12.12.05
Stanley Tookie Williams III is certainly not the first person to be unjustly sentenced to death by an American court for murders he did not commit. On May 6th, 1993, the bodies of Christopher Byers, Steven Branch and Mike Moore were found in a creek near the Robin Hood Hills in West Memphis, Arkansas; the bodies of the three eight-year-old victims had been tied ankle-to-wrist with their own shoelaces, severely beaten and abused, but Byers was most injured, suffering a fractured skull, stab wounds to his groin, and castration.
On June 3rd, 1993, Jessie Misskelly was questioned by police after he had been identified as a "cult member" by Vicky Hutcheson, who later retracted her confession because she admitted that police had coerced her by offering to drop theft charges levied against her by her employer, and because police threatened to take her child. Misskelly was then interviewed for nearly 12 hours during which he had neither his parents or an attorney present, and only 46 minutes of the interrogation were recorded; Misskelly eventually confessed to the killings and named Damien Echols as the leader of a "cult," though the details of Misskelly's confession were wildly at odds with forensic evidence.
Misskelly retracted his confession soon after giving it, explaining that he had confessed only because he had been exhausted, confused and intimidated after the intense 12 hour interrogation, during which police investigators had promised him the chance to see his parents in return for his confession. It was also later established that Misskelly is borderline retarded with an IQ of 72, increasing the possibility that he was confused into confessing to a crime he did not commit.
On June 30th, 1993, Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelly, and Jason Baldwin -- now known as the West Memphis 3 -- were arrested and charged with the murders. Echols had a history of truancy and had once been charged with burglary after breaking into a trailer during a rain-storm when he ran away with a girlfriend; Misskelly and Baldwin both had minor criminal records that included vandalism, shoplifting and fist-fighting. The prosecution's entire case was built entirely from insubstantial circumstantial evidence including the suspects's pasts, along with Pink Floyd lyrics from their notebooks, Stephen King novels in their possession, Echols' interest in heavy metal music -- including Metallica -- and Wicca; additionally, the state's "expert witness" on occult crimes had obtained his degree through mail order and had never taken an actual class on the subject.
In 1996, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky produced a documentary entitled Paradise Lost: the Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, using existing footage from the trials of Echols, Baldwin and Misskelly and newly interviews with the participants in the case to reconstruct the string of mishandlings and wild speculations that plagued the investigation.
During the production of the film, Berlinger and Sinofsky were given "a gift" by John Mark Byers, stepfather of victim Christopher Byers -- a hunting knife, which they later discovered contained blood that forensics proved matched Christopher Byers' bloodtype. John Byers had a history of his own; he admitted to having beaten Christopher shortly before the boy disappeared on May 5th, and had a previous conviction for beating his wife, Melissa Byers (who, incidentally, contacted Christopher's school a few weeks before the murders to express concerns that her son was being sexually abused).
John Byers also had a tumor for which he was prescribed Carbamazepine, a drug that was found to have been used to sedate only Christopher before the murders. Following the convictions of the three teenagers, John Byers had his teeth removed for unspecified reasons; this would later become pertinent when Echols, Misskelly and Baldwin all submitted imprints of their teeth, none of which matched bite marks found on the bodies of the eight-year-old victims. This piece of key forensic evidence was ignored when Echols, Misskelly and Baldwin were granted an appeal only to have their convictions upheld in a second documentary, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations.
John Byers did submit to a polygraph during the shoot of Revelations which he did manage to pass, but the fact that Byers was heavily medicated during the test must be taken into account. The fact that polygraph results are inadmissible in court due to their wild unreliability must also be acknowledged, as must Byers' reaction to finding that he had passed the polygraph: he acted like a man who just beat a polygraph. Meanwhile, Damien Echols is sentenced to death, despite the fact that not only was there absolutely no physical evidence tying him to the crime, the only physical evidence that did exist -- a bloody knife, Carbamazepine pills, and bite marks – all point overwhelmingly to a far more likely suspect: John Mark Byers.
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