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Thread: Damien Wayne Echols - Arkansas

  1. #101
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    West Memphis Three’s Jason Baldwin wants ‘name cleared’ after wrongful conviction

    By Erika Tucker
    Global News

    TORONTO – “My first day in prison, people were literally trying to kill me, because they thought I was guilty. By the end, they knew I was innocent, and all those curses and beatings turned into prayers and hugs.”

    Jason Baldwin speaks about his 18 years and 78 days in jail with a calm, even voice, expressing gratitude for those who believed in his innocence all along.

    Baldwin’s first day in prison was in 1994, after he was convicted—along with friend Damien Echols and schoolmate Jessie Misskelley Jr.—of murdering three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. Baldwin had just finished tenth grade.

    The three young victims were Steve Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers, who went missing on May 5, 1993. The next day, the boys were found in a creek, naked and “hogtied” with hands bound to their feet. The autopsies said Byers died of multiple injuries; Branch and Moore of multiple injuries and drowning.

    Baldwin maintained his innocence in police interviews, and said he tried to be patient.

    “They had this theory and this story that they would rather believe than the truth,” he told Global’s The Morning Show.

    Baldwin said police took his fingerprints, hand prints, footprints, hair, blood and saliva samples when he was charged.

    “That let me know that they had something to compare it to, so my hope was, in their evidence, that they would prove my innocence,” he said.

    But that didn’t happen.

    Instead, he was told by police that a “friend” of his said the accused—dubbed the West Memphis Three—had committed the murders. Baldwin refused to believe them.

    “But I didn’t understand at the time that they had bullied this person—who was Jessie—into basically crying uncle,” said Baldwin. “He would’ve told them he was an astronaut and he was on the moon last night by the end of their interrogation if that’s what they were seeking.”

    Misskelley was questioned by police for about 12 hours on June 3, 1993. His IQ was reported to be 72, which placed him at a borderline intellectual functioning range; a cognitive impairment.

    “They laid out the photographs and they went over each injury one by one to create a believable story. But the officers didn’t know the mechanism of injury, and neither did Jessie,” said Baldwin.

    “They were just trying to make up a story that people would believe in order to get a conviction. And that’s what they did.”

    Added to the prosecution’s case was testimony from Vicki Hutcheson, who claimed that Echols had invited her to a Wiccan meeting. This was meant to strengthen the argument that Echols and the other two teens had killed the young boys as part of a satanic ritual. Years later, Hutcheson recanted her testimony, claiming police had threatened her.

    “I was just a big liar,” she said in 2012’s documentary West of Memphis. “I really was just a big liar.”

    The police department also bungled the retrieval of possible evidence from Bojangles, a local restaurant. A possible suspect was introduced in Misskelley’s trial, after a report near the crime scene of a man who seemed disoriented and was bleeding in the ladies bathroom. Police didn’t enter the restaurant to check the blood until the next day, when the man was long gone.

    “When the evidence from the Bojangles restaurant was not collected, and what was collected was lost…rather than admit that mistake and say, ‘we may have lost our opportunity,’ instead [police] turned to false confessions…and threatened a young woman with taking her child away just for hot cheques in order to lie on us,” said Baldwin.

    Baldwin credits HBO Documentary Films president Sheila Nevins and filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky with showing the world “the kangaroo court and how we were set up.”

    “If it hadn’t been for [them], Damien would’ve been murdered and Jessie and I would still be growing old in prison,” said Baldwin. “And our families would have no peace, and neither, really, would the families of the boys.”

    But the families of the boys may never have peace, because of how the case was settled in court.

    In 2007, DNA from the crime scene was tested; none was found to match any of the West Memphis Three. One piece of hair “not inconsistent with” Branch’s stepfather, Terry Hobbs, was found tied into knots used to bind one of the 8-year-old boys, prompting Hobbs’ ex-wife Pam to say he “possibly” had something to do with the murders.

    A July 2007 statement from prosecuting attorneys said the state “stands behind its convictions of Echols and his codefendants,” but in November 2010, the Arkansas Supreme Court ordered the reconsideration of the DNA evidence.

    On Aug. 19, 2011, Baldwin, Echols and Misskelley were all released from prison after submitting an Alford plea. This strategy allows for a “no contest” plea while the three men maintained their innocence.

    The state of Arkansas didn’t want to reopen the case in court, because it was afraid of the cost should the three men be able to prove their innocence with the help of the DNA evidence not available in 1993.

    “The prosecuting attorney put the price on it – he said it would cost the taxpayers $60 million.”

    “And the idea of the Alford plea was to save them that burden. And I can understand wanting to save them that burden, but you don’t do it at the cost of justice,” said Baldwin.

    He was against entering the plea that compromised his innocence, but said he did it to save Echol’s life—both from the lethal injection he was facing, and from the 23 hours per day of lockdown at the high security Varner Unit prison.

    “My life is so much different than Damien’s. I wasn’t on death row, I had opportunities to be around people and to grow…I could have potentially stayed there another two years,” said Baldwin. “Did I want to be there? No. Did I deserve to be there? No. But I could have.

    “But Damien couldn’t have. His health was failing terribly.”

    Baldwin said it seems like the legal system is telling the families of the victims that they don’t matter, and that justice doesn’t matter.

    “I don’t want the money; I don’t need the soothing.”

