Devil's_Knot___Jessie's_Confession

Devil’s Knot: Jessie’s Confession Have you ever seen a horror film where bodies are discovered in ditches and the victims have been gruesomely murdered' Have you ever seen films where trials take place in court but they are full of errors' What if someone told you that such things happened in real life' Would you believe them' I know that I would not. However, when I read Devil’s Knot by Mara Leveritt, I was shocked. The book is a compilation of real-life events that occurred in 1993. It tells the story of three eight-year-old boys, Christopher Byers, Stevie Branch, and Michael Moore, who were mutilated, possibly raped, tied up, and then brutally murdered in May of 1993 in West Memphis, Arkansas. There were discovered the morning after they disappeared in Robin Hood Hills submerged underneath water in a ditch. What is even more saddening is the way the trials of the murders were conducted. Three innocent teenagers, Jessie Misskelley, Jr., Jason Baldwin, and Damien Echols, were arrested and accused of murdering the boys. The reason for the arrests you might ask; a vague connection to a satanic cult, the wearing of black t-shirts, musical tastes, seriously flawed interviews with an eight-year old boy, Aaron Hutcheson, and a coerced confession from Misskelley, Jr. There was never any direct evidence linking the three boys to the murder and still they were arrested. No clear reason for their arrest was ever given because there was never any substantial amount of evidence against them. Evidence against other possible murderers was disregarded because the police were convinced that they had found their killers in the three teenagers after hearing and recording Jessie’s so called confession to the crime and his tying Damien and Jason to it as well. Even though alibis were presented by the boys the police ignored them and went ahead with the arrests. It is rather obvious, that basing the whole case and investigation on the coerced confession given by Jessie is a seriously flawed decision on the part of the West Memphis police and brings the credibility of the department into question. There were many flaws with Jessie’s confession. The first and biggest flaw would have to be all the inconsistencies. When first, during the polygraph test, asked if he knew who killed the three little boys, Jessie said that he did not know. Durham told him that he was lying. He also told Durham that he had never seen or participated in a satanic ritual. After not receiving the answers they desired, Gitchell and Ridge started yelling at Jessie. “They kept saying they knew I had something to do with it, because other people done told ‘em.”(Knot, 78) When Jessie said he thought the boys were tied up with rope, Gitchell told him that the boys were tied up with shoestrings. Jessie reports, “I had to go through the whole story again and again until I got it right. They hollered at me until I got it right.” In a few short hours, Jessie said that he had seen a picture of the murdered boys at a meeting of a Satanic cult, when just recently he had told the police that he had never been to a satanic meeting. Jessie even provided information about when the meetings were held, where they were held, what kind of things happened at these meetings, and other made up facts that Jessie felt would get the police off his back (Knot, 80). During the interrogation, when asked to point out Michael Moore, Jessie was unable to accurately identify him and Gitchell then pointed Moore to him. Jessie then agreed that that was who he recognized as the young Michael Moore. Gtichell also pointed out Byers to Jessie when originally Jessie had no idea who Byers was (Knot, 82). Soon thereafter, Jessie went from not knowing anything about the murders to falsely admitting that he had been a part of the murders along with Jason and Damien. Jessie was now giving explicit details about what happened on the night of the murders and Gitchell was giving him exclusive information about the case which is what brought about some of the accuracies in Jessie’s statements. The boy even gave several different times about when he was in the woods. The times varied greatly from early in the morning to the evening. However since no formal taped record was kept of the interview none of these things could really be proved in the court of law. This was only the beginning of all the misconducts that would occur in this investigation. The second serious flaw was that no taped record was kept of the whole interview conducted of Jessie by West Memphis police officers. According to Jessie and his family, the interview lasted for over eight hours. Jessie was in police custody from approximately ten o’clock in the morning to past six o’clock in the evening. However, Gitchell did not start tape recording the interview until almost four o’clock in the late afternoon. The rest of the interview was jotted down vaguely on paper by Gitchell and Ridge, because at that time, both of them were present. During the tape recorded part of the interview, only Gitchell was in the room with Jessie. One might question why the whole interview was not tape recorded. The truth is that Jessie’s original confession