Amy Berg’s new documentary is the fourth film to be made about an outrageous miscarriage of justice imposed on three teenage boys known as the ‘West Memphis Three’. Ms Berg had the added bonus that her predecessors lacked with the fact that her movie was produced by Sir Peter Jackson (the Oscar winning director ‘The Lord of The Rings Trilogy’) who with his screenwriter wife Fran Walsh had been personally underwriting the crusade to free the young men for some years.
The story starts in 1993 when the naked bodies of three young boys were found bound, mutilated and drowned in a drainage ditch in West Memphis. With very little evidence to go on and with the public outcry demanding an arrest, the police very quickly charged three local youths Damien Echols, Jessie Miskelly and Jason Baldwin. Miskelly was mentally retarded so the police ‘coached’ a confession out of him that implicated all of them to the murders. For a motive, they decided that as Echols dressed like a Goth and listened to heavy metal music, he was part of a Satanist Cult and hence the mutilations.
With no other evidence to go on and the Prosecution carefully avoiding relevant facts including the information that all three had solid alibis, they were convicted. Echols was given the death penalty and the two others, sentences of life imprisonment.
In 1996 after ‘Paradise Lost’ the first film of their story was released, Echols received a letter from Lorri Davis a landscape architect from New York. She was a successful well-educated middle class woman, recently divorced and 12 years older than him, but something gelled between the two. They eventually fell in love and married and she gave up her comfortable life to move to Arkansas and becoming the driving force behind the movement to get her husband and his two friends freed.
They found experts who blew holes in the testimony of the forensic pathologist that proved that the marks on the boys body were not inflicted by satanic rituals but by the animals in the drainage ditch. They established that the DNA found at the murder scene was not from any of them at all, but actually that of one of the victim’s stepfathers.
With this and other new evidence such as statements from witnesses who had come forward to confess they had lied at the Trial to help the prosecution insure a conviction, they went for an Appeal. Under Arkansas Law this is conducted by the same Judge who had been in charge of the original Trial, and he simply refused to consider any of the new evidence at all, and brusquely dismissed the Appeal. As Echols commented at the time ‘poor white trash’ like him could never expect justice, but in this instance it was much more about the authorities saving face from what was obviously now being exposed as a very shabby investigation and prosecution, and a Judge not wanting to taint his pubic reputation when he was up for re-election.
Besides Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, Davis recruited the support of the likes of Johnny Depp, the Dixie Chicks and Henry Rollins etc who not only raised public awareness but funded the very thorough private investigation that Jackson insisted on as the Police had failed to do one properly. It not only proved the men’s total innocence but clearly showed, without a shadow of doubt, that Terry Hobbs the stepfather of one of the victims, was the real murderer.
The last option open to the men and the impressive array of lawyers that were now assisting them, was the State Supreme Court. And this was the very first battle they won. After their victory it was obvious that their original convictions were unsustainable but they still had to wait the best part of a year before a solution could be found. Rather than mount a re-trial the (elected) Prosecutors overly concerned with the political ramifications from the voters if they simply released the men, concocted a deal called a ‘Alford Plea’ where they had to plead guilty in Court even though they could express their innocence at the same time. It meant that the men could walk free, that they couldn’t sue the State for wrongful imprisonment , and that the Prosecution wouldn’t need to investigate and/or charge Terry Hobbs as the guilty pleas would automatically close the Case.
I must tell you that after two hours of watching this riveting story that has been told in such a compelling fashion, your indignation turns to sheer anger. The fact that the State thought it more important to protect itself than the rights of the defendants is indefensible.
★★★★★★★★★★
