Bestselling author, activist, and former death row inmate Anthony Ray Hinton — who was exonerated after spending 30 years on Alabama’s death row for a crime he did not commit — spoke at Utah Valley University (UVU) on Jan. 19 as a keynote speaker for the 29th Annual MLK Commemoration Week.

Mr. Hinton was wrongfully convicted for the murders of two fast-food managers in Birmingham, Alabama in 1985. He recounted the experiences that led to him becoming the longest-serving inmate on death row and subsequently being released in 2015.

“The state of Alabama didn’t need any evidence,” he said. “The state of Alabama had the most strongest evidence that one could have in the judicial system in America. You see, I was born Black and poor.”

Hinton was sentenced to death based solely on the assertion that the revolver taken from his mother’s home was the gun used in both murders.

“When I got to death row, I had made up my mind that I was not going to communicate with no other human being,” Hinton said. “I was angry. I was heartbroken, you see, because I had bought into this system, that the system was fair. I had believed that you don’t go to jail unless you had committed some type of crime.”

Mr. Hinton recounted his and lawyer and Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson’s decades-long legal battle to get his conviction overturned.

“I told [Mr. Stevenson] that I wanted him to give the state of Alabama all the hell that he could give them,” Hinton recalled. “We fought the state. The state refused to overturn my conviction. And finally, we [brought] my case to the United States Supreme Court. Two years after, something [happened] that hadn’t ever been done in the history of the courts: All nine justices ruled in my favor that I was entitled to a new trial.”

On April 3, 2015, Mr. Hinton was released from prison after the state overturned his conviction and dropped all charges against him. He went on to speak about the injustices prevalent in the American judicial system.

“I came here today to tell you that the system is not broken,” he said. “The system is working exactly the way it was designed to work. I believe that America needs to have an open and honest conversation about race.”

Mr. Hinton was the second of two keynote speakers that addressed the campus community on Jan. 19 during MLK Commemoration Week. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, “The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row.”

View the recorded livestream of Anthony Ray Hinton’s keynote speech.