Case lives on as Echols seeks new trial
Claims state withheld evidence
By Bartholomew Sullivan
April 21, 2002
The case has always been a little murky.
And now, nine years after one of the region's most infamous murders, death row prisoner Damien Wayne Echols claims the state withheld crucial evidence.
In his efforts to win a new trial, Echols, 27, also claims he was incompetent to stand trial because of a history of mental illness and that he was drugged in jail against his will while awaiting trial.
The other two defendants, Jessie Lloyd Misskelley Jr., 26, and Charles Jason Baldwin, 25, both serving life terms, have filed motions claiming their trial lawyers were ineffective. Misskelley is also seeking to preserve trial evidence for DNA and other testing unavailable in 1993. Hearings in those matters have not yet been scheduled.
The Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed all three convictions in 1996, and the U.S. Supreme Court has denied requests to review them.
But that's hardly the end of the story.
The murder case that captivated the region for almost a year starting in the spring of 1993 still lives on. It lives in the reams of new court filings, including a 30-page brief filed in Little Rock last week. And it lives on in the imagination of countless viewers who have seen nationally televised documentaries that question the fairness of the three men's trials for killing Steve Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers.
The movies have spawned a movement to "Free the West Memphis Three."
Interest in the films has led to a popular California-based Web site, dozens of spinoff chat rooms, and regular fund-raising concerts on behalf of the convicted killers.
Perhaps it was inevitable the case would take on a life of its own. The triple-murder case West Memphis police assigned No. 93-05-0666 has a number of elements that make it extraordinary.
The victims, all 8 years old, were last seen in the late afternoon of May 5, 1993, riding their bikes toward Robin Hood Hills, a wooded area near their homes.
They were found the next afternoon brutally murdered, their bodies hog-tied and submerged in a drainage ditch. One was sexually mutilated.
The identified suspects were shadowy denizens of trailer parks, and Echols had an acknowledged interest in the occult magician Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) and called himself a practitioner of witchcraft.
Perhaps most devastating, Misskelley gave police a confession, later retracted, in which he said he participated in the ritual slaughter of animals and in sexual orgies with Echols and others as part of a cult that met in the woods of Crittenden County.
The Commercial Appeal published excerpts of the Misskelley confession just days after it was recorded by police in June 1993. Some have suggested the media hype and atmosphere of hysteria worked against selection of an unbiased jury. There was little convincing physical evidence linking the men to the murders.
That's the underlying theme of the documentaries - Paradise Lost and Revelations: Paradise Lost 2. The films suggest the West Memphis community and surrounding Bible Belt region were gripped by irrational "satanic panic" that helped railroad innocent defendants.
Jurors involved in the two trials have either declined interview requests or can't be located. Circuit Judge David Burnett granted changes of venue because of the publicity. Misskelley's trial was held in Corning, Ark., near the Missouri state line. Echols and Baldwin were tried in Jonesboro.
In pretrial hearings and both trials many of the current legal issues were brought to light. But national interest in the case didn't begin until after the 1994 convictions and the first documentary, Paradise Lost, was aired on the Home Box Office pay-television channel.
The most inflammatory issues remain potent Internet chat topics and also recur in legal briefs.
The suggestion that Misskelley's confession was coerced by police remains a hot issue, even though jurors weighed and rejected that argument at his trial. Echols's new lawyers argue that widespread knowledge of the confession hurt their client's chance for a fair trial two weeks after Misskelley's conviction, even though the confession itself was never introduced in Echols's trial.
Critics of the verdicts also point to a post-conviction ruling by the California Bureau of Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education revoking the license of the college where the state's satanism expert got his mail-order PhD. The former Ohio police captain, Dale W. Griffis, who obtained the doctorate from the now-discredited Columbia Pacific University, was permitted to give his expert views that the triple murders had occult "trappings," including the fact they occurred during a full moon.
Proponents of new trials for the three defendants point to other prosecutorial excesses and suggestions of overlooked evidence.
Perhaps the best known and least satisfactorily explained police foulup was evidence that a bloodied, muddy man showed up at the West Memphis Bojangles restaurant about the time the boys went missing.
Whatever connection might have been made between the killings and the so-called Mr. Bojangles - obviously someone other than the defendants - was never pursued.
Troubling as that may be, it's far from being a post-conviction revelation. The Mr. Bojangles connection was the subject of a news story in The Commercial Appeal four days before Misskelley's January 1994 trial. And it was the subject of extensive testimony in open court.
