Biography
Tommy Lee Hines was a 25-year-old Black man with a severe intellectual disability — an IQ of about 39, described by doctors as having the mind of a young child — living in Decatur, Alabama, when in 1978 he was charged with the rape and robbery of three white women. Picked up for loitering on May 23, 1978, he was within hours accused of the three assaults; though illiterate, he was confronted with a written "confession" that was later used against him.
His prosecution became one of the most explosive civil-rights confrontations of the late 1970s. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference led large marches in Decatur and — after the trial was moved — in Cullman, met by Ku Klux Klan counter-demonstrations; during a 1979 Decatur march, gunfire wounded two Black marchers and two Klansmen. An all-white jury convicted Hines in October 1978 and he was sentenced to 30 years, and he was held at the Kilby Correctional Facility. In 1980 the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the conviction (Hines v. State); a court ordered a competency hearing, and Hines was committed to a state mental hospital rather than retried.
