Book Review: Maybe is should be the ‘criminal injustice’ system

Anthony Ray Hinton wasn’t a name I knew before reading his story that he wrote with Lara Love Hardin: The Sun Does Rise: How I Found Life , Freedom and Justice (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2018).

He was arrested in 1985, sent to death row for murder, then released in 2015 when the court system finally realized they had the wrong man.

Look at those dates. This is modern America. This is life today.

Broken doesn’t even begin to describe the justice system. Racist, discriminatory, rigged against poor people, against Black people. The true crime is how corrupt the system is.

You know what happened to Hinton is still happening. That this injustice is systemic.

Why aren’t people who are abusing the system paying for their crimes?

Hinton lays it out for all of us to learn about the process that landed him behind bars for decades for crimes he did not commit. He doesn’t hold back on his feelings, his descriptions of life, despair, belief, hope, pain and a whole gamut of emotions.

While the subject matter is gritty, the book is also full of hope. It has to be for a man to keep wanting to prove his innocence, to have the truth be told.

Sometimes I think we should read (or listen as I did with this book) to stories that make us think about topics that aren’t necessarily top of mind or in our wheel-house, so to speak. For me, this was one of those books.

It underlined how and why I’m against the death penalty.

Social and criminal justice should matter to all of this, and that’s what this book is all about.