What Can Lawyers Do to Truly Uphold the Constitution?

On April 3, 2015, Anthony Ray Hinton was freed from prison, having spent 30 years on death row for murders he did not commit. The two victims were managers of two fast food restaurants in Birmingham, Ala., and were murdered during the course of robberies. There were no eyewitnesses to the murders. There was no fingerprint evidence. A third robbery occurred, and the manager identified Mr. Hinton in a lineup, even though during the time of that crime, Mr. Hinton was at work. Mr. Hinton had no money to defend himself against a prosecutor who believed he was guilty because he “looked evil.”

At 29 years old, Mr. Hinton had never committed a violent crime, and now he sat on death row.

Attorneys from the Equal Justice Initiative ultimately were able to exonerate Mr. Hinton based on evidence that bullets from the three robberies could not be matched to a single gun, let alone the one owned by Mr. Hinton’s mother that the State claimed Mr. Hinton used in the murders.¹

We will all have the privilege of hearing Anthony Ray Hinton tell his story on the first night of the Bench and Bar conference this year (on his birthday, no less!). In the meantime, I encourage all of you to read his New York Times Bestseller, The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life, Freedom, and Justice.

“I do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States…” – a promise every licensed attorney has made in our country. I watched a captivating panel that the American Bar Association put on related to this topic. At the end of the panel, each of the panelists was asked a pointed question about what non-Civil Rights attorneys can do to uphold their oath to support the Constitution. Nobody could answer the question directly. And as I sat in that moment reflecting on my own contributions, or lack thereof, I discovered that I did not know how to answer the question, either.

How can it be that each and every lawyer in this country has taken an oath to support the Constitution, but each and every lawyer cannot answer the question of what we can do to accomplish it? As you know if you attended Law Day, I intend to focus my time as President exploring this oath. What does it mean? Why is it important? How can an attorney in a seemingly unrelated field stay true to his or her oath to support the Constitution?

I hope you will all join me in this endeavor, which will kick off at the Bench and Bar conference with our guest speaker Anthony Ray Hinton and will be followed by plenary sessions that will inspire you to action – no matter what area of law you practice. Do not worry, we will have some fun, too.

¹ See https://eji.org/cases/anthony-ray-hinton/ for information found in this column, and more.