Friday Aug. 19, 2011 will be a day long remembered for the release of the “West Memphis Three”, three men now in their thirties who served eighteen years after being convicted of the murders of three 8 year old boys in May of 1993. Was the release of the West Memphis Three a good thing for the people of West Memphis, AR or for society in general is a logical question to be asked.
I will attempt to provide an answer to that query in what has to be one of the most grisly, convoluted, riddle-inside-a-mystery-wrapped-in-an-enigma cases in the long, violent history of crimes in the United States.
For years, Eddie Vedder, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks and other celebrities have proclaimed the innocence of the WM3 as they are often known. High powered attorneys have attempted to get a new trial for Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, the three men known as the West Memphis Three.
There have been numerous queries and investigations into the case and the way the West Memphis Police Department and other agencies handled the investigation of the grisly murders of Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore on May 5, 1993.
More recently there have been DNA developments in the case in which none of the WM3’s DNA could be identified from the crime scene.
Here is my take: for years, like most people in Arkansas and elsewhere who followed the case, I believed the West Memphis Three to be probably guilty. I watched all of the HBO documentaries entitled Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills and the sequels. I was left with the feeling that the filmmakers had tried to prove the innocence of the trio, but came up short in that regard.
Still, there was not hard evidence of the guilt of the West Memphis Three, just mountains of circumstantial evidence which tended to make them look guilty.
With the release of the WM3 on Aug. 19, the state of Arkansas appeared to be saving face and trying to stave off any future lawsuits by offering the men something known as an “Alford plea”.
What the state did in effect was make the men plead no contest and free them for time served. By making the West Memphis Three sign off on a deal basically saying they committed this grisly crime and commuting their sentences, the state was clearly more interested in immunizing themselves from future legal actions.
The biggest problem is, with no WM3 DNA identified at the scene and no good leads on the case, we may never know just who committed this crime. While I’m still not 100% sure these men are innocent, the state clearly did not think they could convict the men in another trial which would surely have taken place.
If the West Memphis Three are innocent, no one can ever repay the men for the 18 years they served, especially Damien Echols, who was on death row all that time. In any event, this was a tragic case for all involved, but the state had no choice but to release the West Memphis Three in some fashion when they did.
Hopefully at some point, all who have followed the case and all those involved can find out along with the rest of us who did commit this terrible crime.