full of despair and anger toward all those who had sent an innocent man to his death.” The next 27 years he returned to his faith and became transformed, ministering to other prisoners and founding a book group on death row.

Many who support capital punishment lament that those on death row languish far too long before receiving their terminal sentence. Nonetheless, in Hinton’s case a civil rights attorney reviewed the evidence and eventually helped him receive complete exoneration. Now, he travels the country giving his testimony and fighting against the wrongful imprisonment of others, no matter their skin color.

Riding down the road in my pickup truck recently I heard an illustration regarding race relations on the radio I won’t soon forget. Black pastor Tony Evans was quoted as saying, “We have a skin problem because we have a sin problem.”

I look forward to finishing Hinton’s gripping true story. In the meantime, I’m of a mind to revise my ongoing resolution to not only read more classics, but truly listen to what people are saying — instead of being such a critic.

Mark Millican is a former staff writer for the Dalton Daily Citizen.