Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row (43 page)

The emphasis on the occult in Ridge’s misrepresentations of the truth suggests that the State’s case relied less on any physical or even hearsay evidence than it did on the premise that the crimes were satanic in nature. As Leveritt has said, the State’s case was based on a ludicrously illogical “triangulation”: “By linking the crime to the words ‘the occult,’ then linking Damien and Jason to those words, [the State] indirectly linked them to the crime. The judge allowed the tactic and—voilà! That easily—and that insubstantially—the bedeviling absence of evidence was overcome.”
¹³⁶
The prosecution’s central argument could be summed up, in short, via this deeply flawed “syllogism”:

Major Premise:
Echols and Baldwin were interested in the occult.

Minor Premise:
The murders were part of a satanic ritual.

Conclusion:
Echols and Baldwin committed the murders.

Of the three parts of this quasi-syllogism, only half of one is demonstrably true: Echols was indeed interested in the occult. No testimony or evidence established that Baldwin shared his interest, however. There was also no evidence that the murders were part of an occult ritual, and even if there had been, the fact that a person has an interest in the occult doesn’t constitute proof that he committed murder.

But this lack of logic didn’t deter the prosecution. They proceeded to make the case that the murders were occult-related by introducing as “evidence” such things as Echols’s taste in literature, music, art, and clothing. Among the items introduced as evidence were: his testimony that he liked to read Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Dean Koontz; lines he’d copied into his journal from Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
,
The Twilight Zone
, and Metallica’s
And Justice for All
, which Echols described at his trial as being “about how warped the court systems are”; the cover from the Metallica tape
Master of Puppets
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; testimony from various people that Echols regularly wore black T-shirts, black jeans, and a black trench coat
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; and his own poems and drawings. Ridge testified that the fact that Echols read Stephen King novels was “strange”
¹³⁹
and was one reason he suspected Echols was involved in the murders. Fogleman cited “obsession with heavy metal music” and “wearing all black” as common indications that someone was involved in occult activity, and he read into evidence the number of black T-shirts and heavy metal music posters Echols owned.
¹⁴⁰
Later, in his closing argument, Fogleman would refer to this and other evidence he admitted was “circumstantial,” saying to the jury, “Ladies and gentlemen, each item, in and of itself, doesn’t mean somebody would be motivated to murder—not in and of itself. But you look at it together, and . . . you begin to see inside Damien Echols. You see inside that person, and you look inside there, and there’s not a soul there.”
¹⁴¹

Once Fogleman had linked Echols to the occult through his taste in literature, music, art, and clothing, he proceeded to link the crime to the occult and, by implication, to Echols. He called to the stand “Dr.” Dale W. Griffis, a self-described “cult expert” who admitted on cross-examination that he had received his Ph.D. from an unaccredited mail-order institution—Columbia Pacific University, a diploma mill eventually shut down by the State of California for fraud in 2000—without having taken a single class.
¹⁴²
(Paul Ford, Baldwin’s lead attorney, said in his closing argument that Griffis “didn’t go to college, he went to the post office.”
¹⁴³
) Griffis testified that he had read 4,800 books on the occult since 1976 (an average of one a day)
¹⁴⁴
and had written four books of his own,
The Four Faces of Satan
;
Runes, Glyphs, and Alphabets
;
The Investigation Manual for Non-Traditional Groups
; and
A Primer for Law Enforcement on Non-Traditional Groups
. In fact, the first of these “books” was an article in a newsletter, the second was a mere thirty-two pages long and “prepared by the staff of Dale W. Griffis,” and the third and fourth titles appear to refer to a single fifteen-page text. All of these “books” were self-published.
¹⁴⁵
Griffis did later coauthor a full-length book, one that demonstrates just how unreliable a witness he was. Titled
Secret Weapons: Two Sisters’ Terrifying True Story of Sex, Spies and Sabotage
, the book claims that two sisters were inducted at the age of six “into a covert, government-authorized, mind-control program designed to spawn spies and assassins,” subjected to rape and torture, given “weaponry, martial arts and flight training,” and then, as teenagers, under new identities (one of them male), forced to take part in covert military operations and assassinations, after which they were brainwashed to forget all of these experiences. According to this 2001 book, Griffis, who now claimed to be a “ritual abuse expert,” was instrumental in helping the girls recover their “lost memories.”
¹⁴⁶

Riordan has said, “There is probably no greater disgrace in the history of death penalty litigation in this country [than] that Dale Griffis was placed on the stand.”
¹⁴⁷
It is particularly disgraceful that such a person was allowed to testify about his opinion of the crimes’ satanic nature when legitimate experts like Warren Holmes and Richard Ofshe were not allowed to testify regarding their opinions that Misskelley’s confession was involuntary and false.

