The Empathy Exams: Essays

by Leslie Jamison

  He returns to Robin Hood Hills a few years after the murders in a cowboy hat and overalls, using a machete to hack his way through the tall grasses that have grown where a crime scene used to be. The grass has moved on, the scene suggests, but Byers is in exactly the same place. He’s so attached to performing rituals—for an audience, or else for himself—that he’s grown impatient to deliver on a promise before its time: I’ll spit on your graves, when they’re not even dead. He makes grass mounds and calls them tombs. He douses them with lighter fluid. “My baby will put his foot across your throat,” he announces to the spirits of the accused—who are, by now, the convicted. It’s an odd prophecy: My baby will put his foot … He resurrects his eight-year-old son as a vengeful creature, caught as deeply in this anger as he is.

  He lights his cigarette and then drops the match. Flames crackle the dry grass and Byers mashes them with the heels of his cowboy boots. He seems compelled by something powerfully internal and beyond his mastery, but the scene feels weirdly low budget. It’s like somebody trying to make a home movie about hell. “You wanted to eat my baby’s testicles?” Byers asks the air. “Burn, you sonofabitch. Burn.”

  By the end of the scene, Byers’s theatrics just feel tired. He makes you cringe too much. He’s exhausting to watch. I imagine he got tired as well. He’s furious at everyone: the woman who tutored Jessie for his GED, the people who say the justice system is corrupt, the people who say the justice system isn’t corrupt. He’s furious at an ever-shifting they. His life is lived toward them. They haunt him. They haunts him.

  He has an unnerving way of veering between wounded dis-orientation and rabid anger. There’s a sad slowness to his manner sometimes, and sometimes a scripted rage, but a sense of abiding effort, a kind of struggling for purchase, is common between these modes. He’s like a bad actor playing the role of grieving father. This constant aura of performance is why I think he’d actually make a difficult subject, even if at first glance he looked like a perfect one. It seems like he’s working so hard to pretend he’s something he actually is: a father who’s lost his son. It’s hard to trust any sliver of raw emotion underneath the stilted emotion he performs—the absurdity of his furious indignation, which robs him of precisely the sympathy he thinks it will summon.

  There’s a scene where Byers and Todd Moore crouch in a field and take turns shooting a pumpkin. For a while Byers steals the show as usual, calling each boy’s name as he kills him: “Oh Jessie!” “Jason! Blow me a kiss!” There’s a stubborn ferocity to the way Byers invokes the possibility of these boys being raped in prison, as if he’s earned the right to imagine it—to take pleasure, even, in imagining it. But as with so much of his anger, it feels weirdly stale. He’s playing a part. Todd Moore is trying to learn the script. “What kind of range we got in that courtroom?” he asks, inspecting the gun, like an apprentice to the craft of Byers’s alchemy—his crusade to turn sorrow to vengeance, to turn three dead boys into six.

  I feel betrayed by Moore. I wanted him to be the parent for whom my sympathy could be complete. Instead it’s corrupted by this terrible sadness at the impulse toward retribution—how we crave it and how it deforms us, how it whittles everything to an empty field, a pumpkin riddled with bullets, the crisp thwick, thwick, thwick of each shot.

  The Anger

  When I watched these films as a teenager, I got drunk. I wanted to feel things without thinking them through. Anger lifted me into a sentimental flurry urgent enough to match what I’d seen. These filmmakers are curators of outrage; they entrust you with an injustice it hurts to hold. So you figure out somewhere to put it. Some folks started a protest movement—Free the West Memphis Three—while others gave millions of dollars to their defense. I got drunk and pretended to be a lawyer. I gave impassioned speeches to my hallway mirrors. This is not justice! I delivered closing arguments to no one.

  Of course, that’s not the whole story. Because I knew some part of me was glad for it. For it? For the injustice. Some part of me liked feeling spellbound by it. I rose up against it and felt myself shaped by this opposition.

  We like who we become in response to injustice: it makes it easy to choose a side. Our capacity to care, to get angry, is called forth like some muscle we weren’t entirely aware we had.

