I don’t usually waste my time following high profile court cases. For one thing, they smack a bit too much of gossip. For another, the high profile cases are usually pretty stupid. Oh, and they’re always tied in some way to a pretty white girl.

But every now and then I do pay attention, and today is one of those days. Word came out today that the West Memphis Three are finally going to be freed.

Who are the West Memphis Three? They are Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr. and Jason Baldwin from the small town of West Memphis, Arkansas. In 1994 they were convicted of the murder of three eight year old boys - Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers. Anybody who is interested in the details can find them pretty easily. I’m not going to recap the details here. There is no question that the murders of these three boys were brutal and barbaric.

However, there was one small problem. The case against the West Memphis Three – whom were all teenagers at the time – was pretty shoddy. Again, the details aren’t hard to find, but some of the problems in the case are:

  • The initial investigation’s characterization of the murders as part of some “Satanic ritual” is highly questionable.
  • A key statement by one of the witnesses was later recanted and she claimed that the police had coerced her into making that statement.
  • In an unrecorded police interview, one of the teenagers (Damien Echols) was asked to speculate about how the boys died. His description supposedly gave details that hadn’t been made public yet – but it was later revealed that it had indeed been public information since very shortly after the bodies were found.
  • The “confession” of one of the teenagers, Jessie Misskelley Jr. (borderline mentally retarded) was given after a grueling session of police interrogation and was very quickly thereafter recanted. It was later ruled an invalid confession by the Arkansas Supreme Court.
  • Forensic analysis later proved that the three victims had not actually been raped as initially assumed.
The case against the boys essentially rested on the pillar that because they were Wiccans and Heavy Metal fans, they must have been guilty of these Satanic ritual killings that very likely weren’t actually Satanic rituals at all.
Are Echols, Misskelley, and Baldwin guilty? I don’t know. But I do know that their trial was a travesty of “justice” and that nobody should be convicted on such flimsy “evidence.” Echols was sentenced to death. Baldwin was sentenced to life in prison. Misskelley was sentenced to life plus forty years.
Today, 18 years after their conviction, they will finally be set free.
Why is this important in a Traditionalist/Manosphere blog? Because this case wasn’t an isolated incident. Those of us old enough to remember the 1980s and early 1990s remember that there were two big “fad scares” going around: Satanic cults and pedophilic child kidnapper-murders were everywhere, or so the nightly news would have us believe. The net result of both fads were a number of people, mostly men, being sentenced to long prison terms for crimes that they very possibly didn’t commit.
We can’t solve every case of injustice, and in many ways the injustices around us are continuing to get worse. But today we can celebrate that these three men who probably (but not definitively) aren’t guilty are being set free.