For 30 years, Anthony Ray Hinton
was a dead man walking.
Thank you Jesus; thank you Lord!
Prosecution seemed deemed to take my life from me.
58 years old, Hinton lived more than half his life
inside a cage: Holman Correctional Facility in southern Alabama.
Today he's seeing and experiencing things
for the first time in decades.
Oh my goodness.
He is welcomed home;
a party in his honor hosted by the Equal Justice Initiative,
led by attorney Bryan Stevenson
and his team of attorneys who fought for decades to win Hinton's freedom.
Thank you for giving me my life back.
Just being here, as a team,
you can say that you got an innocent man off death row.
His nightmare began in 1985.
Ronald Reagan was President, Back to the Future was a box-office hit,
and under the cover of darkness, two Birmingham restaurant managers
were shot dead at closing time, just months apart.
A third victim, another man who survived the shooting,
and helped identify 29-year-old Anthony Ray Hinton as the killer.
You're a free man now, what does that mean to you?
It means everything.
I mean, you never think about your freedom until it’s taken away from you.
You couldn't put a price tag on it.
I got my twelve dollars back already.
So much about the world has changed, but the greatest still is the world without his mother.
She died while he was locked away.
It can't get no lower for me.
I'm not a ashamed of it, I'm proud of it -
that's the biggest love of my life.
He goes back to the home they shared together – now abandoned.
I kind of hate to see it in this shape.
It's his first time there since the night it was all taken away.
This is the room where Hinton’s his mother kept her .38 caliber revolver.
Police said it was the murder weapon.
Hinton's court-appointed public defender hired a supposed ballistics expert
to dispute the prosecution's claim about the murder weapon.
A persuasive expert he was not.
So his ballistics expert was blind.
In one eye – yes that's correct.
He had to ask how to turn on the machine,
he couldn't see it, he had to ask,
“somebody please help me.”
So when they put him on the stand as my witness,
they crucified him. I said, they’re gonna find me guilty.
Hinton was sentenced to death.
He was ordered to spend the remainder of his life in prison,
living inside a 5x7 cell.
You pretty much sleep in a fetal position,
because your feet hang over the bed.
You only have a bed that is mounted to the wall,
and a toilet – and that's what I lived in for 30 years.
They took my 30s, my 40s, my 50s,
but what they couldn't take was my joy.
I couldn't do a thing about the years,
but I could control my joy.
53 inmates were executed at Holman while Hinton was on death row.
My darkest memory would be seeing so many people that I got to know be executed.
He languished in prison for years
before his case reached appeals court.
I was – had never been so convinced of someone's innocence
than I had in Mr. Hinton's case.
Judge Sue Bell Cobb was one of those appellate court judges who believed his story.
There was no incriminating evidence.
He didn't have anything from the robbery,
there were no fingerprints.
This is extremely unusual.
His appeal was denied.
But his team kept fighting.
We'd exhausted every state court appeal
and it was the United States Supreme Court that finally intervened.
The result was a new trial – the break Hinton had been waiting for.
But just a few weeks ago,
the state of Alabama dropped the case
after a new look of the evidence could not match the bullets to the gun.
And Hinton was released.
Since I’ve been locked up for 30 years and finances are tight,
it's $5 a slice.
I don’t sense any bitterness – why’s that?
Bitterness kills the soul.
I cannot hate because my Bible teach me not to hate.
I've seen hate at its worst – what would it profit me to hate?
I want you to know there is a God.
He sits high but he looks low.
He will destroy but yet he will defend.
And he defended me.