Tag: Damien Echols

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West Memphis Three Team Takes Evidence Case to Arkansas Supreme Court

Recent images of Jason Baldwin (left) and Damien Echols (right). Credit: Charles Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols both via Twitter.

Damien Echols, a host of attorneys, and two advocacy groups have appealed to the Arkansas Supreme Court to allow for testing of evidence in the West Memphis Three (WM3) case. 

The West Memphis Three includes Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley. The three were arrested and convicted in the ’90s as teenagers in West Memphis, Arkansas, for the murders of three young boys — Steve Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore. The WM3 were released in 2011 with an Alford plea, a guilty plea that allowed them to go free and maintain their innocence. 

Since then, Echols and a legal team have been searching for who they say are rightfully responsible for the murders. A year after their release, for example, the group offered a $200,000 reward for any new information that might lead to the real killer or killers. 

In 2020, Echols and his attorney secured the release of evidence in the case for testing. They wanted to use a new technology, the M-Vac DNA system, that was not available at the time of the original crime to probe for new evidence.

In December 2021, Echols’ attorney Patrick Benca of Little Rock visited the West Memphis Police Department and found that all of the evidence — once rumored to have been destroyed in a fire — was all there and intact. 

This included the target of that new testing, the young boys’ shoelaces that had been used to tie their arms and legs. It also included the victims’ shoes, socks, Boy Scouts cap, shirts, pants, and underwear, and the sticks used to hold the clothing underwater. The team had even chosen a lab to perform the testing, Pure Gold Forensics in California.

However, officials changed their minds on releasing the evidence. Through a series of legal challenges since then, Arkansas officials have continued to block Echols’ access to the evidence.      

In January, Echols’ team of lawyers appealed to the Arkansas Supreme Court for the right to the evidence. National advocacy groups, The Innocence Project and The Center on Wrongful Convictions, filed motions friendly to Echols’ cause in the matter.   

They are fighting a number of legal arguments made by Arkansas officials that claim Echols did not file previous suits in the right courts, that he does not have the right to see the evidence because he is not in prison, and more. 

But Echols’ teams says the testing is, fundamentally, about public safety.  

“After all, if innocent persons have been wrongfully convicted, then the guilty persons have obviously not been convicted,” reads the January appeal. “Take this case for example. If, as they have steadfastly maintained for almost three decades now, the WM3 did not commit these murders, then the person(s) who did so remains in the community — murderers at large, putting us all at risk.”

However, Dylan Jacobs, the deputy solicitor general in the Arkansas attorney general’s office, said in a May brief that Echols should not have this right, arguing Echols has already used up plenty of the state’s time and resources. 

“Yet over a decade after his release, Echols now seeks to further waste judicial resources to challenge the conviction he negotiated for,” Jacobs wrote. “He should not be allowed to. The [Arkansas] General Assembly made post-conviction DNA testing available to set free innocent prisoners, not recenter the limelight on freed felons.”

For the last part, at least, Echols’ attorney said in a late-May rebuttal that “nothing could be further from the truth.” The timing of the new petition, he said, was based on new technology, not on “the state’s hypothesized interests.”

That brief ends with a pointed conclusion. 

“It is evident from the state’s brief how bitterly the Attorney General’s Office feels toward Echols,” it reads. “But how would it feel if new DNA testing identified an individual other than Echols as the perpetrator of these crimes? 

“Would it celebrate the criminal justice system’s correction of a horrible error? Or, would it bemoan the loss of its trophy conviction of Echols and the West Memphis Three? The answer unfortunately seems readily apparent, albeit one contrary to the public prosecutor’s role to ensure ‘that justice shall be done … guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer.’”

The Innocence Project has started a global petition for support to help Echols bring his case to the court. 

Justice for the West Memphis Three
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New DNA Tests Sought In West Memphis Three Case

(Credit: Wikipedia)

New DNA testing has been requested in the West Memphis Three case for recently rediscovered evidence once claimed to be lost or burned. 

Damien Echols, one of three convicted of 1993 murders committed in West Memphis, asked the Crittenden County Circuit Court to allow the review in a petition filed Monday. Specifically, he wants the ligatures — the shoelaces used to tie the young victims’ arms and legs — to be tested with new DNA collection technology. 

Echols hopes new clues from the analysis could exonerate himself, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley, known collectively as the West Memphis Three. The three were teenagers when they were accused and convicted of the murders of three younger boys, Steve Branch, Christopher Byers, and James Moore. The West Memphis Three were released in 2011 after they entered Alford pleas, which allowed them to claim their innocence but also admit prosecutors had enough evidence to prove their guilt to a jury. 

“Echols knows that his DNA is not on those ligatures because he had no role in committing these murders,” reads the petition from Echols’ attorney Patrick Benca of Little Rock. “Others might not be so certain, though, and who those others are surely needs to be determined if it can be ‘in the interests of justice.’”

The petition comes after evidence in the case was rediscovered in December. Echols tweeted at the time that “we know that none of the evidence was destroyed,” and “my attorney was in the evidence room this morning and saw it with his own eyes. Every piece is still there.” 

The petition also outlines the tough and lengthy process required to find that evidence; namely, the ligatures used in the murders. In 2020, a true crime documentary asked if new DNA testing methods might yield new results in the case. Scott Ellington, the prosecutor in the case, “balked” at the idea at the time, according to the petition. 

