7.01.2018

just finished reading

A memoir of hope. This is going to stay with me for a very long time. It's heartbreaking yet uplifting. And it confirms my position on the death penalty--that the government does not have the right to take a life. And I understand that might be an unpopular stance, but it's mine.

From the publisher:
In 1985, Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested and charged with two counts of capital murder in Alabama. Stunned, confused, and only twenty-nine years old, Hinton knew that it was a case of mistaken identity and believed that the truth would prove his innocence and ultimately set him free.

But with no money and a different system of justice for a poor black man in the South, Hinton was sentenced to death by electrocution. He spent his first three years on Death Row at Holman State Prison in agonizing silence—full of despair and anger toward all those who had sent an innocent man to his death. But as Hinton realized and accepted his fate, he resolved not only to survive, but find a way to live on Death Row. For the next twenty-seven years he was a beacon—transforming not only his own spirit, but those of his fellow inmates, fifty-four of whom were executed mere feet from his cell. With the help of civil rights attorney and bestselling author of Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson, Hinton won his release in 2015.

With a foreword by Stevenson, The Sun Does Shine is an extraordinary testament to the power of hope sustained through the darkest times. Destined to be a classic memoir of wrongful imprisonment and freedom won, Hinton’s memoir tells his dramatic thirty-year journey and shows how you can take away a man’s freedom, but you can’t take away his imagination, humor, or joy.

1 comment:

The Gal Herself said...

I'm glad this book is good, and that it does the important subject justice.


My friend John served as a juror on a death penalty case. It was grueling, but he voted to find the defendant guilty, and then voted death in the penalty phase. Guess what. The Innocence Project proved the defendant innocent, and revealed that his confession had been coerced by police torture. The experience scorched John.

As a Christian, I could never serve on a death penalty jury. But after going through this with John I now maintain that government does not have the right to ask jurors to take a life.