PENALTY

Then we were allowed to appeal to the Arkansas Supreme Court, and
by that time public awareness and interest in the case had been building.
There’d been documentaries, books, and countless newspaper
and magazine articles and TV shows. So the Arkansas Supreme Court
justices knew they were being watched. In the end, the only thing
they really cared about was winning the next election. So they ruled
that all of the new evidence would be heard, and the prosecutors
realized that meant there was going to be another trial.
So a deal was hammered out—an Alford Plea. What an Alford Plea
means is that I plead guilty, and I walk out of the courtroom, and I
can still publicly maintain my innocence, but I can’t sue the state.
People have asked me what I was thinking about the day that I went
into court knowing that I could very well go home that day. And the
truth is, I wasn’t thinking anything. By that time I was so tired and
beat down that all I wanted to do was rest. I was dying. My health was
deteriorating rapidly. I was losing my eyesight. I knew I wasn’t going
to make it much longer.
The prosecutor said that one of the factors in his making this deal
was the fact that the three of us together could have collectively sued
the state for $60 million. I knew they could have had me stabbed to
death for $50 any day of the week. It happens in prison all the time.
So I knew if I didn’t take that deal, one way or another I would never
live to see the outside of those prison walls. So I took it.
I’ve been out of prison now for almost two years. I lived in terror
every single day for the first year or so, but it’s getting better. I’m still
scared sometimes, but I’m trying to fight my way through it. And I
know that I will eventually be free from fear and anxiety. I’ll do it, and
I’ll be free, because if there’s one thing that I learned from 18 years in
prison, it was how to fight.
DAMIEN ECHOLS AND THE WEST
MEMPHIS THREE CASE: A SEARCH
FOR MOTIVE RUN AMOK
Stephen L. Braga 1
On a beautiful spring afternoon in 1993, three young boys disappeared
from their neighbourhood in West Memphis, Arkansas,
around dinnertime. The next day their bodies were found, naked,
bound and in horrific condition, submerged in a creek in the
woods. Fear and panic quickly swept through the community, along
with rumours about the murders, including that a satanic cult was
to blame.
Shortly thereafter, three local teenagers—Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin
and Jessie Misskelley—were charged with the murders. Echols’s
own lawyer called him the “weird” kid in town because of the way
he dressed and acted, which—along with his first name—played
right into the sensational nature of the allegations. Agreements were
reached to film the teenagers’ trials and surrounding circumstances
for a documentary, with defence lawyers, prosecutors and even the
victims’ families playing leading roles. Less than a year later, the three
teenagers were convicted in two separate trials. Baldwin and Misskelley
were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole;
Echols was sentenced to death by lethal injection.
Questions arose almost immediately about the validity of the teenagers’
convictions. The evidence seemed thin, and the alleged motive
was almost impossible to believe. Public release of the documentary
Paradise Lost spread those questions worldwide. Journalists, researchers,
supporters and new counsel for the three teenagers began to
re-examine every aspect of the case. What they found was deeply
disturbing at every level, but perhaps nothing was more troubling
than the facts surrounding the prosecution’s purported proof of the
alleged motive for the murders.
1 Stephen Braga is a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and counsel for
Damien Echols, whose essay also appears in this volume.
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