  Or I guess I should say, I. Why project the shame of this rubber-necking onto everyone? I don’t want to suggest I wasn’t genuinely troubled, hurt, aching for these boys—I thought of them for the next ten years, and wrote Jason several letters in prison, never returned—but I admit that some part of me enjoyed these films. I didn’t enjoy what was happening, but I enjoyed who I was while I was watching it. It offered evidence of my own inclination toward empathy.

  Back then, when I practiced playing defense lawyer for the boys who were accused, I wasn’t thinking as much about the boys who’d died. It was only years later I found their autopsy reports online. All three were found naked, covered with mud and leaves. All three showed “washerwoman” wrinkling of the hands and feet from their submersion in the water.

  Their bodies are cataloged in terms of injuries—cuts, bruises, and skull fractures, stripped skin and contusions, “semi-lunar abrasions” above their lips, below their ears, feces around their anuses, the residue of unimaginable fear. The weight of their organs is listed in grams. Christopher’s right lung weighed ten grams more than his left; so did Stevie’s. The autopsy reports move with chilling under-statement between descriptions of the bodies and descriptions of their damage: “The irises were green. The corneae were clear … Fly larvae were present in the left periorbital region.” The language occasionally turns lyrical. The toxicology report on Christopher includes the following entry on his penis: “Bacterial colonies. A few ghost remnants of red blood cells.” Ghost remnants. Every beautiful description of violence becomes—in its beauty—a violation of its object.

  The word unremarkable shows up in odd places. Perhaps, in these documents, it would feel odd anywhere. Stevie Branch’s report offers his body in summary: “The chest and abdomen were unremarkable, except for the injuries to be described further below. The penis showed injuries as described below. The upper and lower extremities showed no abnormalities except for the injuries … described below.” He was sixty-five pounds and blond. His body was unremarkable except for the ways in which it had been brutalized. He was naked save one item: “A cloth friendship bracelet was present around the right wrist.”

  Why didn’t I spend more time thinking about these boys when I first heard the story of their deaths? Maybe because they were past reclamation. So I got angry about the boys who could still be saved.

  In a way, I got angry just like the parents of the victims got angry, only the objects of my anger were different. If you’re a juror, or a mother, or an ordinary citizen of an ordinary town, you are delivered an outrage—as a witness, or a victim—and you have to purge or off-load it somehow. So you get scared. You fling the hurt wherever it will stick. You make sense of it however you can. The parents wanted three men to go to prison; they wanted them to hurt, to burn, to die. I get angry at their intolerance, their unwillingness to consider any option besides guilt, their insistence on the easiest possible narrative as salve for their pain. The more they insist upon their right to vengeance, the less sympathy I have for them.

  In getting mad at them, I suspect I’m doing precisely what I hate the system for doing: looking for a scapegoat. Their faces offer convenient vessels to hold my free-floating notions about a wrongness that cannot be accounted for. Individuals are easier targets than a faceless justice system too large to hate. I remind myself: these parents are only blaming the guys they’ve been told to blame. Which is another casualty of the justice system—not just robbing three boys of their freedom, but robbing three families of their grief, insisting that they turn this grief to something else. The police and the courts—with their conviction, in both senses, their certainty and their verdict—invited these families to trade grace for vengeance.
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  With the victims’ families, I find myself veering wildly between anger and guilt. I feel such sadness for what their grief must be like—forcing them to live inside such rage on top of their unimaginable loss. They lost their children, and in return were offered the chance to become complicit in a burning.

  Prairie burning is the name for what happens when people set fire to the land so that it will grow. It’s a controlled devastation, like irradiating cancer cells that rebel against a body, or amputating a foot gone black with gangrene. Years ago witches were torched like fields. Their bodies bore the controlled burn. Their bodies held evil like vessels so that evil would not be understood as something diffused across other bodies, across everyone.