    “I just want my life, my name cleared,” he said.

    Baldwin will be a keynote speaker at the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC) on Saturday in Toronto.

    Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s dramatized feature film of the case, called Devil’s Knot, is slated for a Jan. 2014 release. The movie follows 2012’s documentary West of Memphis (coproduced by Echols) and three Paradise Lost documentary films spanning from 1996-2011, which initially earned the public’s attention.

    http://globalnews.ca/news/985113/wes...ul-conviction/

  2. #102
    dmezzer
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    I discovered this heartbreaking case merely days ago and spent the last 3 days pouring over the evidence, transcripts of the court proceedings, transcripts and audio of the interviews and of Misskelley's numerous confessions.

    Why this novice prosecutor agreed to the plea deal that has released these child killers back into society is baffling. Of course the idiocy of the WM3 support movement is even more troubling. I almost expect such losers as Natalie Maines and other detached-from reality Hollywood idiots like Depp and the various filmakers, but can't begin to fathom the heartlessness and suspension of rational analytical thought as well as the evidence one must ignore (especially the multiple confessions) required to a) come to the conclusion that the Memphis 3 are innocent and b) be willing to so openly and publicly fawn over convicts whose innocence simply cannot be known by any of these people and if they aren't innocent are guilty of one of the most heartbreaking and heinous murders I've ever heard of. Why risk supporting a child rapist/murderer. Eddie Vedder's really shocking revelation that he wasn't 100% sure about their innocence until he finally asked Echols face to face, point blank, did he do it, and when Echols said 'no' Vedder just knew he was telling the truth. What kind of absolute idiot is Eddie Vedder?

    The real disappointement was John Douglas. I've been a fan of his and have read nearly all of the books he's written since retiring from the FBI. His analysis, as presented at the pre-plea deal evidenciary hearing was in my opinion not at all up to his established standards and it has caused a marked decline in my respect for his expertise. Perhaps it's time to hang it up old man.

    I apologize for venting and hope expression of such opinion isn't considered inappropriate for this forum. I've immersed myself in this case and have become emotional for these poor little boys many times over the past three days. I cannot fathom the reaction of WM3 supporters but can only speculate whether their cause celebre is a defense mechnanism to allow them to attempt to avoid processing the horrors of this case psychologically. These WM3 supporters are weak individuals and they insult the memories of the only established innocents in this case, the three 8 year olds who endured such injustice in those woods in May of 1993.

    Broken hearted.

  3. #103
    Administrator Michael's Avatar
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    Oh, oh, oh, this post would fit in the rant-subboard...

    Welcome to the site dmezzer. Your opinion and your posts are always welcome. I can see that you´re not satisfied with the outcome in this case. My opinion is that we have to accept the court rulings and proceedings. I wonder about antis who think there are hundreds of innocent persons on DR. It´s impossible for me to get all the infos like the judge and jury get. So I have to believe that their judgement is correct. For this reason I don´t like to complain about sentence/deal a long period except a short yes or no after I get info about it.
    No murder can be so cruel that there are not still useful imbeciles who do gloss over the murderer and apologize.

  4. #104
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Crowd: Justice not served in 1993 killings

    Supporters of the three men convicted of killing three boys in West Memphis in 1993 gathered Tuesday on the state Capitol steps and called for officials to reopen the investigation into the slayings.

    On the 22nd anniversary of the deaths of Christopher Byers, Stevie Branch and Michael Moore, speakers -- including Christopher's adoptive father John Mark Byers -- said justice hadn't been served for the 8-year-old boys or for the three men who spent 18 years in prison for the killings.

    Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin -- often referred to as the West Memphis Three -- were released from prison under a seldom-used plea agreement in 2011.

    The plea agreement between the three men and prosecutors is known as an Alford plea. It allowed the men to maintain their innocence while admitting that there was enough evidence to convict them. The deal was struck after new forensic evidence was discovered and after years of case analysis by documentary filmmakers, authors and legal advocates that led many, including family members of the victims, to doubt that the men were responsible for the killings.

    Byers initially believed that Echols, Misskelley and Baldwin killed the boys, but later changed his opinion and said Tuesday that he is convinced that they are innocent. He and Danny Owens, a legal assistant and investigator to Byers' attorney, Ken

    Swindle, questioned how 2nd Judicial Circuit Prosecuting Attorney Scott Ellington has handled the case and said he hasn't acted on new evidence that they provided that points to "the real killers."

    They and other speakers at Tuesday's rally asked Gov. Asa Hutchinson and state Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, among other state officials, to step in.

    "Now is the time to push for change," Byers told a crowd of about two dozen people. "To the great state of Arkansas: investigate the case. Follow up on the evidence we have given you. Quit hiding behind the meaningless Alford plea and prosecute -- and prosecute -- the men who killed these children."

    Judd Deere, a spokesman for Rutledge, referred requests for comment to Ellington, who did not return phone calls Tuesday.

    "We are not in a position to address any issue with regard to the West Memphis Three, the previous litigation or future litigation, because there's no pending procedure for us to consider. That would have to begin at the prosecutor level," Deere said.

    Hutchinson spokesman J.R. Davis said the governor had no comment on the matter Tuesday.

    The men Byers was referring to as suspects have never been charged in the case or been considered suspects by police.

