I first met Damien Echols when I visited him on death row at the Supermax Varner Unit in Grady, Arkansas, when I began to work on this case at the behest of his wife and co-founder of Arkansas Take Action, Lorri Davis. Lorri and Damien were aware that I had helped lead the public campaign to free Martin Tankleff in New York. Marty served 18 years of a 50 years to life sentence based upon a coerced, false confession. Sound familiar?
What is most familiar about the Marty Tankleff and West Memphis 3 cases, however, is the behavior of the prosecutors. When I first met Damien, he asked if police and prosecutors in New York were different from those in Arkansas, maybe more sensitive to the rule of law, concerned with common decency and honesty. Nothing could be worse, he reasoned, than what he has experienced at the hands of prosecutors over the past eighteen years.
I wish I could have had a better, more hopeful answer for him. “The only thing different about prosecutors in New York is their accents,” I told him.
Arkansas District Attorney Dustin McDaniel seems intent on doing anything he can to be uncooperative in the evidentiary hearings being briefed before Judge David Laser in Craighead County Court, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. In the District Attorney’s opposition brief filed on February 18, 2011, prosecutors have expressed their desire to fight the defense on additional DNA testing, as well as on the shocking juror misconduct which introduced Jessie’s patently false confession into deliberations in Damien and Jason’s trial.
The State put huge emphasis on the value of forensic evidence and the lack thereof at the crime scene and it should therefore welcome any additional information that could clear up any misgivings as to who may have committed this crime.
In 1993 DNA testing was in its infancy and many items of evidence in this case yielded no useful result or were deemed too small to test. Since that time DNA testing has taken exponential leaps forward. We are merely requesting the opportunity to test items that have not been tested or were not deemed worthy of testing in 1993.
The multitude of post-conviction DNA exonerations tells us that science can be a more reliable arbiter of justice than jurors, who, being human, like prosecutors, are subject to human error. We assume the State places far more value on finding out the truth than in protecting three possible wrongful convictions.
It’s all in the accents, Damien.
Lonnie Soury