The Death Penalty Theme Analysis

Along with exposing bias in the criminal justice system, Anthony Ray Hinton also uses The Sun Does Shine to explore the issue of the death penalty, which was legal in 32 states as of the book’s publication in 2018. Ray examines the death penalty from a moral perspective, illustrating how it is wrong to take a life for a life. Furthermore, he illustrates through his own wrongful conviction that the death penalty does not always carry out justice—and he also recognizes that even those who are guilty of the crimes for which they’ve been sentenced are still human beings who do not deserve to die. In examining the death penalty’s flaws and its questionable morality, Ray explicitly argues that death penalty should be abolished.

Ray uses the fact that he could have been killed, despite being innocent, to illustrate the inherent flaws of the death penalty. Ray understands that the death penalty is a punishment for people guilty of the worst crimes. But he uses his own case—in which he was wrongfully convicted of two murder-robberies and another attempted murder—to prove that “the system didn’t know who was guilty,” and that the death penalty could easily be used to murder innocent men like him. Ray references arguments from his lawyer Bryan Stevenson, who writes that “With 34 executions and seven exonerations since 1975, one innocent person has been identified on Alabama’s Death Row for every five executions. It’s an astonishing rate of error.” This statement argues that the death penalty’s errors are high enough that the punishment is not worth preserving in the law. Ray concludes definitively, “Until we have a way of ensuring that innocent men are never executed—until we account for the racism in our courts, in our prisons, and in our sentencing—the death penalty should be abolished.” In this way, Ray also ties the death penalty to the problem of the U.S.’s discriminatory criminal justice system. He makes the case that, until the court system can guard against discrimination, the death penalty should not be used, since the punishment can be doled out based on a biased system.

Ray also approaches the issue from a moral perspective, suggesting that the death penalty is just as immoral as any other kind of murder. Ray reasons that no killing is justified by the law—a statement that also applies to the death penalty. He explains, “Man didn’t have the right to take a life. The State didn’t have the right to take a life either.” In suggesting that killing is wrong in all cases, Ray argues governments shouldn’t be able to carry out that kind of punishment. Ray also uses his faith to argue against the morality of the death penalty. He asserts that “Life [is] a gift given by God. I believe[] it should and could only be taken by God as well.” This statement alludes to one of the Bible’s Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13), implying that people should not kill others as Ray states. In alluding to the Bible, Ray uses Judeo-Christian morality to illustrate his stance that while God has the right to take lives, people and governments do not. In addition, Ray refutes the death penalty using other logical arguments. He writes that “When you took a life, it didn’t bring back a life. It didn’t undo what was done” and later, “death has never deterred death.” In both cases, Ray undermines other common justifications for the death penalty by arguing that it neither remedies murders that have already been committed, nor does it prevent future murders from happening.

Lastly, Ray demonstrates that all lives are worthwhile, even the lives of those who are guilty on death row—and thus, no one should be put to death for their crimes. Ray recognizes that although he is innocent, not all of the men on death row are. However, he illustrates that they, too, can be redeemable. For instance, Ray (who’s Black) befriends a man named Henry Hays, a former Ku Klux Klan member who lynched a young Black man in 1981. Ray explains that, despite Henry’s crime, he carries no animosity toward Henry, who has since understood the racist hatred he was taught growing up. Ray notes, “No one is undeserving of their own life or their own potential to change,” illustrating that even those whom the outside world considers horrific criminals have the capacity to show remorse and find redemption. Ray broadly applies this idea to all death row inmates, arguing that the inmates are “Not monsters. Not the worst thing we had ever done. We were so much more than what we had been reduced to.” By using the word “we”—even though Ray himself has not committed a capital offense—he reminds the reader that the other inmates are human beings just like he is and are therefore worthy of life.

In the book’s final pages, Ray lists each of the 2,813 names of the men and women who are on death row in the U.S. as of November 2018. He writes, “Statistically, one out of every ten people on this list is innocent,” which amounts to 281 people. He argues that if one in 10 planes crashed, society would stop flights and reform the planes—and it must do so with the death penalty. Ending the book in this way highlights the scale and stakes of the issue, driving home Ray’s belief that “it’s time we put a stop to the death penalty.”