    Swindle filed affidavits in 2013 accusing Terry Hobbs, L.G. Hollingsworth, David Jacoby and Buddy Lucas of committing the killings, detailing reported confessions that two of them had made to acquaintances. Hobbs, Jacoby and Lucas have denied the allegations, and Hollingsworth died before the accusations surfaced.

    Owens declined to elaborate Tuesday on other reported evidence that Swindle had taken to prosecutors, but said "any competent attorney" could get a conviction with it.

    "We have given [Ellington] eyewitness statements of people that had been there, and we have given additional forensic evidence that could be used and could be considered. I never make it a point to discuss the specifics ... so that it can't be compromised. I'd rather see it tried in a court of law than, you know, in television," he said.

    Over the years, the case has spawned four award-winning documentaries, a best-selling book and, most recently, a Hollywood film, driving public interest and turning Echols, Misskelley and Baldwin into international figures.

    As an example, Tuesday's rally was attended by an Australian citizen who spoke about his interest in the case.

    Byers, on several occasions, has publicly accused Hobbs in the killings, citing DNA evidence. He said Tuesday that he still believes that Hobbs, "without a doubt," was involved.

    Efforts to contact Hobbs and his attorney were unsuccessful Tuesday. Hobbs has said repeatedly that he believes Echols, Misskelley and Baldwin killed the boys.

    Echols, Misskelley and Baldwin did not attend Tuesday's rally.

    Baldwin's mother Angela Gail Schneidmiller, known as Angela Gail Grinnell at the time of the killings, attended the rally but did not speak publicly.

    "The one thing I would like to see is for justice to prevail, for the right people to be caught that murdered those children," she told the Democrat-Gazette.

    http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2...illin/?f=crime
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  5. #105
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    Arkansas Executions: Damien Echols, Ex-Death Row Inmate, Will Speak for Condemned

    LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (NBC News) - Damien Echols has nightmares about being back in Arkansas. As a member of the West Memphis Three, Echols spent nearly two decades on death row in Arkansas — accused of the 1993 murder of three eight-year-old boys — but was later released due to new DNA evidence.

    But he is set to return on Friday in protest of the state government's decision to execute seven men in 10 days because their execution drugs are expiring.

    The two nights he will spend in Arkansas will be his longest stay and only the second time he has returned since his release in 2011.

    "Ever since the executions were announced, I've had tons and tons of people contacting me to, number one, would I help in some way? Number two, would I be willing to come back to Arkansas and speak out against this?" Echols told NBC News.

    "It takes a lot for me to go back to Arkansas," he added. "It's a place that holds nothing but horror and despair for me. This whole situation is horrific and fills me with despair to the point that I wake up at night trying to scream."

    Furonda Brasfield, executive director of the Arkansas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, has organized a protest on the steps of the state capitol building at 1:30 p.m. on Good Friday — three days before the state plans to execute two of the seven condemned men.

    Echols — who rose to national consciousness in the early '90s because of an HBO documentary about the peculiarities that surrounded his case and caught the attention of celebrities like Eddie Vedder, Henry Rollings, Margaret Cho and Johnny Depp — will speak alongside faith leaders, local officials and a few noteworthy activists.

    The former death row inmate's gaze has returned to the state that attempted to kill him because he wants to shine a light on the men he lived alongside for a harrowing 18 years. He believes the historic pace of executions Arkansas has planned, what he calls "a conveyor belt of death," could be a tipping point in the way the death penalty is perceived in the United States and Arkansas, a state which broadly supports capital punishment.

    A 2014 poll conducted by Opinion Research Associates found that 83 percent of Arkansans said that the perceived deterrence aspect of capital punishment was important to them and 67 percent supported the death penalty.

    Echols, 42, doesn't quite understand the support, calling it willful ignorance, because he believes his case should have proven to Arkansans that innocent men can be put on death row. But Arkansas politicians tend to use death penalty as a tool to build support.

    Patrick Crane, the sergeant in charge of Arkansas's death row in 2007, said correctional officers are forced to deal with the emotional and psychological weight of death row while politicians win "tough-on-crime" points with their constituents.

    "I'm a Republican — I've never voted for a Democrat in my life — but these politicians in Little Rock are going to benefit on the backs of honorable men with families to feed who are poor and who have to fulfill their job," he said.

    Crane said he went to work on death row in support of the death penalty, but found the environment distasteful. It was Echols's case, as well as many inmates' clear mental illness that made him rethink his position and leave the job he held.

    "What if we killed Damien Echols?" he asked. "We now know that guy is innocent but we could have killed an innocent man."

    Echols, considered the leader of the West Memphis Three (that includes Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley), became a symbol of the innocent man on death row. To be released, however, Arkansas did not admit Echols' innocence — the state has never exonerated any inmate. Instead, he was granted an Alford Plea, a technicality which allows him to maintain his innocence while pleading guilty.

    He went through a dozen lawyers over 18 years to get to that point and earned an unheard of amount of media attention.

    Echols said he nearly was killed when he first entered death row. Then 19-years-old, the correctional officers at the time decided to "welcome me to the neighborhood." He said they kept him isolated and beat and starved him for more than two weeks — long enough that Echols thought he would die there.

