Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three (33 page)

Attorney Stidham argued in Jessie’s appeal, as he had at Jessie’s trial, that the confession had been involuntary. The justices acknowledged that “the age, education and intelligence of the accused” were “factors to be considered” in determining the validity of a confession. They also recognized that a confession made while a subject is in the custody of police “is presumed involuntary” and that “the burden is on the state to show that the confession is voluntarily made.” Despite those requirements, however, the chief justice wrote that the entire court had found that Jessie’s confession had been voluntary.

Nor was the high court swayed by Stidham’s pleas regarding Jessie’s age and mental capacity. “Persons younger than he have been held capable of giving voluntary confessions,” the chief justice noted. Furthermore, he added, “A low score on an intelligence quotient test does not mean that a suspect is incapable of voluntarily making a confession or waiving his rights.”
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The high court also agreed with Judge Burnett’s decision that the techniques used by Inspector Gitchell and Detective Ridge—the circle diagram, the polygraph, the picture of the victim, and the tape recording of Aaron Hutcheson’s voice—had not been overbearing. Though they acknowledged that “the boy’s voice gives us pause” and that this type of tactic “comes perilously close to psychological overbearing,” the justices concluded that “in this instance, since numerous other factors point to the voluntariness of the confession, we will not invalidate the confession.”

But none of those conclusions constituted the most controversial part of the opinion. The part that would reverberate through the Arkansas justice system for years to come centered on Jessie’s status as a minor and the fact that detectives had failed to have a parent sign his waiver of rights. The issue was particularly troubling in Jessie’s case because, as the high court noted, “At the time the appellant signed his waiver, [Arkansas law] provided that a juvenile’s waiver form must be signed by a parent, guardian, or custodian.”
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Despite the law’s apparent clarity, the high court nevertheless concluded that it did not apply in Jessie’s case. That was, the chief justice wrote, because at the time Jessie was questioned, the State Supreme Court had already ruled “that, when a person under age eighteen
is charged as an adult
in circuit court, failure to obtain a parent’s signature on a waiver form does not render a confession inadmissible….” In that opinion, the court ruled that “when a juvenile is charged as an adult, he becomes subject to the procedures applicable to adults. Therefore, the requirement of parental consent is limited to juvenile court proceedings.”
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To Stidham, the ruling was both maddening and absurd. It meant, he argued, that a minor charged with a relatively light offense, such as throwing a rock through a window, could not sign away his constitutional rights without a parent also signing the form with him—yet a juvenile charged with a serious crime, for which he might receive a sentence of life in prison or even death, did not get that protection.

Stidham continued to attack the validity of Jessie’s confession based on the detectives’ failure to record his entire confession. But the high court dealt easily with that, noting that “no Arkansas law requires this.”
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Stidham’s final points were even more easily dismissed. The high court supported all of Burnett’s decisions, including the one to admit into evidence items such as “a picture of Jason Baldwin wearing a black t-shirt with a skull and the name of the group Metallica on it; testimony of a witness that she attended a cult meeting with the appellant and Echols”; and “a book on witchcraft found in Echols’s home”—items that Stidham claimed were irrelevant and prejudicial. To the contrary, the high court reasoned, all of the items were relevant because they served to corroborate aspects of Jessie’s confession. And, “With the confession being the state’s only meaningful evidence against the appellant, any corroboration was highly probative.”

Finally, the court addressed Stidham’s contention that Jessie should have been granted a new trial when, during Damien and Jason’s trial, the associate medical examiner, Dr. Peretti, changed his testimony to a time of death that contradicted Jessie’s confession. The high court dismissed this as well, noting that the jury in Jessie’s case would probably have found Jessie guilty anyway, even if it had heard Peretti’s estimate that the time of death was probably well after midnight.
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It took the Arkansas Supreme Court a bit longer to address the forty-four points raised by attorneys in Damien’s and Jason’s direct appeals. The opinion, which the justices handed down two days before Christmas in 1996, was ninety-three pages long, the lengthiest in the court’s recent history. And the ruling’s effect was equally sweeping. On every point the defense lawyers raised, the justices unanimously found that the trial had been fair and that Judge Burnett had made no errors.
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The Supreme Court concluded that although the evidence was circumstantial, it had been sufficient to support the verdicts. In explaining the court’s decision, the high court referred frequently to the state’s theory that the killings had occurred as part of a satanic ritual. “On cross-examination,” the opinion said,

Regarding the state’s theory of motive, the Supreme Court had this to say:

