The Birmingham News
by STAN DIEL
October 18, 2008
The Alabama Supreme Court on Friday ordered a judge to review the conviction of Death Row inmate Anthony Ray Hinton, whose case has been a rallying point for death penalty opponents.
Hinton was convicted of killing two fast-food restaurant managers and wounding a third during three robberies in 1985. In a unanimous ruling, the state Supreme Court ordered the Jefferson County trial court to determine whether Hinton had inadequate counsel because of questions surrounding the qualifications of a forensics expert who testified for the defense.
Bryan Stevenson, who is executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative and Hinton's current attorney, said the ruling is a significant win for Hinton, who has been on Death Row for 21 years. Should the court find that the expert was incompetent, Hinton likely will get a new trial, he said.
"This has been a horrific miscarriage of justice," Stevenson said. "Anthony Ray Hinton had nothing to do with these crimes."
Jefferson County Circuit Court has not yet set a date for the hearing.
Hinton was convicted largely on the strength of the eyewitness testimony of the surviving restaurant manager and expert testimony that bullets recovered from all three crime scenes had been fired by a pistol police found in Hinton's home.
Expertise in question:
A man hired by Hinton's trial attorney to counter state forensics experts testified the bullets could not be matched to the gun, but was discredited by the prosecution.
Prosecutors at the trial said retired engineer Andrew Payne was blind in one eye and had admitted he didn't know how to operate the microscope used to examine the bullets. In closing arguments the prosecutor called him "a one-eyed charlatan."
Since Hinton's conviction, three nationally known experts consulted by his new attorneys, including the former head of the FBI's firearms identification unit, said the six bullets cannot be matched definitively to any gun. They also said the .38 pistol in evidence was not mechanically capable of firing the bullets recovered from one of the shootings.
Lower courts rejected appeals on numerous grounds, but in a 14-page ruling released Friday, the state Supreme Court ruled that Payne's qualifications must be reconsidered. Seven of the court's justices concurred with the decision. Chief Justice Sue Bell Cobb recused herself without comment.