Critics of the two trials have also wondered about the relationship John Mark Byers, the stepfather of one of the victims, had with undercover narcotics officers in the West Memphis police department, and whether officials were entirely forthcoming about it.
Those suspicions, and Byers's orthodontic work after the killings, led to so far unsuccessful post-trial efforts to have wounds on one victim's body examined as bite marks.
Supporters of the convicted men also wonder why a Jonesboro juvenile court official with first-hand knowledge was never permitted to testify about the state's most damaging witness against Baldwin, a witness once represented by Echols's trial lawyer. That official could have testified that the witness was spoon-fed his testimony in a juvenile lockup.
Efforts to reconsider Echols's conviction in light of alleged errors were rejected by trial judge Burnett after 13 days of hearings brought by his new lawyers in what's called a Rule 37 proceeding. The rule's purpose is to allow appeals lawyers to prove their client received ineffective legal assistance at trial.
In rejecting that claim, Echols's lawyers say Burnett simply accepted the state's arguments. The Arkansas Supreme Court sent Burnett's ruling back to him and asked him to re-examine and clarify some issues. Burnett has done so, and Echols's lawyers filed their last written argument in that case Wednesday. A final ruling from the high court is pending.
One of the issues still under review is whether contracts involving the filming of the trial are proof of a conflict of interest between defense lawyers and their clients. Burnett says he doesn't see a conflict, and the lawyers involved agree.
Appellate lawyers for Echols say the deal with the documentary filmmakers, and their reliance on them as a financial source, compromised their client's interest in having the state provide adequate resources to investigate the case. In the brief filed last week, they say Echols's lawyer Val P. Price "became an actor" for the film crew, at one point "staging a strategy conference for the sole purpose of having it filmed."
Ironically, according to those who agreed to the arrangement, the success of the films probably explains why the case has become so well-known and attracted the current array of legal talent.
"In the absence of the documentary, the lawyers making these criticisms wouldn't be involved anyway," said Jonesboro lawyer Paul N. Ford, who represented Baldwin. "It did not harm my client before the trial and has helped him afterward. He wouldn't have a champion. He would just be another inmate serving a life sentence."
Daniel T. Stidham, who represented Misskelley but had another lawyer handle the contract with filmmakers, agrees: "I've said before that, without those two films, it would have been swept under the rug and long forgotten."
The Commercial Appeal and other news organizations reported that a film crew from Creative Thinking International was receiving unusual access to the defendants during the trials, but the deals between the filmmakers and their lawyers weren't publicly revealed until years later.
Echols's appellate lawyers, Edward A. Mallett of Houston, Texas, and Alvin Schay of Little Rock, reviewed contracts that show Creative Thinking agreed to pay $7,500 to each defendant for a total of nine interviews, three with each. Under terms of the contracts, they were to keep the terms confidential. Burnett has said he was unaware of any payments by the documentary film crew until well into the process.
While the new lawyers pursue the theory that Echols received poor legal advice, they are also raising other issues in a parallel case, also before the Arkansas Supreme Court.
In a motion asking to permit the trial court to consider issues uncovered after the trials, they want to address whether Echols was mentally competent to stand trial and whether he was improperly given psycho-active medications during his trial.
And in what appears most damaging on the surface, they want to examine whether the state concealed exculpatory evidence from a West Memphis police officer. In a sworn statement, the officer now contends there was no sign of the bodies in Robin Hood Hills when he searched the area just hours before the bodies were found.
Echols's new lawyers now say his first lawyers should have recognized his mental incapacity.
The record on appeal spells out a long history of Echols's mental heath problems, including a May 5, 1992, Arkansas Department of Youth Services referral for possible mental illness, a year to the day before the murders.
Hospital records for his treatment in Little Rock 11 months before the killings show a history of self-mutilation, and assertions to hospital staff that he gained power by drinking blood, that he had inside him the spirit of a woman who had killed her husband and that he was having hallucinations.
He also told mental health workers that he was "going to influence the world."
The appellate legal team argues that Echols didn't waive his assertion that he wasn't mentally competent before his 1994 trial because he wasn't competent to waive it. They've retained a Berkeley, Calif.-based forensic psychiatrist, Dr. George Woods, to make their case.
But state appellate lawyers maintain Echols's mental history was available to defense lawyers at his trial, and they elected not to assert his incompetence. The trial lawyers even introduced some of his mental rec ord in the trial's sentencing phase.
