It has been 17 years since John Fogleman led the tainted prosecution that sent Damien Echols to death row and Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin to prison for life for crimes no reasonable person believes they committed.
Today, the man who pushed past the boundaries of legal ethics to obtain those wrongful convictions seeks a judgeship on the state’s highest court, the Arkansas Supreme Court. The same court will soon decide whether new evidence in Damien Echols’s case, including the uncovering of shocking juror misconduct in the original trial, will be enough to set him free.
In obtaining convictions in the West Memphis 3 trials, Fogleman did exactly what many prosecutors would do when faced with no serious police investigation, no credible witnesses, no evidence linking the accused to the crimes: he closed his eyes to the truth and hoped the lies would convince 12 jurors to agree.
In a report on prosecutorial misconduct and error, the Washington, DC Center for Public Integrity said that “Former Crittenden County deputy prosecuting attorney John Fogleman took part in at least three of the 54 cases [cited in the report from Arkansas]. In one, the court found his conduct to be so prejudicial as to require a new trial. In another, a dissenting judge would have reversed a murder conviction because of Fogleman’s tactics.”
John Fogleman is not the first Fogleman to be involved in a horrible injustice. As a recent CNN article notes, a prominent African-American man named Isadore Banks was chained to a tree and burned to death by a group of white citizens of Marion, Arkansas, 50 years ago, when his father Julian was the city attorney and his uncle John was the prosecuting attorney. When asked if his brother or any other legal authorities conducted an inquest into the gruesome murder, Julian Fogleman said, “I can’t tell you if they did or they didn’t.” Nor does he have any explanation why he himself did not pursue justice in the case when he became prosecutor a few years later. When asked how he feels that the killers were never brought to justice, he says, “I don’t know what to think. It hasn’t happened, but why I don’t know, I just don’t know.”
Fifty people gathered in Marion recently to honor the memory of the murdered man and, after all these years, to seek some measure of justice. Many believe Julian Fogleman knows a lot more than he is telling. Many believe that he and his brother John, who went on to become Chief Justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, stood by silently while the guilty men were never brought to justice for the “lynching” of an innocent man.
Now, 50 years later, his son John Fogleman aspires to the highest judicial position in the state, where he would be responsible for dispensing the ultimate justice in cases that come before the court.
Based upon his actions during and after the convictions of Damien, Jessie and Jason, we can be sure that John Fogleman, like his father and uncle before him, cannot be expected to seek justice. He just wouldn’t know what “to think.”
Lonnie Soury