But allowed to testify Griffis was. In testimony every bit as unreliable as any that occurred in Salem, Massachusetts, three centuries before, he claimed that wearing black clothing was a common indication that someone was involved in Satanism.
¹⁴⁸
“If any person wears a black tee shirt,” he said, “that is a factor that I would consider in determining if this case has trappings of occultism.”
¹⁴⁹
In addition, he testified that injuries on the left side of one victim were evidence that the murders were part of a satanic ritual. Satanists, he argued, “use a mid-line theory, drawing straight down through the body. The right hand side is usually related to those things which is [
sic
] synonymous with Christianity, and the left hand path is that which is [related to] practitioners of the satanic occult systems.” Hill has commented: “Although the majority of the injuries were on the right-hand side of the body, Griffis didn’t suggest this meant a Christian killing.”
¹⁵⁰

Griffis also testified that since eight is a “witches’ number,”
¹⁵¹
the fact that the boys were eight years old was evidence that the murders were part of a satanic ritual, as was the fact that there were three victims. “One of the most powerful numbers in the practice of satanic belief,” he explained, “is six-six-six, and some believe the base root of six is three.”
¹⁵²
(Evidently Griffis’s expertise did not extend to other religions, for when Val Price, one of Echols’s court-appointed public defenders, asked Griffis if the number three was “also significant in Christianity, for example, and other religions,” he responded, “I cannot make that statement.”
¹⁵³
) While there’s no evidence that Echols ever invoked the number 666, there is evidence that the police did: the original docket number assigned to Echols’s case was 93-05-0555, but someone changed its final three letters to 666.
¹⁵⁴

Griffis said that a drawing Echols had made of “an individual that had the head of a satanic goat” further convinced him that the murders were cult-related, though he didn’t explain what made the goat’s head “satanic.” He also cited Echols’s writings as evidence that he was involved in the occult. Fogleman agreed, saying Echols’s drawings and writing revealed his “belief system” and “state of mind.”
¹⁵⁵

To back up this assertion, in his closing argument Fogleman read one of Echols’s poems to the jury, a poem he described as defining the conflict between the good and the satanic within him. The poem read:

I want to be in the middle,

in neither the black nor the white,

in neither the wrong nor the right,

to stand right on the line,

to be able to go to either side with a moment’s notice.

I’ve always been in the black, in the wrong.

I tried to get into the white,

but I almost destroyed it

because the black tried to follow me.

This time I won’t let it.

I will be in the middle.

Though the poem was written long before Echols was arrested, it nonetheless reads like a commentary on the investigators, prosecutors, and jurors and the wrongs they committed in their self-righteous pursuit of justice—the “blackness” that followed them into
their
“white.” But Fogleman didn’t see it this way, of course. After reading the poem, he told the jury, “That right there tells you Damien Echols. He don’t wanna be in the white. He don’t wanna be good. He wants to be both, where he can go to the good side or the bad side, however it suits his purpose. If he wants to do bad, let’s go to the satanic side. If he wants to be good, he goes to the Wiccan side. That poem right there tells you about Damien Echols.”
¹⁵⁶

When I asked Echols in June 2005 how he felt when Fogleman used his poem as evidence against him, he said that at the time he was more upset about having his private thoughts and feelings made public than about being convicted and sentenced to death. At first his answer surprised me, but then I remembered that he was still a teenager when he was convicted, and at that age the fear of embarrassment trumps virtually all other fears, even the fear of death. Also, as Echols explained, back then he didn’t believe it was possible for an innocent person to be convicted of a crime without any evidence, and he thought that everything would be straightened out soon. Having his private thoughts and feelings revealed to the world upset him so much that for three years he didn’t write another word—and this was someone who had filled several notebooks with poems by the time he was arrested.