Woods has been involved in several high-profile trials. Past prosecutors have accused him of designing diagnoses to meet defense needs. In an affidavit on file in Little Rock, he said that Echols's history of mental illness is well-established and its effects were devastating:
"Mr. Echols' mental illness made him incompetent to stand trial. He could not adequately appreciate or consistently articulate the nature and gravity of the charges against him. He did not understand the role of his counsel and could not assist his counsel or investigators in identifying critical evidence or a viable theory of defense.
"His grandiose and paranoid delusions left him unable to make rational decisions and grossly distorted his perception of the purpose and possible outcomes of the trial."
Echols's condition worsened during the trial, when he developed a "psychotic euphoria that caused him to believe he would evolve into a superior entity," and eventually be transported to a different world. His psychosis dominated his perceptions of everything going on in court, Woods wrote.
The second issue on appeal deals with the anti-depressant Imipramine that Echols was given before and during his trial. The theory relies in part on a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court case from Nevada that overturned a conviction in which a defendant contended his appearance and demeanor before jurors was affected by state-administered psycho-active drugs.
Echols's lawyers suggest there is no evidence Echols consented to the medication administered by jailers and that it undermined the credibility of his defense. But state lawyers, on appeal, note that Echols had been prescribed an antidepressant, and had been taking it, well before he was charged in the case.
The final issue raised to get back into court involves former West Memphis police officer John P. Slater. He signed an affidavit last year asserting that he was on duty the night and early morning the victims disappeared and that he helped search the very area where the bodies were later found.
"If the bodies had been present at the time we searched the area, I am confident that we would have located them," Slater wrote. "We were aware that the facts within our personal knowledge contradicted the version of events being presented by the state."
Although Slater contends he discussed the issue with West Memphis Police Lt. Fred Boskey, he acknowledges he never pre sented the evidence to detectives working the case.
Capt. Mike Allen, the detective who found the bodies, said Slater's assertion is "a complete crock."
Allen says the logical implication of Slater's statement is that the bodies were dropped off in the woods while a full-scale search for the missing boys was under way.
He suggests searchers didn't see the bodies, which were submerged in murky water.
"If it was 12 o'clock straight up noon, unless you got down in that water, you wouldn't have seen them."
Claims state withheld evidence
By Bartholomew Sullivan
April 21, 2002
The case has always been a little murky.
And now, nine years after one of the region's most infamous murders, death row prisoner Damien Wayne Echols claims the state withheld crucial evidence.
In his efforts to win a new trial, Echols, 27, also claims he was incompetent to stand trial because of a history of mental illness and that he was drugged in jail against his will while awaiting trial.
The other two defendants, Jessie Lloyd Misskelley Jr., 26, and Charles Jason Baldwin, 25, both serving life terms, have filed motions claiming their trial lawyers were ineffective. Misskelley is also seeking to preserve trial evidence for DNA and other testing unavailable in 1993. Hearings in those matters have not yet been scheduled.
The Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed all three convictions in 1996, and the U.S. Supreme Court has denied requests to review them.
But that's hardly the end of the story.
The murder case that captivated the region for almost a year starting in the spring of 1993 still lives on. It lives in the reams of new court filings, including a 30-page brief filed in Little Rock last week. And it lives on in the imagination of countless viewers who have seen nationally televised documentaries that question the fairness of the three men's trials for killing Steve Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers.
The movies have spawned a movement to "Free the West Memphis Three."
Interest in the films has led to a popular California-based Web site, dozens of spinoff chat rooms, and regular fund-raising concerts on behalf of the convicted killers.
Perhaps it was inevitable the case would take on a life of its own. The triple-murder case West Memphis police assigned No. 93-05-0666 has a number of elements that make it extraordinary.
The victims, all 8 years old, were last seen in the late afternoon of May 5, 1993, riding their bikes toward Robin Hood Hills, a wooded area near their homes.
They were found the next afternoon brutally murdered, their bodies hog-tied and submerged in a drainage ditch. One was sexually mutilated.
The identified suspects were shadowy denizens of trailer parks, and Echols had an acknowledged interest in the occult magician Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) and called himself a practitioner of witchcraft.
Perhaps most devastating, Misskelley gave police a confession, later retracted, in which he said he participated in the ritual slaughter of animals and in sexual orgies with Echols and others as part of a cult that met in the woods of Crittenden County.
