The absence of physical evidence tying Echols and Baldwin to the crime was not due to any lack of effort on the part of the investigators. They took samples of hair, blood, and saliva as well as fingerprints and shoeprints from all three suspects and found nothing that matched the evidence at the crime scene. Nothing.124 As Dr. Peretti had testified at the first trial, and would testify again at this trial, there was also no physical evidence that the boys had been sodomized by anyone, much less by these two particular defendants. Because of Peretti’s testimony, the defense lawyers asked Burnett to bar the prosecutors from claiming the boys had been sodomized, but he ruled that they could continue to make this claim despite the lack of any supporting evidence.125
The prosecution’s hearsay evidence was every bit as dubious as the fiber evidence (and Misskelley’s confession). In addition to the now admittedly false testimony of Vicki Hutcheson, there was the equally false testimony of a sixteen-year-old jailhouse informant named Michael Carson. On the witness stand, Carson claimed that, in August 1993, Baldwin, whom he’d met less than twenty-four hours before, had confessed the crime to him. “He told me how he dismembered the kids,” Carson testified. “He sucked the blood from the penis and scrotum and put the balls in his mouth.”126 Leaving aside the fact that only one “kid” had been “dismembered,” and the fact that over the course of several interviews with the police Carson named five different days as the day Baldwin confessed to him (one of them a day after Carson was released from the detention center),127 his statement is hard to accept. First, Baldwin had maintained his innocence from the very beginning, so it seems highly unlikely that he would confide his guilt to someone he had known for less than twenty-four hours; second, Carson waited five months to mention this conversation to anyone; third, he had a long history of drug abuse and lying; and fourth, given the criminal charges against him at the time, he might have been hoping that his testimony would win him some leniency.128
The prosecution was clearly aware that Carson’s story was difficult to swallow, for when Fogleman and Davis met with the victims’ families before the trial, they warned them that the jury might not believe him.129 What they didn’t tell the families—or the jury—was that Danny Williams, a former counselor at the juvenile detention center where Baldwin and Carson had been held, told Davis on February 14 that Carson’s claims were false and that they were based on rumors he had himself told Carson during a therapy session. Williams offered to testify in the trial, but Burnett ruled that his testimony could not be admitted because it would “violate the therapist/client privilege of a minor.”130 It is perplexing how testimony that did not include a single word that Carson had said in confidence could be construed as violating his right to confidentiality. The court inexplicably chose to protect a minor from losing his right to confidentiality (even though nothing confidential would be revealed) rather than protect another minor from being wrongly sentenced to death or imprisoned for life.
Like Hutcheson, Carson has since retracted his testimony. Their retractions and further evidence of their perjury will be discussed in more detail later.
The final hearsay evidence came from two girls, one twelve and the other thirteen, who claimed they had overheard Echols tell a group of people at a softball game that he’d killed the three boys. The older girl, Jodee Medford, also said that Echols had said “he was going to kill two more and he already had one of them picked out.”131 There were discrepancies in the girls’ testimony that cast doubt on their accounts, however. In a June 7, 1993, statement, Jodee Medford said that her sister Jackie and her friend Christy Van Vickle, the younger girl who testified at the trial, were with her at the time Echols supposedly confessed and that Baldwin was not present. Four days later, however, she changed her story to say that Baldwin was present, and in her testimony in court she repeated that claim but this time said her sister Jackie and Van Vickle were not with her. Van Vickle testified, on the other hand, that Jackie Medford was there when she overheard Echols but Jodee Medford was not. Also, Van Vickle’s testimony was nothing if not vague. She said she could not remember anything Echols had said before or after his “confession.”132 Both girls said they’d reported this incident to their mothers, but no one had alerted police about it until after the arrests.133 Donna Medford, Jodee’s mother, also testified, confirming that Jodee had told her what Damien had said. She has since signed a sworn affidavit indicating that “Echols’s statement was not serious and that neither she nor her daughter believes he committed the crime.”134
The State’s case was not limited to physical evidence and hearsay, however. It also relied on inaccurate testimony from investigators, particularly Detective Ridge, and unsubstantiated statements by the prosecutors. Whether by mistake or design, Ridge said under oath that Echols told him that “all people have a demonic force in them and that the person [who committed the murders] would have no control over that demonic force.” According to Ridge’s notes of his interview with Echols, however, Echols had stated the exact opposite, that people do have control over the demonic force in them. Ridge also said that Echols told him Anton LaVey was his favorite author. There is no reference to LaVey in Ridge’s notes, and Echols testified that he told Ridge that “I haven’t read anything by him, but I am familiar with him.” Similarly, Davis tried to suggest that Echols had told Ridge that he had read works by Aleister Crowley, but again, there is no evidence of that in Ridge’s notes. The fact that Echols testified that he would have read Crowley’s books if he’d had the opportunity suggests that he was not trying to hide his interest in occult writers and would have admitted to reading LaVey and Crowley if he had done so.135
The emphasis on the occult in Ridge’s misrepresentations of the truth suggests that the State’s case relied less on any physical or even hearsay evidence than it did on the premise that the crimes were satanic in nature. As Leveritt has said, the State’s case was based on a ludicrously illogical “triangulation”: “By linking the crime to the words ‘the occult,’ then linking Damien and Jason to those words, [the State] indirectly linked them to the crime. The judge allowed the tactic and—voilà! That easily—and that insubstantially—the bedeviling absence of evidence was overcome.”136 The prosecution’s central argument could be summed up, in short, via this deeply flawed “syllogism”:
Major Premise: Echols and Baldwin were interested in the occult.
