[WEST OF MEMPHIS opens in Cleveland Friday March 8th exclusively at the Cedar Lee Theatre.]
Review by Pamela Zoslov
Review by Pamela Zoslov
It's sobering to think of how many
people, in the short history of the United States, have been jailed,
stoned or burned because someone imagined them guilty of witchcraft
or Satanism.This peculiar form of judicial persecution isn't confined
to 17th-century Salem; it recurs with alarming regularity, with the
1980s hysteria over ritual sex abuse (imaginary, it turns out) in day
care centers that led to people being sentenced to life in prison
based on wild tales coaxed out of small children, and in the
celebrated case of the West Memphis Three, a trio of teenagers from
the small town of West Memphis, Arkansas who were convicted of the
1993 murders of three 8-year-old boys found hog-tied, mutilated and
drowned in a creek. The murders, which shocked the community, were
quickly attributed to "cult" practices, because the boys'
bodies were found naked with signs of sexual mutilation.
After a shoddy investigation, suspicion
centered on Damien Echols, a troubled 18-year-old with arrests for
shoplifting and vandalism and an interest in the occult. Despite the
lack of physical evidence linking him to the killings, Echols'
reputation among law enforcement was enough to earn him suspicion as
the "mastermind" of the murders, and a prosecution theory
based on "expert" testimony about Satanism provided a
storyline jurors willingly bought. The horror of child murder and
zealous prosecutor's ghastly narrative about how the boys were
mutilated guaranteed there would be no acquittal of Echols, Jason
Baldwin or Jessie Misskelly, a borderline mentally retarded kid who
was interrogated for 12 straight hours and whose solid alibi placing
him 40 miles away at the time of the murders was ignored by jurors.
After separate trials marked by false
testimony, coerced confessions, police, prosecutorial and juror
misconduct and the electoral ambitions of the prosecutor and judge,
Echols was sentenced to death, while Baldwin received a 20-year
sentence and Misskelly life plus 40 years. Following a prolonged
campaign for a reexamination of the evidence and a retrial or
exoneration – with the help of celebrity activists including Eddie
Vedder, Henry Rollins, Patti Smith, Johnny Depp and film
director Peter Jackson -- the men were released in 2011 on an Alford
plea, a legal maneuver by which they maintained their innocence but
pled guilty in exchange for release from prison. It was far from an
ideal resolution – the young men still bear the stigma of murder
convictions – but given the decay of evidence and the case's
lasting notoriety, it was probably the best outcome the supporters
could have hoped for.
The film also recounts the unlikely romance of Damien Echols and Lorri Davis, a pretty, intelligent young woman who started writing to Damien after seeing him in PARADISE LOST. She quit her job, married him and devoted herself to working full-time on his case, laboring tirelessly against long odds to have the evidence reexamined by top forensic pathologists. (Damien and Lorri are producers of the movie.) After the HBO documentaries, a movement arose to free the West Memphis 3, with celebrity benefit concerts and marches. One interview subject calls it "the first crowd-sourced criminal investigation.". Alternative scenarios emerged – the injuries to the boys' bodies may have been caused by postmortem animal predation rather than mutilation with a knife. (The movie vividly demonstrates this scenario with a huge snapping turtle biting a man's arm.) Witnesses recanted their testimony, admitting they lied under duress or to escape prosecution for other crimes. Still, it was not enough to overcome local corruption. A hearing on a motion for a retrial was presided over by the original trial judge, David Burnett. Not surprisingly, he denied the motion.
The film convincingly demonstrates that
the state of Arkansas had everything to gain and nothing to lose by
throwing away three poor white teenagers. The crimes were the kind
that society demands avenged, and assistant prosecutor and the judge
were both elected to higher office after the highly publicized
convictions. Seeing the three men walk out of prison and begin to
adjust to their hard-won freedom is exhilarating. But in the U.S.,
that freedom-loving land that imprisons far more of its citizens than
any other country, there are countless innocents who languish,
forgotten, in prison and on death row. Most of them will not have
celebrity supporters or benefit concerts held on their behalf. And
most of them will barely see daylight again. 3 1/2 out of 4 stars.
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