The Commercial Appeal published excerpts of the Misskelley confession just days after it was recorded by police in June 1993. Some have suggested the media hype and atmosphere of hysteria worked against selection of an unbiased jury. There was little convincing physical evidence linking the men to the murders.
That's the underlying theme of the documentaries - Paradise Lost and Revelations: Paradise Lost 2. The films suggest the West Memphis community and surrounding Bible Belt region were gripped by irrational "satanic panic" that helped railroad innocent defendants.
Jurors involved in the two trials have either declined interview requests or can't be located. Circuit Judge David Burnett granted changes of venue because of the publicity. Misskelley's trial was held in Corning, Ark., near the Missouri state line. Echols and Baldwin were tried in Jonesboro.
In pretrial hearings and both trials many of the current legal issues were brought to light. But national interest in the case didn't begin until after the 1994 convictions and the first documentary, Paradise Lost, was aired on the Home Box Office pay-television channel.
The most inflammatory issues remain potent Internet chat topics and also recur in legal briefs.
The suggestion that Misskelley's confession was coerced by police remains a hot issue, even though jurors weighed and rejected that argument at his trial. Echols's new lawyers argue that widespread knowledge of the confession hurt their client's chance for a fair trial two weeks after Misskelley's conviction, even though the confession itself was never introduced in Echols's trial.
Critics of the verdicts also point to a post-conviction ruling by the California Bureau of Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education revoking the license of the college where the state's satanism expert got his mail-order PhD. The former Ohio police captain, Dale W. Griffis, who obtained the doctorate from the now-discredited Columbia Pacific University, was permitted to give his expert views that the triple murders had occult "trappings," including the fact they occurred during a full moon.
Proponents of new trials for the three defendants point to other prosecutorial excesses and suggestions of overlooked evidence.
Perhaps the best known and least satisfactorily explained police foulup was evidence that a bloodied, muddy man showed up at the West Memphis Bojangles restaurant about the time the boys went missing.
Whatever connection might have been made between the killings and the so-called Mr. Bojangles - obviously someone other than the defendants - was never pursued.
Troubling as that may be, it's far from being a post-conviction revelation. The Mr. Bojangles connection was the subject of a news story in The Commercial Appeal four days before Misskelley's January 1994 trial. And it was the subject of extensive testimony in open court.
Critics of the two trials have also wondered about the relationship John Mark Byers, the stepfather of one of the victims, had with undercover narcotics officers in the West Memphis police department, and whether officials were entirely forthcoming about it.
Those suspicions, and Byers's orthodontic work after the killings, led to so far unsuccessful post-trial efforts to have wounds on one victim's body examined as bite marks.
Supporters of the convicted men also wonder why a Jonesboro juvenile court official with first-hand knowledge was never permitted to testify about the state's most damaging witness against Baldwin, a witness once represented by Echols's trial lawyer. That official could have testified that the witness was spoon-fed his testimony in a juvenile lockup.
Efforts to reconsider Echols's conviction in light of alleged errors were rejected by trial judge Burnett after 13 days of hearings brought by his new lawyers in what's called a Rule 37 proceeding. The rule's purpose is to allow appeals lawyers to prove their client received ineffective legal assistance at trial.
In rejecting that claim, Echols's lawyers say Burnett simply accepted the state's arguments. The Arkansas Supreme Court sent Burnett's ruling back to him and asked him to re-examine and clarify some issues. Burnett has done so, and Echols's lawyers filed their last written argument in that case Wednesday. A final ruling from the high court is pending.
One of the issues still under review is whether contracts involving the filming of the trial are proof of a conflict of interest between defense lawyers and their clients. Burnett says he doesn't see a conflict, and the lawyers involved agree.
Appellate lawyers for Echols say the deal with the documentary filmmakers, and their reliance on them as a financial source, compromised their client's interest in having the state provide adequate resources to investigate the case. In the brief filed last week, they say Echols's lawyer Val P. Price "became an actor" for the film crew, at one point "staging a strategy conference for the sole purpose of having it filmed."
Ironically, according to those who agreed to the arrangement, the success of the films probably explains why the case has become so well-known and attracted the current array of legal talent.
"In the absence of the documentary, the lawyers making these criticisms wouldn't be involved anyway," said Jonesboro lawyer Paul N. Ford, who represented Baldwin. "It did not harm my client before the trial and has helped him afterward. He wouldn't have a champion. He would just be another inmate serving a life sentence."
