PARADISE LOST Subjects Freed After 18-year Miscarriage of Justice

 

Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin, three men collectively known as the "West Memphis 3", were freed from prison today after more than 16 years.  The three were wrongly convicted in the 1994 murders of three young boys, a court case that was documented in Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's landmark 1996 documentary PARADISE LOST: THE CHILD MURDERS AT ROBIN HOOD HILLS, which aired on HBO.

The news comes just weeks before PURGATORY, the third film in the PARADISE LOST trilogy, is set to debut at the Toronto International Film Festival.

More from CBS News:

The deal reached Friday is what's known as an Alford plea. Normally, when defendants plead guilty in criminal cases, they admit that they've done the crime in question. But in an Alford plea, defendants are allowed to insist they're innocent, says Kay Levine, a former prosecutor who now teaches criminal law and criminal procedure at Emory University in Atlanta. She is not involved with the Arkansas case.

"It's not an insane strategy decision," Levine said. But, she added: "It's incredibly troubling to us as a free society that people would plead guilty to something that they actually did not do."

In a clip from the forthcoming film [embedded below], Echols is seen telling Berlinger and Sinofsky that if it weren't for the films, he would already be dead.  "I really do believe these people would have gotten away with murdering me if it would not have been for what you guys did, for being there in the very beginning and getting this whole thing on tape so that the rest of the world sees what was happening.  If not for that, these people would have murdered me, swept this under the rug and I wouldn't be anything but a memory right now."

In a statement today, Berlinger said, "What greater gift to a filmmaker than to see their work actually having real world impact."

The first two films drew national and international attention to the West Memphis 3's case, where the prosecution used locals' fear of satanism - along with what appears to be a coerced confesstion by Misskelley - to convict the teens .  Public outrage especially centered on the prosecution's arguments that the defendants' interest in heavy metal music, wearing black clothes and alleged attendance at a Wiccan meeting was evidence of their guilt.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal's John Jurgensen, Berlinger noted that the filmmakers find themselves having to add a new, last-minute ending for their film.

Originally the movie had ended on “a question mark,” Berlinger said, having presented a chronology of the whole case and the emergence in recent years of new evidence, including DNA, that pointed toward a likely hearing next December. On Wednesday, however, the filmmakers rushed to Arkansas after getting a tip that the men would likely go free on time served and a plea to lesser charges.

As the filmmaking team prepared to set up their cameras for what they expected to be a climactic press conference, Berlinger was ebullient about the prospect of shooting some last-minute footage for the movie before it hits the festival: “Now we’re in that funny position and wonderful opportunity of having a much happier ending.”

On Twitter and elsewhere, many were drawing comparisons to Errol Morris' 1988 THE THIN BLUE LINE, which helped free Randall Dale Adams, who had been wrongly convicted in the murder of a Dallas police officer.

Comments

[Tom Hall]

So happy they are free. Still hoping for justice for those three little boys and their families.

All of that said, this once again proves the real problem with our criminal justice system: The state KNOWS it has no evidence but seeks to uphold the convictions anyway. I don't blame the juries in this case (well, I blame the jury who used inadmissible evidence of a coerced confession, but that aside), but for the state not to admit that it has no case and set them free without a sham plea agreement is a joke. Even worse than that (if it is possible) is that by upholding the convictions, the state is released from the responsibility of finding the actual murderer(s), which means those three boys who lost their lives won't get the justice they deserve. I hope that the focus of the West Memphis Three campaign shifts from freeing the wrongly convicted to helping find the real killer(s). If there is DNA evidence that excludes the Echols, Misskelley & Baldwin, maybe it can be used to find the real criminal.

Great news that the WM3 are free at last, but the tragedy lingers over this story.