We have all heard about the serious cut-backs that state governments are making in the face the current depression. In Arkansas things have gotten so bad that they have now put a price on the lives of innocent children. In Arkansas, if it will save the state 10 to 20 million dollars, the murderers of small children will be allowed to go free.
This precedent was set when the West Memphis Three, three men in their mid-thirties who were falsely convicted, were allowed to walk out of prison only after confessing to three murders they didn’t commit. To understand how this perversion of justice took place it is necessary to have some background on the case.
In 1993 in West Memphis, Arkansas three eight year-old boys were found dead in a drainage ditch. They had been bound hand and foot and one of the boys had been sexually mutilated. The West Memphis police refused the help of the state police and determined to solve the crime themselves. But instead of identifying the real murderer, the police found unpopular members of the community who were too weak to defend themselves, and determined to hang the crime on them.
Because of the sexual mutilation of one of the victims, the police decided that the murders were part of a “satanic ritual” committed by “Satan worshipers.” The only person in West Memphis who remotely fit that description was one Damien Echols. Echols was by all accounts an intelligent young man who had dropped out of high school because of impatience with his classes. He was later determined to have a personality disorder and was prescribed drugs to help control it. At the time of the murders he was working part time as a roofer. Echols only connection with “Satanism” was that he liked to dress in black and talk about Wicca. Today you could find hundreds of kids just like him, who call themselves Goths, in any high school in America. But as an occasionally unemployed, high school drop out, with a personality disorder, who was unpopular in the community, Echols was a perfect target for a false charge of murder.
In spite of their best efforts, the West Memphis police could never get evidence against Echols, so they instead targeted a boy named Jessie Misskelley, who knew Echols slightly from high school. Misskelley was 17 and had an IQ of 72 making him mildly retarded. The police took Misskelley to the police station and interrogated him for 12 hours, after which he confessed to the murders and implicated Echols and Echols best friend from high school, Jason Baldwin.
There were three problems with Misskelley’s confession. First, he was a retarded minor who had no counsel while questioned. Second, he almost immediately recanted the confession as soon as he was not being threatened by the police. And third, many of the facts in the confession didn’t agree with the facts of the murder as they were known. Unconcerned by any of this the county prosecutor succeed in getting murder convictions against all three suspects. Misskelley and Baldwin were sentenced to life in prison and Echols was sentenced to death.
Fortunately for the ability of Americans to sleep at night, a movement was immediately started to protest the convictions. This movement found special support among Goths and Wiccans who, quite naturally, didn’t want to find themselves looked on as convenient scapegoats in unsolved murder cases. In 2007 the crucial break in the case came. Using DNA techniques invented since 1993, material from the site where the murdered boys were found was retested. None of the material matched the DNA of any of the West Memphis Three. But a hair found entangled in one of the knots with which the boys had been tied was determined likely to belong to Terry Hobbs, the stepfather of one of the murdered boys. Another hair yielded DNA which closely matched one of Hobbs friends, David Jacoby. After many self-contradictory statements from Hobbs, it was determined that he was the last person to see the murdered boys alive.
With these facts it doesn’t take a genius to form a version of the case completely different from that presented by the prosecution. The real murderers are not the West Memphis Three but Hobbs and Jacoby. In all likelihood they sexually assaulted the three boys. In order to cover this crime they murdered them, further gratifying themselves in the process with an act of sexual mutilation.
At this point, as a rational citizen of a free country, you have just leaped to your feet and said, “So the prosecutors immediately ordered the wrongly convicted high school students freed and arrested and charged Hobbs and Jacoby.” And of course gentle reader, you couldn’t be more wrong.
The prosecutor opposed and the district court denied a motion for new trial. But, to its credit, when the case came before the Arkansas Supreme Court it ordered a hearing to determine if the DNA evidence warranted a new trial. In response prosecutor Scott Ellington negotiated an agreement with the lawyers for the West Memphis Three in which they would state in court that they were not guilty, after which they would plead guilty to crimes which they never committed. After that they would be sentenced to time served. Ellington explained his actions by saying that if he had not made the men plead guilty they could have sued the state of Arkansas for millions of dollars. He also said he was sure they were guilty and that he had no intention of trying Hobbs. The West Memphis Three said that they had to plead guilty because Echols was still on death row. If anything had gone wrong at the rehearing he could have been executed for a crime he had nothing to do with.
Now here ladies and gentlemen is where this case threatens the very foundations of the rule of law. Scott Ellington and the Crittenden County, Arkansas Prosecutor’s Office know the names of two men who raped, murdered, and mutilated three innocent eight year-old boys. It has substantial evidence against them. In 1993 the same prosecutor’s office represented these murders as being among the most heinous, hateful crimes ever committed, crimes which cried out for vengeance. But today the prosecutor’s office is more worried about saving the State of Arkansas the 30 to 60 million dollars it would owe on a false imprisonment suit, than it is in bringing justice in the murders of the three boys.
This sets an incredible precedent. But rather than get outraged over this I think we should congratulate Ellington. His brilliant insight, and complete disrespect for the law, has shown us a way out of the recession. After all, rather than raise taxes on rich people the state of Arkansas, and the rest of the states and the federal government, are cutting education, parks, the arts, assistance to the elderly, to the disabled, the sick, the lame, the deaf, the blind. Soon we’ll wake up to find families sleeping in the gutters in front of our homes and old women begging on the steps of our churches. Under these dire circumstances why should justice not be made to do its part? After all we don’t have to be limited to selling the lives of eight year olds who are already dead. We can sell them while they’re still living!
I know lots of rich people who would be happy to pay ten or twenty million dollars to rape and kill an eight year-old child. Do you doubt it? Then consider, Rupert Murdoch paid thousands of dollars to members of his staff to hack the cell phone of a murdered 13 year-old girl. Think what he’d pay for an exclusive on the rape and murder of an eight year-old! He could set up the whole thing. Pick the victim, someone photogenic, the murderer, a liberal no doubt, someone from one of the groups regularly demonized on Fox News, pick the time and place, say Democratic headquarters or the Bill Clinton library, and for a ten million dollar payment, cash on the barrel head only, the State of Arkansas would make the whole thing legal.
Think of the possibilities, wives and husbands you don’t love, business partners who are in the way, witnesses to crimes, relatives with insurance. All you would have to do would be lure them to Arkansas, pull the trigger, and be rich enough to pay ten million dollars. Why the State of Arkansas would be in the black in no time, and they wouldn’t have done anything they haven’t already done in the case of the West Memphis Three.
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