Free the 'West Memphis Three'

Over the past week or so, I've been startled and engrossed by a series of documentaries about a brutal mass child-murder case which took place in Arkansas, USA, back in 1993. Three 8-year old boys were stripped, mutilated and dumped in a muddy ditch in a small wooded area of West Memphis, known as Robin Hood Hills.

The first documentary follows the police investigation and subsequent murder trials of three young men, Damian Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley. As you can imagine, the utter shock, disgust and outrage that such a heinous crime will bring out in a small tight-knit community is there for all to see and these men provide a focus of hate for a grieving town.

What follows however is nothing short of jaw-dropping as you watch the prosecution press home their charges with the flimsiest of evidence.

I say evidence. There wasn't any.

The sum total of the evidence presented that convinced the jury beyond a reasonable doubt to effectively end the free lives of these men forever, and put one of them on death row, was as follows. 1) A coerced confession from one of the boys, Jessie, who has severe learning difficulties. 2) The testimony of two young girls who thought they'd overheard Damian admitting to the murders to his friends and 3) The fact that he listened to heavy metal and wore black, so was clearly a satanist.

That was it. Not one scrap of physical evidence. Nothing in the prosecution's case added up. Jesse's account of what happened on the day of the murder didn't even match the known facts of the case. It took the police 12 hours of suggestion to get him to change his story enough so that everything married up. They maintained that the boys carried these murders out in darkness, there in the woods, yet somehow, these young boys had managed to clean up every last drop of blood and forensic evidence from the crime scene.

16 years later they still rot in jail, although DNA breakthroughs since the initial trial have all but proved their innocence (and implicated one of the victim's step fathers)

Even some of the parents of the murdered boys are now convinced of these men's innocence and are actively campaigning for their release.

Yet to do so, would mean the Arkansas law makers admitting they'd made a terrible mistake, which has ruined the lives of three innocent men and allowed a child killer to walk the streets a free man for all this time.

It seems that is too bitter a pill to swallow.

What's more unsettling is to think that this is only in the public arena because HBO decided to document the case at the time. How many other witch hunts and miscarriages of justice have their been in other small towns that we'll never get to find out about?

And if this is happening in The Land Of The Free, the mind boggles as the sheer numbers of innocent people currently locked up or worse around the world as we speak.

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