Minor Premise: The murders were part of a satanic ritual.
Conclusion: Echols and Baldwin committed the murders.
Of the three parts of this quasi-syllogism, only half of one is demonstrably true: Echols was indeed interested in the occult. No testimony or evidence established that Baldwin shared his interest, however. There was also no evidence that the murders were part of an occult ritual, and even if there had been, the fact that a person has an interest in the occult doesn’t constitute proof that he committed murder.
But this lack of logic didn’t deter the prosecution. They proceeded to make the case that the murders were occult-related by introducing as “evidence” such things as Echols’s taste in literature, music, art, and clothing. Among the items introduced as evidence were: his testimony that he liked to read Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Dean Koontz; lines he’d copied into his journal from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, The Twilight Zone, and Metallica’s And Justice for All, which Echols described at his trial as being “about how warped the court systems are”; the cover from the Metallica tape Master of Puppets137; testimony from various people that Echols regularly wore black T-shirts, black jeans, and a black trench coat138; and his own poems and drawings. Ridge testified that the fact that Echols read Stephen King novels was “strange”139 and was one reason he suspected Echols was involved in the murders. Fogleman cited “obsession with heavy metal music” and “wearing all black” as common indications that someone was involved in occult activity, and he read into evidence the number of black T-shirts and heavy metal music posters Echols owned.140 Later, in his closing argument, F
ogleman would refer to this and other evidence he admitted was “circumstantial,” saying to the jury, “Ladies and gentlemen, each item, in and of itself, doesn’t mean somebody would be motivated to murder—not in and of itself. But you look at it together, and . . . you begin to see inside Damien Echols. You see inside that person, and you look inside there, and there’s not a soul there.”141
Once Fogleman had linked Echols to the occult through his taste in literature, music, art, and clothing, he proceeded to link the crime to the occult and, by implication, to Echols. He called to the stand “Dr.” Dale W. Griffis, a self-described “cult expert” who admitted on cross-examination that he had received his Ph.D. from an unaccredited mail-order institution—Columbia Pacific University, a diploma mill eventually shut down by the State of California for fraud in 2000—without having taken a single class.142 (Paul Ford, Baldwin’s lead attorney, said in his closing argument that Griffis “didn’t go to college, he went to the post office.”143) Griffis testified that he had read 4,800 books on the occult since 1976 (an average of one a day)144 and had written four books of his own, The Four Faces of Satan; Runes, Glyphs, and Alphabets; The Investigation Manual for Non-Traditional Groups; and A Primer for Law Enforcement on Non-Traditional Groups. In fact, the first of these “books” was an article in a newsletter, the second was a mere thirty-two pages long and “prepared by the staff of Dale W. Griffis,” and the third and fourth titles appear to refer to a single fifteen-page text. All of these “books” were self-published.145 Griffis did later coauthor a full-length book, one that demonstrates just how unreliable a witness he was. Titled Secret Weapons: Two Sisters’ Terrifying True Story of Sex, Spies and Sabotage, the book claims that two sisters were inducted at the age of six “into a covert, government-authorized, mind-control program designed to spawn spies and assassins,” subjected to rape and torture, given “weaponry, martial arts and flight training,” and then, as teenagers, under new identities (one of them male), forced to take part in covert military operations and assassinations, after which they were brainwashed to forget all of these experiences. According to this 2001 book, Griffis, who now claimed to be a “ritual abuse expert,” was instrumental in helping the girls recover their “lost memories.”146
Riordan has said, “There is probably no greater disgrace in the history of death penalty litigation in this country [than] that Dale Griffis was placed on the stand.”147 It is particularly disgraceful that such a person was allowed to testify about his opinion of the crimes’ satanic nature when legitimate experts like Warren Holmes and Richard Ofshe were not allowed to testify regarding their opinions that Misskelley’s confession was involuntary and false.