Daniel T. Stidham, who represented Misskelley but had another lawyer handle the contract with filmmakers, agrees: "I've said before that, without those two films, it would have been swept under the rug and long forgotten."
The Commercial Appeal and other news organizations reported that a film crew from Creative Thinking International was receiving unusual access to the defendants during the trials, but the deals between the filmmakers and their lawyers weren't publicly revealed until years later.
Echols's appellate lawyers, Edward A. Mallett of Houston, Texas, and Alvin Schay of Little Rock, reviewed contracts that show Creative Thinking agreed to pay $7,500 to each defendant for a total of nine interviews, three with each. Under terms of the contracts, they were to keep the terms confidential. Burnett has said he was unaware of any payments by the documentary film crew until well into the process.
While the new lawyers pursue the theory that Echols received poor legal advice, they are also raising other issues in a parallel case, also before the Arkansas Supreme Court.
In a motion asking to permit the trial court to consider issues uncovered after the trials, they want to address whether Echols was mentally competent to stand trial and whether he was improperly given psycho-active medications during his trial.
And in what appears most damaging on the surface, they want to examine whether the state concealed exculpatory evidence from a West Memphis police officer. In a sworn statement, the officer now contends there was no sign of the bodies in Robin Hood Hills when he searched the area just hours before the bodies were found.
Echols's new lawyers now say his first lawyers should have recognized his mental incapacity.
The record on appeal spells out a long history of Echols's mental heath problems, including a May 5, 1992, Arkansas Department of Youth Services referral for possible mental illness, a year to the day before the murders.
Hospital records for his treatment in Little Rock 11 months before the killings show a history of self-mutilation, and assertions to hospital staff that he gained power by drinking blood, that he had inside him the spirit of a woman who had killed her husband and that he was having hallucinations.
He also told mental health workers that he was "going to influence the world."
The appellate legal team argues that Echols didn't waive his assertion that he wasn't mentally competent before his 1994 trial because he wasn't competent to waive it. They've retained a Berkeley, Calif.-based forensic psychiatrist, Dr. George Woods, to make their case.
But state appellate lawyers maintain Echols's mental history was available to defense lawyers at his trial, and they elected not to assert his incompetence. The trial lawyers even introduced some of his mental rec ord in the trial's sentencing phase.
Woods has been involved in several high-profile trials. Past prosecutors have accused him of designing diagnoses to meet defense needs. In an affidavit on file in Little Rock, he said that Echols's history of mental illness is well-established and its effects were devastating:
"Mr. Echols' mental illness made him incompetent to stand trial. He could not adequately appreciate or consistently articulate the nature and gravity of the charges against him. He did not understand the role of his counsel and could not assist his counsel or investigators in identifying critical evidence or a viable theory of defense.
"His grandiose and paranoid delusions left him unable to make rational decisions and grossly distorted his perception of the purpose and possible outcomes of the trial."
Echols's condition worsened during the trial, when he developed a "psychotic euphoria that caused him to believe he would evolve into a superior entity," and eventually be transported to a different world. His psychosis dominated his perceptions of everything going on in court, Woods wrote.
The second issue on appeal deals with the anti-depressant Imipramine that Echols was given before and during his trial. The theory relies in part on a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court case from Nevada that overturned a conviction in which a defendant contended his appearance and demeanor before jurors was affected by state-administered psycho-active drugs.
Echols's lawyers suggest there is no evidence Echols consented to the medication administered by jailers and that it undermined the credibility of his defense. But state lawyers, on appeal, note that Echols had been prescribed an antidepressant, and had been taking it, well before he was charged in the case.
The final issue raised to get back into court involves former West Memphis police officer John P. Slater. He signed an affidavit last year asserting that he was on duty the night and early morning the victims disappeared and that he helped search the very area where the bodies were later found.
"If the bodies had been present at the time we searched the area, I am confident that we would have located them," Slater wrote. "We were aware that the facts within our personal knowledge contradicted the version of events being presented by the state."
Although Slater contends he discussed the issue with West Memphis Police Lt. Fred Boskey, he acknowledges he never pre sented the evidence to detectives working the case.
Capt. Mike Allen, the detective who found the bodies, said Slater's assertion is "a complete crock."
Allen says the logical implication of Slater's statement is that the bodies were dropped off in the woods while a full-scale search for the missing boys was under way.
He suggests searchers didn't see the bodies, which were submerged in murky water.
"If it was 12 o'clock straight up noon, unless you got down in that water, you wouldn't have seen them."
