Sheffron, Lee & Associates

After almost 30 years on Alabama’s death row, Anthony Ray Hinton walked out of prison a free man on Friday, April 3, 2015.

Hinton, one of the longest serving inmates on Alabama's death row, was convicted of two murders in 1985 after his mother’s revolver was linked to killings that took place in the Birmingham area. In 2002, EJI attorneys brought in three of the country’s top firearms examiners, who testified that the revolver used to convict him could not be matched to the crime evidence. However, state prosecutors refused to re-examine the case.

Hinton is the third death-row inmate freed in the United States in less than a month. Since 1973, 151 people besides Hinton have been released from death row. And as the number of exonerees continues to grow, fundamental questions are being raised about potential flaws in the system.

“The fact that there’s innocent people in prison or death row has transformed people’s understanding of the death penalty,” University of North Carolina political scientist Frank Baumgartner, author of “The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence.” 

“Your opinion about the death penalty in the abstract is one thing, but meeting exonerees changes the death penalty from an abstract principle to a very practical issue of: Can the government do it right every single time?”

It is uncertain whether any innocent people may have been executed in the United States in the period since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, but work published by University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross suggests that 4 percent of death row inmates may be innocent, the Monitor reported. Meanwhile, the Death Penalty Information Center lists 10 people who were executed despite strong evidence of their innocence. And the EJI points out that for every 10 people executed in the United States, one innocent person has been exonerated

"I shouldn't have [sat] on death row for 30 years," Mr. Hinton told reporters Friday. "They had every intention of executing me for something I didn't do.""All they had to do was test the gun."