The Sun Does Shine – Book Review

A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit.

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.

In 1985, Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested for a series of burglaries and murders which he did not actually commit. In the state of Alabama, he was given the death row and Hinton spent the next years on death row at Holman Correctional Facility. For three years, he remained silent, anger at the unfair and injustice, and watching his fellow inmates, being taken to the death chamber, i.e. the electric chair, known among inmates as Yellow Mama. Hinton started spreading hope, encouragement among the death row inmates, even winning over the prison guards, never giving up hopes that someday, he would be set free as he was innocent.

This was an emotional story and the fact that this was a true story based on Hinton’s own life makes it more emotional and heartbreaking. It amazes me of how much Hinton suffered injustice at the hands of the Alabama’s law–the judges, the prosecutors and so forth. Even there were evidences that Hinton was innocent, Alabama state refuses to released Hinton. Regardless, Hinton never gave up hope, believing in God and of course, Bryan Stevenson, eventually helped him to finally release Hinton from prison in 2015. This was a truly an emotional read to me.

If you are looking for a good non fiction, check this book out. Worth five stars!