    His fellow inmates smuggled him food and appealed to a deacon who visited death row to get him out. Don Davis — the man the state plans to execute first — stood out as a savior in that instance and went on to watch his back for 18 years, Echols said.

    Davis, believed to have an IQ between 69 and 77 — according to an investigation by Harvard Law School's Fair Punishment Project — murdered a 62-year-old woman while he burglarized her home in 1990. According to Echols, Davis, who has been on death row for more than 25 years, admitted to his crime and was tormented by the murder.

    "One day we were sitting down and talking about it and he started crying so hard," Echols said, starting to cry himself. "It was like watching someone's soul break open. He was telling me how it had tortured him every single day that he did what he did — that he wishes that he could be as evil as the politicians in Arkansas all said he was, so that it wouldn't bother him anymore."

    Harvard's report found that two men slated for execution this month are severely mentally ill — one believes that death row is a test from God "to prepare him for a special mission as an evangelist" and the other hallucinates "bugs, ants and spiders in particular, that he believed were going to get him." A third man is intellectually disabled and suffered significant head injuries that might have caused brain trauma, and a fourth was first represented by a drunk lawyer and then a mentally ill lawyer — both attorneys later lost their licenses.

    "A lot of those guys are mentally ill and there's no need to execute them," Crane said about the inmates. "We got them locked up and they're not going anywhere."

    Crane does not believe the death penalty is necessary, and that it dehumanizes everyone involved, one of the reasons he now works as a postal worker in his home state of Kansas.

    "You can't be a person of character and know what I know and still be for the death penalty," Crane said.

    "I'm a Catholic and while I'm not particularly good at being religious," he added, "I know I'm going to have to account for myself, for what I did and what I saw."

    Echols agrees, and that's why he feels obligated to return to Arkansas — a place that, to him, feels as though it is full of enemies and terror. While it is not fun to relive his time in prison, or the thoughts he had while waiting for his execution to be scheduled, he wants people to consider his story and imagine what might have happened if no one had paid attention to his case.

    "The thing I always try to keep in mind," he said, "is every single person, every single person that hears my story is a potential jury member on someone else's case in the future and can make sure the same thing doesn't happen to someone else."

    http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/let...-speak-n744471
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

  6. #106
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Some People Find Jesus on Death Row. Damien Echols Found Magick

    Damien Echols is best known for the worst years of his life. On March 19, 1994, Echols was sentenced to death for the gruesome murder of three grade-school boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. He was 19. (His two purported accomplices, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, Jr.—also teenagers—were both sentenced to life in prison.) The trial, which relied heavily on “evidence” of Echols’ love of witchcraft, Satanism, and Metallica, became a national sensation and came to define the era’s so-called Satanic Panic.

    Echols spent nearly 18 years on death row. Due largely to the publicity of the HBO documentary Paradise Lost and its two sequels, the cause to free the “West Memphis Three” (as the boys became known) gathered steam and high-profile advocates like Eddie Vedder, Peter Jackson, and Johnny Depp. New DNA evidence only piled onto the growing consensus that the original trial was a botch job (and an actual witch hunt), and in August 2011 the three convicted men were released from prison by entering an Alford plea, a strange legal loophole that allows freedom in exchange for a formal admission of guilt.

    It was Echols’ interest in Aleister Crowley and “ceremonial magick” that inflamed the Bible-thumping, Satanic-Panicked southerners who threw him in prison to die…but it was that same magick (Echols spells it with a ‘k’ to distinguish it from “low” magic of performers like Criss Angel) that he claims, in a new book, saved his life. High Magick is a beginner’s guide to the spiritual practices and philosophy to which Echols, now 43, has devoted himself since those dark days. He’s currently on a book tour, and will be at the Regent on November 15, in conversation with the Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines (another famous supporter while he was in prison). On November 16, he’ll be signing books at Amoeba Records in Hollywood.

    Can you pinpoint when your interest in magick began?

    I was no older than probably 7. I didn’t even comprehend what magick really was back then, but I came across the word the very first time when I was a child, living with my grandmother. She used to read these old, horrible tabloids—the really old-school ones, not the ones about celebrities getting divorces, but the ones that every week there was something on the cover like “Half Alligator, Half Man Found Along the Banks of the Mississippi.” I remember seeing in the back of one this ad that said something like, “Want to learn magick or the secrets of the universe? Send $5.95 off to this address and we’ll rush you this book.” I remember going to my grandmother and being like, “Can we please get this?” I don’t know what it was, but as soon as I saw it it was like it lit something in me like a fuse. I thought: if you could dedicate your life to this—even though at that time I still didn’t know exactly what “this” was—why would anything else matter?

    I didn’t really come in contact with actual practices, rituals, meditations until I was in my teenage years. This would have been around the time that Wicca and paganism started to make a comeback, and you started being able to walk into stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble and see the really classic books on witchcraft, like Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft and Scott Cunningham’s work. I started to read through those and do some of the stuff, but it still didn’t scratch an itch. I kept having this feeling, like there’s got to be something more. Time and time again, whether it was Wicca in the late ’80s and early ’90s, or The Secret in the early 2000s, whatever it is, they focus on manifestation, manifestation, manifestation. It’s all about materialism in a certain way, whether it’s focusing on teaching you how to manifest the life you want to have or a parking spot when you need one. What I eventually discovered was that these things are all just really, really watered-down versions of ceremonial magick, or high magick. They’re just a tiny sliver of that world.

