Damien Echols: Will Justice be Denied?

For the last 16 years a young man has sat on death row in an Arkansas prison while two other young men have spent the same amount of years in prison sentenced for life, for a crime all three say they are innocent of committing.

The trail and conviction of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelly known as the Memphis three, may well be the most analyzed police investigation and trial in history and it all began with the horrifying murder of three young boys.

The Crime

On May 5, 1993 three young 8 year old boys went off on their bikes to play together. Steven Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore. The three never came home and the next day their battered bodies were found in a ditch of water. They had been tied with their own shoelaces, beaten, battered, and downed.

The information and misinformation that was soon common knowledge regarding the condition of the bodies and the way their deaths occurred would soon strike fear In the hearts of the West Memphis community who wanted the killers of these three innocent young men brought swiftly to justice.

The Investigation

The investigation into the deaths of these three young children was doomed to failure from the beginning as the police made several errors in judgment right from the beginning.

They delayed calling the coroner to the scene and removed the bodies from the water before he even arrived to get a look at the scene.

Evidence was improperly collected and put in grocery bags from a local supermarket.

A juvenile officer on the scene who was known for his dislike of a young 18 year old high school drop out immediately suggested that Damien Echols was the murdered before the evidence was even given or analyzed.

A report from a local restaurant that was called in the night of disappearances describing a dirty man covered with blood was practically ignored until the next day when police would come to collect samples of the blood the man left behind.

Those samples never reached the crime lab, and there was never any search done for the African American male described by the staff of the restaurant. (Later a hair consistent with an African American would be found on a sheet one of the victims was wrapped in. This evidence would be seen as inconsequential)