But allowed to testify Griffis was. In testimony every bit as unreliable as any that occurred in Salem, Massachusetts, three centuries before, he claimed that wearing black clothing was a common indication that someone was involved in Satanism.148 “If any person wears a black tee shirt,” he said, “that is a factor that I would consider in determining if this case has trappings of occultism.”149 In addition, he testified that injuries on the left side of one victim were evidence that the murders were part of a satanic ritual. Satanists, he argued, “use a mid-line theory, drawing straight down through the body. The right hand side is usually related to those things which is [sic] synonymous with Christianity, and the left hand path is that which is [related to] practitioners of the satanic occult systems.” Hill has commented: “Although the majority of the injuries were on the right-hand side of the body, Griffis didn’t suggest this meant a Christian killing.”150
Griffis also testified that since eight is a “witches’ number,”151 the fact that the boys were eight years old was evidence that the murders were part of a satanic ritual, as was the fact that there were three victims. “One of the most powerful numbers in the practice of satanic belief,” he explained, “is six-six-six, and some believe the base root of six is three.”152 (Evidently Griffis’s expertise did not extend to other religions, for when Val Price, one of Echols’s court-appointed public defenders, asked Griffis if the number three was “also significant in Christianity, for example, and other religions,” he responded, “I cannot make that statement.”153) While there’s no evidence that Echols ever invoked the number 666, there is evidence that the police did: the original docket number assigned to Echols’s case was 93-05-0555, but someone changed its final three letters to 666.154
Griffis said that a drawing Echols had made of “an individual that had the head of a satanic goat” further convinced him that the murders were cult-related, though he didn’t explain what made the goat’s head “satanic.” He also cited Echols’s writings as evidence that he was involved in the occult. Fogleman agreed, saying Echols’s drawings and writing revealed his “belief system” and “state of mind.”155
To back up this assertion, in his closing argument Fogleman read one of Echols’s poems to the jury, a poem he described as defining the conflict between the good and the satanic within him. The poem read:
I want to be in the middle,
in neither the black nor the white,
in neither the wrong nor the right,
to stand right on the line,
to be able to go to either side with a moment’s notice.
I’ve always been in the black, in the wrong.
I tried to get into the white,
but I almost destroyed it
because the black tried to follow me.
This time I won’t let it.
I will be in the middle.
Though the poem was written long before Echols was arrested, it nonetheless reads like a commentary on the investigators, prosecutors, and jurors and the wrongs they committed in their self-righteous pursuit of justice—the “blackness” that followed them into their “white.” But Fogleman didn’t see it this way, of course. After reading the poem, he told the jury, “That right there tells you Damien Echols. He don’t wanna be in the white. He don’t wanna be good. He wants to be both, where he can go to the good side or the bad side, however it suits his purpose. If he wants to do bad, let’s go to the satanic side. If he wants to be good, he goes to the Wiccan side. That poem right there tells you about Damien Echols.”156
When I asked Echols in June 2005 how he felt when Fogleman used his poem as evidence against him, he said that at the time he was more upset about having his private thoughts and feelings made public than about being convicted and sentenced to death. At first his answer surprised me, but then I remembered that he was still a teenager when he was convicted, and at that age the fear of embarrassment trumps virtually all other fears, even the fear of death. Also, as Echols explained, back then he didn’t believe it was possible for an innocent person to be convicted of a crime without any evidence, and he thought that everything would be straightened out soon. Having his private thoughts and feelings revealed to the world upset him so much that for three years he didn’t write another word—and this was someone who had filled several notebooks with poems by the time he was arrested.
While Fogleman was able to link Echols’s poetry and literary tastes to the occult, all in an effort to persuade the jury that the murders were part of a satanic ritual, he had no evidence that Baldwin shared this interest. Even the wildly imaginative, not to say delusional, “Dr.” Griffis said he was unable to find “any evidence that establishes a link between Jason Baldwin and the occult.”157 So the prosecutors approached Baldwin with a deal: if he’d testify against Echols, he would receive a substantially reduced sentence. But just as Misskelley refused to testify against Echols and Baldwin, Baldwin refused to testify against Echols. In a 2009 letter published in the Arkansas Times, he wrote:
One day I was offered a choice. I was told the only hope in the world I had was to turn “state” against Damien Echols and testify under oath that he murdered those three boys. The problem with this choice was the fact that I did not know who murdered those boys. For the life of me I did not believe Damien did—and even if I
had a “belief” as to who could have done the murders, the simple fact remained that I did not know who committed them. . . . [Sixteen] years later I do not regret my choice. . . . Tonight I rest easy knowing that when I was confronted with the choice to protect innocent life, I made the right one.158
The jury, however, made the wrong choice. Misled by the police, the prosecution, news reports, the false testimony of Hutcheson and Carson, and the bizarre fantasies of Griffis, on March 18 they found Echols and Baldwin guilty, and on March 19 they sentenced Baldwin to life in prison without the possibility of parole and Echols to death.
The Appeal Process and New Evidence
The process of appealing a conviction is extremely slow and convoluted, and to summarize all the steps would be tedious and time-consuming. Suffice it to say that from 1994 through 2010, Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley filed a series of motions and appeals based on ineffective counsel, prosecutorial and juror misconduct, new evidence, and other grounds, and that virtually all of them were denied, usually by Burnett, the very judge who heard the original trials. Even though Burnett officially retired in December 2008, he continued adjudicating the appeals in this case (and no others) until mid-January 2010. What’s more, he continued to oversee the appeals even after he announced his intention to run for the state senate. According to the Arkansas State Constitution, when a judge files for a non-judicial political office, he automatically vacates his judgeship. Since Burnett didn’t formally file for the senate until March 2010, he did not technically violate the law, but as a declared state senate candidate serving as a judge, he certainly violated its spirit. Journalist John Brummett has noted, “There’s a rule of judicial conduct that requires a judge to avoid even any appearance of impropriety. But Burnett has disregarded that.”159
Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row Page 36