did not fit in with what police were looking for. Albeit, by the end of the grueling interview session, Jessie had changed his confession dramatically to fit exactly what Gitchell and Ridge, along with the rest of the West Memphis police department, were in search of. Due to this carelessness or “smart move” on the part of the police department, the on trial jury members were never able to hear the whole of Jessie’s confession and were therefore unable to come to the obvious conclusion that Jessie’s confession had been coerced by the police. This gigantic mistake or ploy is what really did Jessie, Damien and Jason in. The whole tape would have easily proven their innocence. Another serious flaw is that Jessie was interviewed as an adult even though he was still a minor. No permission to waive Jessie’s constitutional rights were ever taken by the police from Jessie’s father. Misskelley, Sr. only signed a form allowing the police to take a polygraph test of Jessie. Even then he was not fully made aware of what was going on. Jessie, Jr. and Jessie, Sr. were only told that Jessie was going to be asked a few questions about the crime and that there was a $35,000 reward if any relevant information was found. After obtaining Misskelley, Sr.’s permission to polygraph his son, detective sergeant Mike Allen returned to the police station with Jessie, Jr. There it is reported that Jessie was read his Miranda rights twice. He was told that he had the right to remain silent, the right to hire a lawyer, and the right to stop answering questions at any time he wished. It is reported that Jessie, Jr. then signed paperwork waiving his own constitutional rights. However it is a known fact that Jessie, Jr. never learned how to write in cursive and could only have printed his name. This was yet another piece of crucial evidence that pointed towards a flawed investigation but was ignored by Judge Burnett and never made available to the members of the jury. The last flaw in the investigation is Jessie’s intelligence quotient. It was never taken into consideration that mentally Jessie was on the verge of mental retardation. Even though he was seventeen years old at the time of the investigation, he was at the learning level of a third or fourth grade child. He had never passed standardized tests given to him in school. During his trial, a psychologist was even called to the witness stand to give an evaluation of Jessie’s mental capabilities. The psychologist testified that Jessie’s IQ was at seventy-eight. An IQ of seventy-eight means that the person suffers from a lack of proper intellectual functioning. Anything below a seventy is considered mental retardation by doctors. No special considerations were ever given to Jessie in considering his mental stability. The jury and the police never once stopped to question, even after learning of Jessie’s mental capabilities, whether or not he was capable of staging such an elaborate crime where no evidence was left behind. Any normal person with the ability to think rationally would ask the question, “Could someone who thinks at a fourth or fifth grade level really be responsible in any way, shape, or form for such a heinous crime'” Even with the help of Damien, who by the way was in severe depression, and Jason, a mere sixteen year old boy, it would not be possible for someone of Jessie’s mental abilities to not leave behind anything that linked him to the crime scene. The ignorance of such crucial information about the alleged perpetrator of such a crime is yet another serious flaw in the investigation conducted by the West Memphis police department. After reading the book, I came to the conclusion that Damien, Jason, and Jessie were most likely not behind the murder of Christopher, Michael, and Stevie. The work seems to have been done by someone older and more skilled in the “art” of killing. The evidence presented in the book seems to hint at Christopher’s stepfather, John Mark Byers. He was in possession of a knife that was consistent with the wounds on Christopher’s body. The knife also had traces of Christopher’s blood on it. Byers gave the knife to HBO filmmakers who were covering the story of the West Memphis three. When police questioned Byers about the knife he gave a seriously flawed story to them but they disregarded the inconsistencies and just concluded that John Byers had nothing to do with the murder of his stepson. His prior criminal record and his tendency to be violent with the people around him were all ignored and never released to the defendants’ lawyers. Because of the flawed investigation on the part of the police, the boys were concluded guilty by the jury. Damien married while in jail in a Buddhist ceremony. All three boys are serving lifetime sentences in jails without the possibility of parole. Potentially innocent boys are serving time for a crime that they may have never even done. One of them might even lose his life over it. Organizations, such as Free the West Memphis Three, have been set up to somehow gain freedom for the boys. However it has been sixteen years since they were first arrested and the boys, now men, are still rotting away in prison from a crime they perhaps never even did.