You don’t have to be locked up to occupy your mind and your days trying to rewrite a painful past or undo a terrible tragedy or make right a horrible wrong. Replay the horrific moments of our lives and reimagine them by going left instead of right, being this person instead of that person, making different choices. Or married that girl when you had the chance. Or if you had gotten that baseball scholarship. To imagine what might have happened if you had run when they came chasing you. When you are forced to live out your life in a room the size of a bathroom-a room that’s five feet wide by seven feet long-you have plenty of time to replay the moments of your life. Did my life change forever the day I was arrested? Or did the life-changing moment happen even earlier? Was that day just the culmination of a whole series of fateful moments, poor choices, and bad luck? Or was the course of my life determined by being black and poor and growing up in a South that didn’t always care to be civil in the wake of civil rights? It’s hard to say. And trust me when I tell you that you never, ever see it coming. You can only begin to know that moment by looking in the rearview mirror. There’s no way to know the exact second your life changes forever. But more so than the evidence, I have never had as strong a feeling in trying any other case that the defendant just radiated guilt and pure evil as much as in the Hinton trial.
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