The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row: Summary & Key Insights

I was born in 1956 in Birmingham, Alabama, a place and time where a Black boy learned early that his worth was not guaranteed. My mother, Buhlar, taught me two invaluable things: to work hard and to love God even when the world wasn’t fair. We didn’t have much, but we had dignity. The world outside our home was built on segregation and suspicion, yet inside that small house, there was laughter, food cooked with care, and a deep belief that we could rise above what the world tried to make of us.

Growing up in the shadow of racial discrimination shaped me in ways I did not fully see until much later. The lessons of restraint my mother taught me—the insistence that anger wouldn’t save my soul—became the same lessons that later saved my sanity on death row. It was this foundation of faith and humor that prepared me, unknowingly, for the greatest test of my life.

In 1985, two restaurant managers in Birmingham were shot and killed, and fear coursed through the community. When police came for me, I thought there must be a mistake. They said a white man had committed the crimes, and yet here I was, a Black man who had been at work miles away when the murders occurred. But in Alabama then, being poor and Black was enough to make you guilty in the eyes of the law.

At the police station, Detective Doug Acker looked me in the eye and said something I will never forget: 'I don’t care whether you did or didn’t do it. You’re going to pay for it.' Those words were a death sentence spoken long before the trial began. I had an old revolver from my mother’s house, a weapon that hadn’t fired in 25 years, and yet the state’s expert claimed the bullets from the murders matched it perfectly. Later, that same gun would prove to be the key to my release—but in 1985, that lie was enough to take away my freedom.