PENALTY

However, subsequent re-examination by several of the country’s leading
forensic pathologists found Peretti’s testimony to be completely
wrong. Each of these experts, evaluating the evidence independently,
concluded that the injuries suffered by the victims were caused by
post-mortem animal predation rather than by a knife. Thus, the injuries
with the alleged serrated-knife patterns and the emasculation of
one victim were caused by animals attacking the young boys’ bodies
in their watery grave, not by a knife used as part of a satanic ritual
killing. The unanimity of these experts is as striking as their findings,
which leave no room for doubt that the forensic arguments used to
convict the West Memphis Three and to sentence Damien Echols to
death were wholly unfounded.
How could the state’s forensic pathologist have been so wrong? Peretti
had failed the board examination for forensic pathologists twice,
yet Arkansas law permitted him to keep his state job. Arkansas law,
like that in many states, provided little funding for criminal defence
attorneys to hire their own experts in court-appointed criminal cases.
So the system enabled a weakly (if at all) qualified expert with the
imprimatur of a state title to impress the jury more than whatever the
defence could come up with on a limited budget.
Everyone recognizes that money can make a difference in the effectiveness
of a criminal defence, but the West Memphis Three case
provides a particularly dramatic example of the human tragedy that
can result. At trial with limited resources, Damien Echols was unable
to effectively counter the state forensic pathologist’s evidence that
a knife had been used to commit the murders. After the trial, with
the financing of numerous well-to-do supporters, Echols was able to
retain the world’s best forensic pathologists to testify, in unison, that
the state’s expert was completely wrong and that no knife had been
used in the crimes. The case for adequate defence funding in criminal
justice systems around the world could hardly be made more clear. It
can literally be a matter of life and death.
THE PRISON INFORMANT
In another of the trial’s dramatic moments, the prosecutors called
inmate Michael Carson to the stand to recount statements allegedly
made to him by Jason Baldwin about the murders while the two
men were briefly incarcerated together. Carson said that Baldwin had
told him about sucking blood from a victim, which is what Griffis
relied on for the blood-related element of his conclusion that the
crime had an occult aspect. Griffis conceded on cross-examination
that if Michael Carson’s testimony was false, then there was no other
evidence in the case to connect Baldwin to the occult.
Although the jury accepted Carson’s testimony as credible, it too
turned out to be false on later re-examination. Prison informants
make notoriously unreliable witnesses, as Brandon Garrett’s landmark
book Convicting the Innocent makes clear. 3 Carson proved to be even
more unreliable than most. As Carson himself explained in the movie
West of Memphis, 4 he was a heavy drug user at the time of his testimony,
could not distinguish between reality and fantasy, and had no
idea what he was doing or why. To this day, Carson is not certain
whether Baldwin ever made the statements he testified about at trial,
and he has publicly apologized to Baldwin.
FEAR AND PREJUDICE
Like Salem, Massachusetts, during the witch hysteria of the late
1600s and New York City in the 1980s at the time of the Central
Park jogger’s brutal beating and rape (for which five defendants were
wrongfully convicted), rural Arkansas was terrified by the West Memphis
murders. Who could possibly have committed such unthinkably
heinous acts? Adding allegations of satanic activity with ritualistic
knife murders and the drinking of blood into the investigation of
these murders was like tossing a Molotov cocktail of prejudice into
the mix. Who could be impartial, dispassionate and analytical, who
would not be afraid in the face of such a panoply of evil? Due process
disappears when such fear and prejudice creep into the system to
warp people’s judgment.
Regrettably, fear and prejudice did not merely creep into the West
Memphis Three case—they were injected into the case by prosecutors
3 Brandon Garrett, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011).
4 Amy Berg (director), West of Memphis (Sony Pictures Classics, 2012).
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