    What is “high magick,” in your definition?

    Magick is, for all intents and purposes, the western path to enlightenment. I always compare it to eastern traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism and Daoism, because they sort of have the same goal. Magick, in its highest forms, is very, very similar to Dzogchen in Tibetan Buddhism. It was a native form of magick that they did there, and then whenever Buddhism came into Tibet the two mingled together. In Dzogchen they say that enlightenment, what we think of as enlightenment, is not the end of the path. That’s a mark along the path. It is in ceremonial magick what we call achieving solar consciousness, where you live constantly in the present moment. You don’t dwell in the past, you don’t dwell in the future. You are here, you are experiencing life—which is what we’re here to do. If the only reason that we were existing in this world was to reunite with a spirit, or become one with the universe, then we never would have come here in the first place, because we were all those things before we were born. Part of the path that goes along after enlightenment is, what they call in Dzogchen “building the rainbow body.” In ceremonial magick, we call it the light body.

    There is a very physical aspect to all of this stuff, and it’s connected to your nervous system. If you’ve ever looked at pictures of the Dzogchen lamas, after they die they continue this practice, and you will see the body start to shrink over a period of about seven days. They’ll get so small that some of them are basically just a head and a few bones left—and they’ll put them on a shrine, and they stay there as a religious artifact. If you carry this process to its absolute fulfillment, its absolute end, there would be nothing left within seven days after you die except hair and nails—the only parts of you that are not connected to your nervous system. All of this stuff does have a very real, vital, physical component. I didn’t get into the in-depth aspects of it, the really hardcore spiritual alchemy parts of it, until I was in prison. And that would have started slowly, when I was in my early 20s.

    What led to that?

    At first, in prison, I would practice it for three weeks, and then I wouldn’t do it again for six months. I wasted a lot of time. After I’d been there for several years, I received ordination in the Rinzai tradition of Japanese Buddhism, and I sat zazen meditation for several years. I felt like I really wasn’t getting a lot of out it, and I kind of think, when I look back on it now, it’s because it’s geared towards the Eastern psyche—it’s part of their culture from the time they’re born, and it’s not to us. Whereas ceremonial magick is uniquely western. The form that I practice originated in Europe, so it is part and parcel of our psyche. Even if you want nothing to do with Christianity—say you’re a complete atheist, say you don’t believe in it at all—it is still part of your psyche. Especially if you grew up in a part of the country like I did, where there are literally places you can come to a four-way stop and there are churches on all four corners.

    While I was in prison, maybe four years before I got out, I decided: I am going to dedicate every single waking moment to these practices. By the time I got out, I was doing it for up to eight hours a day. One day I bent over to tie my shoe and I had this epiphany that was like a bomb going off in my head. I realized, Oh my God, I am actually in the present moment. Everything that I tried to accomplish with all those years of zen, I just experienced after three or four months of ceremonial magick. That first taste of it showed me this works. Aleister Crowley said, “Let success be thy proof.” And that’s exactly what that was.

    What are some of the most common misconceptions about high magick?

    Number one: people don’t realize what high magick even is. The reason I call it “high magick” is to differentiate it from low magic. Low magic is the stuff which deals only with manifesting things in some way. Practical magic. High magick is all about spiritualism. The other misconception would be that it’s something dark or scary. I think that comes from two different places. One is just the smear campaign from the Catholic church that started all the way back with the Knights Templar, and goes up until now, because they didn’t want competition. And the other thing is, sadly enough, people themselves who claim to be magicians or witches or whatever. You have all the “Instagram witches” now that are more concerned with if their jewelry looks dark and spooky than they are with actually doing these practices.

    Why do you believe it saved your life?

    I always tell people, if you’re only going to do one single practice, the one you should do is the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. One of the reasons it’s so important is because it establishes emotional equilibrium. What you’re doing is sort of clearing yourself out. Think about it like a cup of water. If you leave a cup of water sitting long enough, it starts to develop stagnation, debris—it starts to get gunk in it. Now, if you turn a faucet on in the sink and just hold that cup under that running faucet until the water’s flowing over, for hours or days or however long it takes, eventually you’re going to end up with a cup of clean water again, without ever washing it out or anything. Doing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram does kind of the exact same thing. You’re focusing on pushing old energy out, and bringing new energy in, which is symbolized by four different archangels: we use Raphael the Archangel of Air, Gabriel the Archangel of Water, Michael the Archangel of Fire, and Uriel the Archangel of Earth. You are then taking that new energy directly into your energy system—it gets absorbed.

    I was in a situation where I was in tremendous psychological stress, anxiety—not even to mention the physical aspects like sleep deprivation, solitary confinement for almost a decade, almost no human touch, stuff like that. Physical aspects aside, the emotional aspects were devastating. Anything that fucks you up emotionally is eventually going to manifest physically. When I get really, really stressed out and anxious, I’ll start getting things like sores inside my mouth.

    We’re all meant for something slightly different, to fulfill some slightly different role than anyone else. For me, my will, what I was supposed to do, was magick.