One of Echols’ attorneys later asked Ellington about testing the evidence again, and at that time the prosecutor “had no problem” with the idea. The two agreed on the evidence to be tested: “the victims’ shoes, socks, Boy Scout cap, shirts, pants, and underwear, as well as the sticks used to hold the clothing underwater, and the shoelaces used as ligatures to bind the victims,” according to the petition. They even selected a private California laboratory to run the tests. But none of the evidence was ever transferred, no explanation was ever given, and “it just never occurred.”

In March, Ellington was elected to a new position. He was replaced as prosecutor by Keith Chrestman, to serve until the end of 2022. 

Chrestman, the new prosecutor, told Echols’ attorney that some of the evidence in the case had been “lost” after the three entered their Alford pleas. Some of the evidence was “misplaced,” according to the court papers, and some of it “was destroyed by fire” in a building fire.

Chrestman also told attorneys that the court had jurisdiction over the evidence and those officials would have to grant authority to see it. Still, he asked the West Memphis Police Department (WMPD) to catalog any remaining evidence. Chrestman did not respond to emails or requests from Echols’ attorneys after April 2021, they said. 

Those attorneys filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request against the WMPD to see the evidence. In fall 2021, West Memphis city attorney Michael Stevenson invited Echols’ attorney, Benca, to a WMPD evidence storage facility “to ascertain what was there and what was not.” 

“That visit proved productive with the finding of the most important evidence for present purposes — the ligatures used to bind the murdered children — misfiled at the police department,” Benca wrote in the petition. 

Echols and his attorney are now asking for those ligatures, the little boys’ shoestrings, to be tested using the “M-Vac system.” Company officials describe it as “kind of like comparing a hand broom to a carpet cleaner,” when it comes to collecting material that might contain DNA. 

Benca said the shoestrings already provided biological material used as evidence in the case, which is not surprising “given that the ligatures are the pieces of evidence that we can most confidently say were necessarily handled by the killer(s) who wrapped them around the victims’ limbs and then knotted them into place.”

“No one knows, of course, whether additional testing of the ligatures with the new M-Vac DNA collection technology will lead to the recovery of new DNA samples for testing or not,” Benca wrote. “But one thing for certain is that such evidence will definitely not be found if testing with this new technology is not done.”

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West of Memphis

It gets to the point where I’d give my life to know the [expletive] truth,” witness David Jacoby says tearfully near the end of West of Memphis, the fourth feature documentary on the 1993 murders of West Memphis children Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore, which led to the eventually not-quite-overturned conviction of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley Jr. Earlier, Branch’s mother, Pam Hobbs, sitting on a bed, looking at old family photos, breaks down. “I just want the truth. I want the answers,” she says.

Let these be the voices for the rest of us — those who believe that a miscarriage of justice was committed with the initial conviction of the so-called West Memphis 3 but who aren’t particularly interested in Eddie Vedder cameos or the human-interest details of Damien Echols’ death-row courtship with activist Lorri Davis.

After more than 400 minutes across the three previous Paradise Lost films, did we really need another 147 minutes on the subject from filmmaker Amy Berg (Deliver Us From Evil) and co-producers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh? Maybe. Some of it anyway.

West of Memphis might have been leaner if it spent less time with celebrity advocates such as Vedder, Henry Rollins, and Natalie Maines and delved less into the relationship between Echols and Davis, who are both also co-producers.

There’s an audience for all that, of course. But the substance of the film is still the details of the initial conviction and the lingering mystery of what, to many, if not to the state of Arkansas, remains an unsolved case.

West of Memphis provides even more persuasive arguments — particularly in terms of Misskelley’s coached confession and mishandled forensic evidence — toward what most who’ve followed the case long ago concluded: that even aside from questions of innocence or guilt, the West Memphis 3 were victims of a wrongful conviction.

The case this film makes against Terry Hobbs, Branch’s stepfather, is in no way conclusive but is perhaps more compelling than the remaining case against Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley and is certainly more suggestive than the reckless case Paradise Lost built toward Byers’ adoptive father, John Mark Byers. Based on what West of Memphis presents, which is more thorough than a similar thrust in the third Paradise Lost film, most viewers might want to see authorities take Hobbs more seriously as a suspect than they’ve appeared willing to.

But the waters are poisoned in this case when it comes to implicating anyone, with the seemingly false accusations toward first Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley, and then Byers, coloring the recent emphasis on Hobbs. West of Memphis might seem convincing, but you carry the knowledge that, as a direct outgrowth of the West Memphis 3 movement and under the partial direction of both Davis and Echols, its consideration of the evidence can’t be fully dispassionate. Independent-minded viewers will be reluctant to abandon skepticism.

West of Memphis is, at least, something more than rehash. It features fresh interviews with many people involved in the case from all sides, including some key witnesses now recanting testimony and others whose testimony should have been more prominent from the beginning. And the original material is more sharply filmed and more artfully marshaled to the screen than in the Paradise Lost series.

But not all of this new stuff feels necessary. Material featuring Samantha Hobbs, the younger sister of Stevie Branch, is needlessly exploitative, particularly what purports to be on-camera glimpses of Hobbs’ sessions with a therapist.

With West of Memphis, we’re at more than nine hours of feature film on this case, with more to come in the form of Devil’s Knot, an adaptation of journalist Mara Leveritt’s book, which is set to be released later this year. But closure remains elusive.

West of Memphis

Opening Friday, March 1st

Studio on the Square