The high court ruled that all of this constituted “substantial evidence” of Damien’s guilt. As for the substantial evidence against Jason, the justices cited only Michael Carson’s testimony that Jason told him he had “dismembered the kids.” The court labored a bit longer over arguments that the trials should have been severed. But in the end the justices concluded that “almost all of the factors” they considered “clearly” weighed in favor of a joint trial.
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Similarly, the court had little trouble approving the extraordinary nighttime search; the fact that the West Memphis magistrate who’d issued the search warrants had also instructed police in how to prepare the affidavit; and the vagueness of warrants authorizing police to search for “blue, green, red, black, and purple fibers” and “cult or Satanic materials.” The high court did deal at some length with arguments concerning the admission of evidence regarding the occult. But ultimately, all of those arguments were rejected as well. Relying heavily on the testimony of Griffis, the high court ruled that Judge Burnett’s decision to qualify Griffis as an expert had not been error; that allowing Griffis to testify had not been error; that Judge Burnett’s ruling admitting the dog’s skull, heavy metal music posters, and books Damien had read into evidence had not been error; and that there was no problem with Judge Burnett’s ruling allowing Jerry Driver to testify that he’d seen Damien, Jason, and Jessie walking together six months before the murders, carrying “long sticks or staffs.”
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The Supreme Court also rejected arguments that Judge Burnett should have required Christopher Morgan to take the stand, even if he had invoked the Fifth Amendment for every question he was asked. The justices ruled that the trial judge had the discretion to decide whether Morgan should testify or not. Since they found no “manifest abuse” of that discretion, they declined to second-guess Burnett’s decision.

And so it went. The high court approved of Burnett’s decisions to admit as evidence the sticks found in the woods months after the killings and the knife taken from the lake, based on Dr. Peretti’s testimony that wounds to the victims “were consistent” with injuries that might have been caused by such objects. Similarly, the high court supported Fogleman’s demonstration in front of the jury with the knives cutting the grapefruit. And it found no problem with the fact that, even now, two years after the trials, none of the court-appointed defense lawyers had been paid.
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Though the opinion was exceptionally long, its bottom line was simple: the convictions would stand. The only avenue of appeal left to the defendants now, in the state of Arkansas, was for them to claim that their lawyers had been grossly inadequate. But no court would appoint someone to do that, and all three of the inmates were indigent.

Paradise Lost

At a point when it appeared that Damien, Jason, and Jessie might slip into obscurity, Sinofsky and Berlinger, the filmmakers who’d recorded the trials, released their documentary.
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills
premiered in 1996 and created an immediate sensation. Against a sound track by Metallica, the documentary showed gritty scenes of West Memphis and the families involved in the case, on the sides of both the victims and the defendants. Images of poverty, grief, and anger played against the formality of courtroom proceedings. Interviews with Damien, Jason, and Jessie in jail were interlaced with comments from the victims’ families, and long segments in which John Mark Byers railed against the accused. The film aired on HBO. Its directors never offered a conclusion, beyond the actuality of the convictions, but thousands of viewers—and most reviewers—found the film and its contents shocking.
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Many viewers in Arkansas were dismayed by the image of their state presented in the film—and by the way reviewers focused on the small-town mentality that they generally assumed had given rise to the verdicts. Michael Atkinson wrote in
Spin
magazine that West Memphis was “the kind of dreary hellhole that America is sick in the blood with.” Robin Dougherty observed in the
Miami Herald
that Damien’s “wardrobe and his page-boy-gone-bad haircut wouldn’t get a second look at South Beach.” Roger Ebert focused on the prosecutors’ explanation of motive. “Oh, it’s a great film,” Ebert said, “and one of the things it points out is the need, the real need to create the idea of Satanic rituals in order to explain crimes, because it’s not enough that there could be a sick deviate out there who would kill these boys…. But everybody in the town and in the courtroom and on the jury are all blinded by their fantasies about Satanic cults, and they can’t listen to reason.”

Many filmgoers assumed that since release of the documentary, all three defendants had appealed, and that if the problems revealed in the film were real, they were now being corrected and the teenagers would soon walk free. But three friends in Los Angeles—writer Burk Sauls, graphic artist Kathy Bakken, and photographer Grove Pashley—were not content to assume. They wanted to know more about what had happened in the case, but found it hard to get information. Sauls later explained that after seeing the documentary, “I felt like I’d missed that part where they show why they thought these teenagers were responsible for the murders.” Bakken was equally perplexed. “I felt like I was hanging,” she said. “It was a horrible feeling. I hoped that something was going on, but just to make sure, I wrote to the lawyers and what I found out was that the guys were still languishing in prison.”

In October 1996, the three traveled to Arkansas, trekked through the woods where the bodies were found, drove to three different prisons, and met with Damien, Jason, and Jessie. They also met with Jessie’s lawyer Dan Stidham, the only one of the defense attorneys still committed to proving his client’s innocence. As they later recalled, they found “not a single thing” that supported the idea that the three teenagers had committed the murders. Equally troubling was the sense that “no one was out there helping them, and they had just been abandoned.”

The three began to view what happened in West Memphis as amodern-day version of the infamous Salem witch trials, in which rumors and hysteria had supplanted reason, and resulted in executions. As they often later explained, they also became convinced that just as an uncritical media had promulgated the view of the defendants as evil, a forum for a more rational discussion of what had actually taken place might introduce some of the objectivity that only the passage of time had been able to bring to Salem—in that case, many years too late for the unjustly convicted.
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