    If I had not had these practices to keep my emotions equilibrated, I honestly would not have made it. This would have crippled me and devastated me even more than it did already. I would see people in there dying slowly. Guys would come in and they would just sit there, doing nothing, waiting to die, staring at a TV watching a football game to kill a day, whatever it was—slowly stagnating, deteriorating by the day. Because they didn’t have a life. Once they came in there, they didn’t have anything else to focus on to keep them going, keep them alive.

    Magick was what I focused on. In there and out here, it is what my life is dedicated to—it’s the lynchpin of my life that everything else revolves around. And as crazy as it sounds, there were times when I would not even think about the fact that I was in prison for days at a time. When I would get ready to go to bed at night, exhausted, I would still feel like I hadn’t gone quite as far as I wanted to, that I want to do this technique one more time, or this ritual for one hour more. I would, honest to God, jump out of bed in the morning excited to start a new day of doing this again.

    Do you believe, despite the hellishness of your time in prison, that being there actually pointed you toward magick?

    Absolutely. People now think that I had a horrible life. They look back on 20 years in prison for something I didn’t do, facing death—the physical torture, the mental trauma, the emotional destruction. Don’t get me wrong: all those things were there. But the only time that I even think about prison anymore is when somebody asks me about it. That’s it. For me, it’s almost like an insignificant sidebar of my life. My life is magick. It always has been, God willing, always will be.

    I come in contact with people who tell me horrendous stories of things they’ve been through, or depression that they’re suffering, despair they’re experiencing, and they’re like: “Well, how did you get through that?” I tell people there are two causes of depression. One is some sort of chemical imbalance, and the only thing that’s going to remedy that is medication, exercise, adjusting your diet, things of that nature. The other cause is not doing in magick what we call your will, or what they call in Buddhism your dharma. That means: what you were put here to do. We say that the universe is not going to waste energy replicating people like cookie-cutter images that are all meant for the same thing. We’re all meant for something slightly different, to fulfill some slightly different role than anyone else.

    For me, my will, what I was supposed to do, was magick. Once I dedicated myself to that wholeheartedly, I never really had to think about those things again, despair and all that stuff. They’d come in, they’d do something to me, I’d get right back up and I’d go right back to my practice. Once you know what your will is, and you dedicate yourself to it as much as you possibly can, you’re going to be a hell of a lot happier.

    You grew up in what I imagine is deep Trump country now. Do you feel like you understand what fuels that tribe’s outlook?

    I think it’s incredibly simple. I think it’s the same thing that inspires most tribes’ outlook. You can live from one of two energy wavelengths—only two. Love or fear. Plain and simple. Even when you look at things that don’t seem like one of those, if you trace them back far enough it’s still fear. When a dog is barking at you, that dog’s not mad—that dog is scared. All these people are scared that somebody’s going to take something from them, whether it’s an immigrant that’s coming in to take their job, or the government’s going to take their gun. It all comes down to fear.

    Do you think what’s happening right now, with Trump and this fear-based negativity, is ultimately good for our country, that it’s bringing a rot to the surface that we can then identify and deal with? Or are you worried about our trajectory?

    No. To be honest, I don’t watch the news, I don’t keep up with any of it—just because, like I said, the more you focus on that stuff, the more miserable you’re going to be. Especially when it’s stuff that there’s nothing you can do about whatsoever. Like, say, another mass shooting. It doesn’t matter if you sit there for four hours watching this footage over and over and over on the news…there’s nothing you can do about that, other than obsess over it and get depressed and despair and angry, and start talking about it with other people and enraging each other. I honestly would rather focus on something productive. You cannot create a new reality by fighting against what you hate. The only way you can do that is by building up what you love.

    https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/d...s-high-magick/
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  7. #107
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Sources: Evidence in 3 boys' case gone

    New DNA tests now impossible

    By Lara Farrar
    Arkansas Democrat Gazette

    Evidence requested by attorneys for new DNA testing in one of the most high-profile, savage murder cases in Arkansas history has been lost or destroyed by fire, dashing hopes that the men convicted of the killings of three children in West Memphis in 1993 will be exonerated.

    Known as the West Memphis Three, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley were found guilty in 1994 of the gruesome slayings of three 8-year-old boys whose bodies were found May 6, 1993, in a drainage ditch near West Memphis.

    The victims -- Christopher Byers, Stevie Branch and Michael Moore -- were found naked and hogtied with shoelaces. Investigators thought the murders were connected to a Satanic ritual.

    Though no DNA evidence ever tied the West Memphis Three to the crime scene, Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley were convicted, spending nearly 20 years in prison until a twist of events in August 2011 when prosecutors allowed the men to immediately walk free.

    A bargain, known as an Alford Plea, permitted the men to maintain their innocence yet plead guilty in exchange for an 18-year sentence and credit for time served. It was reached after the results of additional DNA testing still failed to connect the three to the crime.

    Since their release, attorneys and supporters of the West Memphis Three -- who have been the subject of numerous articles, movies and books -- have been working to clear their names.

    "We remain hopeful that we will unravel this case and discover who committed these crimes," Echols' spouse, Lorri Davis, said via phone Friday from New York City where the couple lives. "We still believe we are going to do that, and we are never going to back down."

    "We will keep fighting," said Davis, who produced documentaries about the murders. "Whatever it takes, we will keep fighting it."

    "We intend to keep this alive," said Lonnie Soury, a New York-based spokesman who works with Arkansas Take Action, a group advocating for the exoneration of the three men. "We will go back to court if we have to. We are going to get to the bottom of this one way or another."

