Wm3 trial

Legally, however, they were allowed to be released using an Alford Plea. Because of their legal status, they are now free men. Many believe the State allowed this because they believed they could not win another conviction.

Others believe the WM3 only signed this knowing they were the guilty party. The truth is only known to those who committed the crime. We try to follow only the law as we write these articles and this is one of those cases where the trial transcripts resulted in a conviction, appeals and ultimately an Alford plea.

At our office we are always invested in the rights of those charged with crimes. As such, we stay up to date on a variety of cases, some high profile and some lesser known. This article is about one of those high profile cases — the arrest and conviction of three teenaged boys known as the West Memphis 3, who spent nearly two decades in prison before being freed due to a public outcry and court appeals. This case strikes as an interesting one because there are a number of questions surrounding the investigation, the trial and the appeals process for each of these young men.

Keep in mind as you read this that in a criminal case, the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt. In , three boys went missing and were later found murdered in a small town in Arkansas.

These were horrific crimes. According to records and trial transcripts, very little police work was actually done before settling in on a main suspect, Damien Echols. Here is how they were led to Mr. It began with a missing persons report for the boys. The town was not really prepared for this type of situation. There were some missed steps, both by searchers and the police.

There were conversations with others who saw the 3 boys and some of those conversations seem to conflict with one another, making it even more confusing. The next morning, Chief Inspector Gary Gitchell announced he would be heading up the search for the missing boys.

In the early afternoon, Steve Jones, a juvenile officer, spotted a black tennis shoe floating in the water of a ditch in the Robin Hood Hills , near where the woods bordered the Blue Beacon car wash.

Fifteen minutes later, Sergeant Mike Allen of the West Memphis Police Department pulled the naked body of a child to banks of the ditch, and yellow crime tape went up around the area. Within an hour, police recovered two more bodies of children. Both were naked, with wrists bound to ankles with shoelaces.

The body of one of the boys, identified as that of Chris Byers, was found with its scrotum gone and its penis skinned. Gitchell walked to the edge of the woods, where a large crowd had gathered, to report the news of their discovery. Upon hearing the news, Terry Hobbs, stepfather of Stevie Branch, fell to the ground and wept. Soon after the bodies were removed from Robin Hood Hills, rumors began circulating that the killings might have been the work of devil worshipers.

Inspector Gitchell did nothing to squelch the rumors when he told reporters that his department was investigating the possibility that the murders were connected with "cult activity.

On May 7, Steve Jones, the juvenile officer who first discovered the bodies, interviewed a troubled local teenager, Damien Echols, who had been under the watchful eye of another juvenile officer, Jerry Driver, for some time.

Echols was a seventeen-year-old dropout with a history of psychiatric problems, including major depression. Echols wrote dark poems, dressed mostly in black, wore long hair, had a tattoo on his upper arm, and was a self-described Wiccan.

In the previous couple of years, Echols allegedly had threatened his former girlfriend and the boy she was then dating, as well as his father. During part of a several month stay with his mother in Oregon in , Echols had been admitted to a psychiatric ward and placed under suicide watch. Returning to Arkansas in the fall, Echols briefly entered a juvenile detention center before being transferred to a psychiatric hospital in Little Rock after biting and attempting to suck blood from the arm of another detainee.

Following his release from the Little Rock hospital, Echols returned to West Memphis, where he met regularly with a social worker at a mental health center. The social worker reported in her notes that Echols told her he might become another "Charles Manson or Ted Bundy. Police questioned Echols about the Robin Hood Hills murders three separate times between May 7 and May 10, twice at the trailer park where he lived and once at the police station.

Echols told investigators he "never heard of" the three boys and that the person who committed the murders was obviously "sick. In his notes of the police station interview, Lt. James Sudbury reported that stated "the killer is probably someone local and that he won't run.

The administering officer concluded that Echols "recorded significant responses indicative of deception. Like Echols, Baldwin denied any involvement in the killings, but detectives on the case increasingly thought otherwise. Investigations might have stalled were it not for the work of a local waitress named Vicki Hutcheson. Hutcheson told police she suspected the killing were cult-related and that she was willing to "play detective.

Hutcheson told authorities that Misskelley, who was mildly mentally retarded, had told her about Echols, his friend who "drank blood and stuff. Jesse agreed, and shortly thereafter brought Damien over to Hutcheson's house and made introductions. What exactly happened between Hutcheson and Echols became clear only years later, but for the benefit of local law enforcement authorities, Vicki hatched quite a tale.

She told investigators that on the night of May 19 she and Jesse were driven by Damien in a red Ford Escort odd, given that Echols had no car and was never once known to have driven one to an "esbat" a gathering of witches in a field outside of town where she encountered ten young people, each with faces and arms painted black, stripping off their clothes and "touching each other. Offended by the naked activity, Hutcheson, according to her story, asked Damien to drive her back home, which he did, leaving Jesse at the orgy.

