The hearing in Jonesboro, Arkansas which ended a few weeks ago represented a watershed in the effort to overturn the convictions of Jason Baldwin, Jessie Misskelley and Damien Echols. Although the Rule 37 hearing for ineffective counsel involved only Jason and Jessie, the evidence presented had a very strong impact on innocence of all three wrongfully convicted young men.
Some of the country’s leading forensic experts, Drs. Werner Spitz, Michael Baden, Richard Souviron and Janice Ophoven, presented compelling scientific testimony that the murders of the young boys in 1993 were not committed with a knife, which was the basis of the prosecution’s entire case. The testimony that the terrible wounds on the children were, in fact, the result of animal bites and scratches while their bodies were in the drainage ditch in Robin Hood Hills, undermines both the cause of death assertions, as well as the prosecution’s motive of a ritualistic killing.
Furthermore, the appearance of Vicki Hutcheson on the witness stand during the last day of the hearings, prepared to testify that she lied in the original trial implicating Jessie, Jason and Damien in satanic cult activity, was chilling.
While Judge Burnett refused to grant her immunity from perjury prosecution and she therefore refused to testify under oath, she confirmed outside the courtroom that she had been virtually forced by the police investigators in West Memphis to make up the story of cult activity and falsely implicate the defendents.
The evidence presented by the forensic experts and other witnesses was so strong and the DA’s office so unprepared to refute it, Judge Burnett quickly postponed the hearings until October to allow the DA to “find” someone to challenge the evidence. Good luck.
New DNA evidence establishing that there was none of the three young men’s DNA at the crime scene while implicating others, new forensic testimony by the country’s leading pathologists, recantations by important witnesses and shocking evidence of juror bias and misconduct during the trials, establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley are innocent. It is time that the Arkansas Supreme Court intervenes and do what is obvious to every impartial observer: overturn the convictions and grant these men a new trial