    Most recently, attorneys for Echols requested access to evidence from the crime scene to conduct DNA testing using new technology that they hoped might shed light on who actually committed the heinous killings.

    Attorneys learned that the evidence they hoped to test -- including the victims' shoes, socks, shirts and shoelaces that were used as ligatures -- had either been lost, misplaced or destroyed by fire, according to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted July 6, 2021, by one of Echols' attorneys, Patrick Benca, to the West Memphis Police Department.

    Benca said he learned of the missing evidence from Keith Chrestman, prosecuting attorney for the 2nd Judicial District, which includes Crittenden County where West Memphis is located.

    Chrestman informed attorneys that after the 2011 Alford Plea, "some of the evidence ended up 'lost,' some of the evidence was 'misplaced' and some of the evidence was 'destroyed by fire' in a building that burned down,'" according to the Freedom of Information Act request submitted to the West Memphis Police Department seeking detailed records of how evidence was catalogued and where it was stored.

    As of Friday afternoon, Benca said Echols' legal team had not received a response from the West Memphis Police Department to their FOIA request.

    Before submission of the FOIA request, the West Memphis Police Department had not confirmed with attorneys that the evidence they are seeking is gone, Benca said.

    The West Memphis Police Department did not return calls made over two days by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette seeking comment.

    During an April 2021 interview with the news website Talk Business & Politics, Chrestman said much of the evidence from the West Memphis Three case was gone.

    "Echols, the alleged ringleader, has asked Chrestman's office to test remaining items of evidence in the case, but most of it is gone, the prosecutor said," Talk Business & Politics reported. "In capital murder cases, evidence is kept and securely stored, but in cases like this the evidence is often destroyed or lost."

    Chrestman did not return requests for comment from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

    West Memphis Mayor Marco McClendon said via phone Friday that he had confirmed with the West Memphis Police Department that some of the evidence "might have been destroyed" in a fire "around 15 years ago."

    "I don't know what was destroyed or what was not destroyed," McClendon said. "That is what I am being told, that there was a fire many, many years ago."

    The Arkansas state Crime Lab, which conducts forensic testing for law enforcement agencies across the state, transferred the evidence back to the West Memphis Police Department, said Kermit Channell, the lab's executive director.

    "That policy was true then just like it is today," Channell said. "We don't have the physical storage space to keep all the homicide evidence for the state of Arkansas. It belongs to that investigative agency."

    Logs detailing the chain of custody and other specifics of when evidence from the West Memphis Three case was transferred from the state Crime Lab to West Memphis are confidential and only available to prosecutors, defense attorneys and public defenders, Channell said.

    "Anytime you look at any old case it becomes difficult," Channell said. "In my experience, it is always difficult when you go back and look at a case that is 25 or 30 years old."

    As part of the Alford Plea agreement, prosecutors agreed that "the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory would help seek other suspects on any DNA evidence produced in private laboratory tests during the defense team's investigation," the FOIA request to the West Memphis Police Department said.

    "The state should be held accountable," Benca said, adding that prosecutors and police should adhere to their side of the agreement to "make sure we could get access to it [evidence] for further testing."

    "New technology and advances in science would now allow us to test DNA in amounts so small that it would have been previously impossible," Echols said via Twitter Wednesday. "The state of Arkansas continues to attempt to prevent this testing from happening."

    Blake Hendrix, an attorney for Jason Baldwin, said evidence gathered by the West Memphis police has long been in "disarray."

    "When we -- post conviction counsel -- came on board, our first effort was to gather all physical and forensic evidence, and, with the prosecution's agreement, to submit it to independent laboratories for testing," Hendrix said via email.

    "We soon found out that the evidence the West Memphis Police Department gathered was in complete disarray -- improperly gathered, improperly stored -- and worse, crucial evidence that would have [proved] our clients' innocence was missing or ignored," said Hendrix, who is with the Little Rock-based Fuqua Campbell P.A. law firm.

    "These three men spent too many years of their lives locked up for something they didn't do," Hendrix said.

    Benca, Echols' attorney, said time is of the essence.

    Ten years after the Alford Plea, the court where the case was tried will lose jurisdiction, which means this August, Echols' defense attorneys could no longer file petitions for relief, which, depending on what happened to the evidence, could be a petition for dismissal.

    "What we are asking for, we don't know," Benca said. "It is speculative at this point. It would be quite aggressive. This is pretty serious."

    Part of the Alford Plea agreement was that defense attorneys "wouldn't sue the state civilly for wrongful conviction," Benca said. "That would again be at issue if the state failed to fulfill their obligations, which included the preservation of evidence for future testing."

    https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/...oys-case-gone/
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  8. #108
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    News Flash.......this just in.....Lawyer posturing for a money grab!

    Coming up after the break, we have an in-depth analysis of "Water is wet."

    Stay with us......
    “Ninety-nine percent have made peace with their God. Their victims didn’t have that choice.”

    “You're not entitled to a pain-free execution.”

  9. #109
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    Police Department ordered to comply with FOIA request in West Memphis Three case

    A man who claims he was wrongfully convicted in the 1993 murders of three boys in West Memphis may soon learn what happened to the evidence in his case that police and prosecutors claim was lost or destroyed.