In late May, Vicki Hutcheson and her eight-year-old son, Aaron, met with detectives. While Vicki shared her story about the esbat, Aaron told authorities the he and the three murdered boys often visited Robin Hood woods together, and that on one visit to the woods they saw five men sitting in a circle chanting and doing "what men and ladies do. Polygraph administrator Bill Durham reported that Hutcheson was telling the truth.

Arrests and a Confession Chief Inspector Gary Gitchell Convinced by the polygraph results that they had their murderer, the police pick up Jesse Miskelley for questioning about 9 A.

In a polygraph interview, Jesse initially denies participating in either Satanic rituals or the murders, but Detective Durham tells another officer Jesse is "lying his ass off. After hours of harsh questioning by Gitchell and Ridge, Jesse begins to tell the officers what they want to hear: that he and Damien and Jason committed the murders.

Later, Jesse would offer this account of his experience: I kept telling [Inspector Gitchell and Detective Ridge] I didn't know who did it--I just knew of it--what my friend had told me. But they kept hollering at me They kept saying they knew I had something to do with it, because other people had told 'em.

After I told 'em what the three boys were wearing, Gary Gitchell told me, was any of them tied up? That's when I went along with him. I repeated what he told me. I said, yes they were tied up. He asked, "What was they tied up with? He got mad. He told me, "God damn it , Jesse, don't mess with me. They was tied up with shoestrings. They hollered at me until I got it right. So whatever he was telling me, I started telling him back.

But I figured something was wrong, 'cause if I'd a killed 'em, I'd a known how I done it. Eventually the inconsistencies that trouble officers such as Jesse saying the murders occurred in the daytime when they actually occurred at night, or that they tied up the boys with rope when the actual murderer used shoelaces are ironed out, and Jesse's story begins to match the known facts of the case.

Some five hours after picking Jesse up, police taped Jesse's "confession. By P. At a press conference the next morning held to announce the arrests, Gary Gitchell is asked how confident he felt about his case, on a one-to-ten scale. Gitchell answers, "Eleven. Aaron now tells a detective that he actually been with the three boys in the woods and witnessed their murders.

According to Aaron's account, he received a call the night before the murders from Jesse Misskelley inviting him to bring his three friends to the woods the next day where they would all "do something.

Then I got away, and he caught me again, and I um, stayed there for about forty seconds and got untied. Then, he said, "They cut off the private spot.

Burnett ruled that Misskelley should be tried separately from Echols and Baldwin. Burnett also ruled that the state could introduce Jesse's confession, despite defense arguments that it was obtained under coercive circumstances. The defense pointed to, among other things, the officers' "repeated refusals to believe his statements," showing Jesse a circle a diagram and telling him he had a choice to be in the circle "with the killers" or outside it "with the police," and playing a spooky audio tape of Aaron Hutcheson's voice in which he said, "Nobody knows what happened but me.

On January 18, , jury selection in the Jesse Misskelley trial began in a one-story cinder block courthouse in Corning, Arkansas. In short order, a jury of seven women and five men was chosen, and John Fogleman rose to deliver the state's opening argument. Fogleman told jurors that while they might find errors and discrepancies in Jesse's confession, they were largely explained by Misskelley's efforts to minimize his own role in the killings. Each described the last time they saw their son on May 5 of the previous year.

Despite the suspicions of defense attorney Stidham that the husband, John Mark Byers, of Melissa Byers might have been involved in the killings, he resisted the temptation to pursue that theory in cross-examination, fearing that to do so might only anger jurors who naturally sympathized with the parents.

King reported that the man with muddy feet, wearing a white cap, black pants, and a blue shirt had blood on his face and arm and appeared "mentally disoriented," but had left the restaurant a few minutes before the officer arrived. When employees entered the women's rest room they discovered blood smeared on the wall. The officer leaves the premises about without ever setting foot inside the restaurant. The sheriff's office said on Wednesday night that it appeared a mother took the lives of her two children before taking her own.

The killing was almost immediately deemed self-defense by the Crawford County Sheriff. Six adults and 3 children were shot. A star running back for Benedictine High School in Cleveland has been arrested in connection with the drive-by shooting and murder of a year-old boy. A judge told a man who admitted to sexually assaulting a shackled inmate to chose between jail or the military, saying: "You are under the gun, young man.

After disappearing during a camping trip, Enrique Roman-Martinez became one of dozens of Fort Bragg soldiers to die recently under unexplained circumstances. At least one showed signs of torture. A Massachusetts judge denied defense attorneys' request on Tuesday to throw out DNA evidence collected from the man charged with the murder of a year-old Google employee out for jog in the Worcester area in Vanessa Marcotte never returned from her run.

A year-old Lebanon resident was part of a duo that was manufacturing and selling 28 "ghost guns" in the area, according to officials. Close this content.