While Fogleman was able to link Echols’s poetry and literary tastes to the occult, all in an effort to persuade the jury that the murders were part of a satanic ritual, he had no evidence that Baldwin shared this interest. Even the wildly imaginative, not to say delusional, “Dr.” Griffis said he was unable to find “any evidence that establishes a link between Jason Baldwin and the occult.”
¹⁵⁷
So the prosecutors approached Baldwin with a deal: if he’d testify against Echols, he would receive a substantially reduced sentence. But just as Misskelley refused to testify against Echols and Baldwin, Baldwin refused to testify against Echols. In a 2009 letter published in the
Arkansas Times
, he wrote:

One day I was offered a choice. I was told the only hope in the world I had was to turn “state” against Damien Echols and testify under oath that he murdered those three boys. The problem with this choice was the fact that I did not know who murdered those boys. For the life of me I did not believe Damien did—and even if I had a “belief” as to who could have done the murders, the simple fact remained that I did not know who committed them. . . . [Sixteen] years later I do not regret my choice. . . . Tonight I rest easy knowing that when I was confronted with the choice to protect innocent life, I made the right one.
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The jury, however, made the wrong choice. Misled by the police, the prosecution, news reports, the false testimony of Hutcheson and Carson, and the bizarre fantasies of Griffis, on March 18 they found Echols and Baldwin guilty, and on March 19 they sentenced Baldwin to life in prison without the possibility of parole and Echols to death.

The Appeal Process and New Evidence

T
he process of appealing a conviction is extremely slow and convoluted, and to summarize all the steps would be tedious and time-consuming. Suffice it to say that from 1994 through 2010, Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley filed a series of motions and appeals based on ineffective counsel, prosecutorial and juror misconduct, new evidence, and other grounds, and that virtually all of them were denied, usually by Burnett, the very judge who heard the original trials. Even though Burnett officially retired in December 2008, he continued adjudicating the appeals in this case (and no others) until mid-January 2010. What’s more, he continued to oversee the appeals even after he announced his intention to run for the state senate. According to the Arkansas State Constitution, when a judge files for a non-judicial political office, he automatically vacates his judgeship. Since Burnett didn’t formally file for the senate until March 2010, he did not technically violate the law, but as a declared state senate candidate serving as a judge, he certainly violated its spirit. Journalist John Brummett has noted, “There’s a rule of judicial conduct that requires a judge to avoid even any appearance of impropriety. But Burnett has disregarded that.”
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The only appeals that were not rejected were the result of a 2001 Arkansas law (Act 1780; amended in 2005 by Act 2250) granting prisoners access to DNA testing to prove their innocence. The law states that the court may grant a motion for a new trial if DNA test results exclude a person as the source of the evidence and if those results, “when considered with all evidence in the case regardless of whether the evidence was introduced at trial, establish by compelling evidence that a new trial would result in an acquittal.”
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In July 2002, Echols filed a motion seeking DNA testing on crime scene evidence, and in June 2004, after several court-instigated delays, Burnett finally issued an order allowing DNA testing. After further court-instigated delays, the testing began in December 2005 and continued into 2007.

In July 2007, Echols’s attorneys filed a status report with initial DNA test results, indicating that those results excluded Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley as possible sources, and in October of that same year they filed an amended Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus in federal court calling for a new trial. This petition included not only the results of the DNA tests but also, as the Arkansas DNA statutes allow, all of the additional evidence of Echols’s innocence discovered since his conviction. The federal district judge returned the case to the state circuit court, and in September 2008, Burnett denied the petition. In March 2009, Echols’s attorneys filed an appeal with the Arkansas Supreme Court, arguing that Burnett’s decision violated the state’s DNA law. The court heard oral arguments in the case on September 30, 2010, and on November 4 the justices issued a unanimous ruling reversing Burnett’s decision, which they said “erroneously interpreted the Arkansas DNA testing statutes,” and remanding the appeal to the circuit court. They instructed the court to “hear Echols’s motion for a new trial and consider the DNA-test results ‘with all other evidence in the case regardless of whether the evidence was introduced at trial’ to determine if Echols has ‘establish[ed] by compelling evidence that a new trial would result in acquittal.’”
¹⁶¹
Although the motion was filed by Echols’s attorneys, the justices ruled that Baldwin and Misskelley were also entitled to a similar evidentiary hearing. This hearing was assigned to Craighead Circuit Court judge David N. Laser, who had replaced Burnett after he was elected to the state senate, and it was scheduled to begin December 5, 2011.