    The West Memphis Police Department has been served with a summons by the Crittenden County Circuit Court and the state of Arkansas ordering the department to respond to a FOIA request demanding answers as to what happened to case evidence. WMPD has 30 days to respond to a lawsuit filed by Damien Echols’ attorney, Patrick Benca, according to Echols public relations firm, Soury Communications.

    Echols, who served 18 years on death row in Arkansas, for a crime he claims that he and his co-defendants, Jason Baldwin or Jesse Misskelley Jr., didn’t commit, has learned that evidence that was preserved at the West Memphis, Arkansas Police Department has either been destroyed, is missing, or both.

    Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley were convicted in 1994 of the slayings of 8-year olds Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore. The three boys were riding bikes in their West Memphis neighborhood May 5, 1993 when they vanished.

    Their bodies were found in a drainage ditch a day later. Echols and his cohorts were arrested a month later and prosecutors claimed the boys were killed in an occult ceremony. After the convictions, serious questions about the veracity of the case against the three emerged.

    On Aug. 19, 2011 the three were released from prison after agreeing to an Alford Plea. The three were placed on probation for 10 years meaning all evidence in their case had to be kept until Aug. 19, 2021.

    In an effort to find out what happened to the body of evidence that could potentially contain exculpatory forensics, Benca submitted an FOIA request July 6, seeking all records relating to the missing evidence in the West Memphis 3 case.

    Over the past year, Echols and his attorneys have tried on numerous occasions to contact the West Memphis Police Department as well as prosecutor, now judge, Scott Ellington to make arrangements to transfer the forensic evidence to a special laboratory for M-Vac testing. Echols said he has received no response.

    Benca had reached out to acting Prosecuting Attorney Keith Chrestman seeking to review the evidence when he learned from him that after the plea, in 2011, some of the evidence ended up lost and missing, and some of the evidence ended up in a building that burned down. He agreed at first to review the remaining evidence with Benca, but now, according to news reports, Chrestman is now saying “he told Echols’ attorneys that if they wanted that evidence tested they would have to seek a court order.”

    “The West Memphis PD agreed to facilitate the testing of some of the evidence, but then the West Memphis police as well as Prosecutor Ellington stopped communicating with us over the past year. We have now learned that much of the evidence has been lost, destroyed or both. We are deeply concerned about the sequence of events. Was the evidence lost after we requested advanced DNA testing? What evidence is left? Where does that evidence reside now? Bottom line is that we want to submit the remaining evidence for advanced DNA testing to hopefully obtain new DNA results that can help fully exonerate the three men,” attorney Stephen Braga said.

    In May 2020, Echols, his attorney Braga and Lonnie Soury contacted Ellington who agreed to release evidence in the case for further DNA testing. In a series of email correspondence, Ellington contacted Kermit Channel at the Arkansas Crime Lab who informed Ellington that the trial evidence was located at the West Memphis police department. Ellington then contacted WM Police assistant chief Langston and Major Stacey Allen who also agreed to provide the evidence for DNA testing.

    Filmmaker Bob Ruff, who had recently completed a docuseries on the West Memphis 3 case, had recommended using the new M-Vac DNA system on the existing evidence to hopefully reveal the DNA of the murderer. Testing had previously revealed that DNA linked to Terry Hobbs, stepfather of one of the murdered children, was found in the ligatures on the sneaker of one of the boys. A recent FBI study found that the amount of DNA recovered with the M-Vac system was several‐fold greater—the vacuum system yielded an average of 12 times more nDNA and 17x greater mtDNA- than traditional testing methods.

    “We have been literally begging the state of Arkansas to allow us to do further DNA testing to clear our names for over a year. We were lied to repeatedly, and now we learn that much of the evidence has been destroyed or lost,” Echols said.

    https://talkbusiness.net/2021/10/pol...is-three-case/
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  10. #110
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    June court date set for DNA evidence in West Memphis 3 Case

    KAIT News

    MARION, Ark. (KAIT) - A court date has been set for this summer to discuss the retesting of DNA evidence in the West Memphis 3 case, Damien Echols said on social media Thursday.

    Echols said he will be going to court June 23 in Crittenden County to ask a judge to order a prosecutor to hand over DNA evidence to a lab for testing in the case.

    Echols had asked earlier this year in a petition to retest the evidence in the case, using the M-Vac method for testing. The system uses a wet vacuum method to test evidence.

    However, Prosecuting Attorney Keith Chrestman said Feb. 8 in a court filing, denying the request, that he believes there is little evidence to show that M-Vac is a scientifically sound method to test evidence.

    “A general caselaw search reveals only two cases in which courts mentioned M-Vac,” Chrestman said. “And neither case discusses whether M-Vac uses scientifically sound methods consistent with forensic practices.”

    Chrestman also said he believes that the M-Vac method would alter the DNA, thus would be in violation of the court’s requirement to permanently preserve physical evidence in violent-offense cases. The prosecutor said he also believes the testing would create due process concerns involving the other two defendants - Jason Baldwin and Jesse Misskelley.

    Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley were convicted in 1993 in the deaths of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis.

    The trio later accepted an Alford Plea in 2011, which allowed them to plead guilty but maintain their innocence in the case.

    https://www.kait8.com/2022/03/10/jun...emphis-3-case/
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

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