Anthony Ray Hinton Quotes

What becomes a crime deserving capital punishment when the tables are turned is a matter of small moment when the negro woman is the accusing party.

To the average white man, a courthouse even in Mississippi is a place where justice is dispensed. To me, the black man, it is a place where justice is dispensed with.

Sometimes our tunnel vision is limited to what we see outside our window. Until racial injustice becomes personal then I don't think it moves us in our gut.

Trayvon Martin did not need to die.

I represented a man on death row whose lawyers had spent all of eight hours looking into his claim of innocence. I met men whose lawyers had never looked into their backgrounds.

My first job out of law school was representing people on death row in North Carolina, where I often saw the impact of hasty prosecutions.

It is an insult for me to have been alive through the times you are calling the so-called civil rights movement. I don't celebrate my humiliations and my insults.

What kind of system do we have when innocent people can sit on death row for 30 years?

My only crime was being born black - or being born black in Alabama.

I spent 30 years on Alabama's death row for a crime I did not commit.

I was put on death row because of hate.

Racism is what acquitted O. J. Simpson.

When you're poor and black in America, you stand a greater chance of going to prison for something you didn't do.

When we look at our justice system, we have this image of a balancing scale: truth and justice, right and wrong. But for years, our system has been lopsided, where it's not about truth and justice or balance. It's about being tough on crime, and sometimes that means you're putting the wrong person behind bars.

The death penalty has been one of many examples where racial discrimination has played out. You can see it in the simple fact that someone convicted of the same crime is more likely to face the death penalty if they are black.

When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men I say that intelligence has never saved anyone: and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men.

I think that America certainly has racism, I think that any industrialized country does. But when you see how many million fans Barack Obama has who are not black, it would lead one to the conclusion that millions of Americans are in fact not burdened by the albatross of racism.

It is this third consequence that has been elaborated in greatest detail and has formed one of the most significant pillars of historical capitalism, institutional racism.

The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.

But I really think it's a very unfortunate part of our judicial system and I would feel much, much better if more states would really consider whether they think the benefits outweigh the very serious potential injustice, because in these cases the emotions are very, very high on both sides and to have stakes as high as you do in these cases, there is a special potential for error. We cannot ignore the fact that in recent years a disturbing number of inmates on death row have been exonerated.

When one in three Black men are in prison, those larger systemic injustices become a part of what it means to love our neighbor as ourself. We care about dismantling institutional racism. That begins in relationships when you see injustice happen.

I think this country would be much better off if we did not have capital punishment.... We cannot ignore the fact that in recent years a disturbing number of inmates on death row have been exonerated.

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn't as good as a white child.

The white man is a devil. If he is not a devil, let him prove it!