  The Trial

  It’s the imperative of efficiency that got these boys accused and the mechanics of pride that got them convicted. Gary Gitchell, the chief inspector of the West Memphis police, is the face of this efficiency. At a press conference early in the first film, when asked about the strength of his case on a scale of one to ten, he says, “Eleven.” He says “eleven” and people clap. They laugh.

  It’s an eleven the state of Arkansas will overturn, eighteen years later, when it sets these boys free as men. But in the documentary, eleven stands, immortalized forever. People laugh at this eleven because they need it so badly. They laugh from relief. They want to believe in what Gitchell’s words imply about the justice system and the nature of wrongdoing—they need to believe that for every irrefutable tragedy, there’s an irrefutable way to make things right again.

  “I think the cops just can’t find who done it,” says Jessie Sr., shortly after his son’s arrest. He’s sitting in a recliner. He has a red face and dirty hands. He’s a mechanic. He looks calm. When Jessie is released, years later, father and son will bow out of the public festivities and get some barbecue instead. But Jessie Sr., trapped in this moment, doesn’t know about that barbecue—doesn’t know that it’s coming; or how many nights lie between. For eighteen years of phone calls, his teeth will show when he laughs. The camera already knows that, and brings you close to his face to show something animal in his laughter—not something brute, but something having to do with survival. It hurts to be this close to the simple fact of his mouth, the white of his teeth.

  This intimate attention is constant across these films; it thickens their world and makes them ache. The same bikes dredged up from the creek are shown after the verdicts, being loaded into a van—presumably about to get shoved away for good in some dark storage locker of evidence. Or the camera lingers for an extra moment on the steel toilet in Jessie’s cell—the same one that bruised his fist but did not break it. If you can move it, it ain’t broken. If you can breathe in prison, you are still living. If you show teeth, you are laughing; if you can laugh, you are surviving.

  This finely textured camera work forces empathy to effuse in all directions, even where it isn’t meant to go. You get so close to everyone, you can feel sorry for anyone. The angles are exacting and perceptive, catching tremors of pain on parents’ faces during trial, or flash-fissures of doubt from one of Gitchell’s officers on the witness stand—a sudden flick of his eyes, a moment of panic at having goofed up, at revealing a chink in the system—another testimony that everyone here is nervous, including the police officers who seem so smug. Everyone is afraid of something.

  The films also do a fantastic job of capturing odd moments of triviality, the disconcertingly casual texture of being sentenced to die for a crime you didn’t commit. Life can’t feasibly be lived as dire gravity at every moment. The films get this. Sitting with his lawyers, Damien goes over a low point in his testimony. He was daydreaming, he explains, and only halfway paying attention to the question.

  “Maybe they’ll only halfway kill you,” his lawyer replies.

  Damien laughs. The camera zooms in, as if querying: how could he laugh? And then it lingers a moment, as if suggesting, even insisting, since no response could be appropriate, in the sense of expected or adequate, since appropriate no longer means anything here—how could he not laugh? Who cares if he does?

  As teenagers on camera, Damien and Jason giggle when they remember the night they got arrested. They were just watching TV on the couch. “Pigs busted in,” Damien says, and they shake their heads, as if they still can’t believe it. They laugh. Eleven. People laugh. Part of this whole saga still feels like a movie to Damien and Jason; even when they’re on trial it’s still a little bit absurd—and, for one saving moment of absurdity, not really happening. They tried to hide in a bedroom and turn off the lights. But the police wouldn’t go away. Not for another eighteen years.

  The Bond

  The friendship between these boys comes across as something deeply felt. At the hearing that sets them free, Jason will submit a plea he doesn’t believe in, admitting legal guilt, in order to save Damien’s life. (Damien was the only one of the three on death row.) Damien thanks him for this willingness at their press conference. For the first time in nearly twenty years, they hug. It’s hard to imagine what this hug would feel like, how intimate or inadequate—touching the body of a man who’d lost his life, just like you’d lost yours, but was still alive, just as you were, and now free. They lean across micro-phones, awkwardly, to embrace.

  Damien closes his memoir with a simple moment: catching sight of Jason in prison. This was 2005. They were both living in the Varner Unit, a prison near Pine Bluff. They went for years without contact until Jason appeared out of the blue one day, on the other side of a glass wall. “He raised his hand and smiled,” Damien writes, “then he was gone, like a ghost.” It’s a sad scene because nothing happens. That’s what they have, all they have: a glass wall, a raised hand—one of them ghosted and the other haunted.

  When they were boys, Damien and Jason had an entire world to disavow. There were arcade games to play and curfews to break and trailer parks to ditch, and there was music fierce enough to lend every breakage resonance. So much music: Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth. So much volume. In Damien’s memoir, the only relationships that appear flawless are his friendship with Jason and their shared love affair with music. They lived for it. They were always two boys crouching in a dark bedroom, waiting to be left alone, itching for sound.

  I’ve often imagined my life with a sound track. Like we all have. I’ve heard music bloating the stories of my life, lifting common-place discontent to the pitch of tragic drama. I think of this bloat as Metallica thrums under the vistas of Damien’s story: sprawling trailers and blurred big rigs, yellow crime tape flapping in the breeze. Damien was given a sound track, probably the one he’d always heard anyway, but for reasons he’d never imagined—and it couldn’t comfort him during the days of his incarceration because he had no access to a stereo in prison. It couldn’t hold his emotions, deepen or soothe them—it can only do these things for us, now, as we watch a movie about his life. Surging chords of Metallica aren’t the sound track of Damien’s story so much as the sound track of our story of his story, which is to say: the story of our hearts breaking for him.

  The Reason

  One of the brilliant narrative betrayals of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, the grandfather of all highbrow true crime, is that the criminals at its center, the men who killed an entire family, ultimately emerge with no motive besides money. This feels like a second death: it makes the deaths feel meaningless by taking away the possibility of any affective frame that could explain them. The murderer at the center of the book, Perry Smith, is described as “capable of dealing, with or without motive, the coldest deathblows.” With or without, that casual eitherness, is terrifying.

  It’s easier, somehow, if there’s a reason for tragedy—lust or jealousy or hatred or revenge. We can find in these explanations an emotional tenor commensurate with the gravity of the act. There’s something we recognize as human, a motive toward which we can direct our rage but can also understand, at some primal level, as an extension of ourselves.

  “I see no m
otive,” says a disembodied voice in the first film, while the camera prowls the forest floor—getting close to the ground as if hunting for it, this lost motive, nestled in tangled tree roots or buried in a creek gully long gone dry. The parents need an explanation. So do reporters. So do prosecutors. There’s no motive apparent so motives are found. The press says “Satanic orgy.” The parents seem convinced of devil worship. Damien calls West Memphis “Second Salem.”

  “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote, meaning frightened people need motives. Meaning everyone does.

  A preacher remembers Damien saying he couldn’t be saved. He hadn’t taken the Bible into his heart. Damien self-identifies as Wiccan—which he explains on the stand as “basically a close involvement with nature.” Hearing him say this, I can’t help thinking of the woods. I think of three boys lying hog-tied. I don’t hear guilt, but I hear the connective tissue of imagining—how, faced with a tragedy, you want to put the pieces together any way they might fit. I spend a lot of time thinking about what happens in the minds of jurors. Who were they? What were they afraid of? What did a guilty verdict offer them that innocence wouldn’t have?

  The films demand point-of-view train hopping as an ethical imperative—just when you’ve gotten deep inside the groove of someone’s pain, you are jolted suddenly into the pain of another. This empathy is thrown into relief by the fact that, in the films, empathy is rare. Which is understandable. The parents of these boys suffer deep into particulars. Washerwoman wrinkling. Fly larvae. Ghost remnants. How could a mother live with these details? Anger burns them like fuel. A man crushes fire with his cowboy boots.

  These grieving parents are cocooned by anger, the only structure in which they find shelter. They don’t have much energy left over for compassion. They wear their curses like garments. And the mothers that bore them. These mothers are suffering too.