Paradise Lost

Justice for the West Memphis 3?

Aug. 07, 2012

2:34 p.m.

More and more documentary filmmakers display the annoying tendency of putting themselves into the story Usually, they are not as interesting as the subject of their film. One exception is Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, whose makers, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, have earned the right to reference themselves. Their previous Paradise Lost productions drew national attention to the apparent miscarriage of justice that is PL3's subject and led to the recent freeing of the West Memphis 3, convicted as teenagers in 1994 for murdering a trio of eight-year old boys. The Oscar and Emmy-nominated PL3 is out on DVD. The third installment in this series of HBO documentaries recounts the story before getting to the relatively happy ending. A news media searching for sensationalism rather than the truth played up the murder of those boys in the woods near their homes. After a month of drum-beating headlines, the residents of West Memphis, Arkansas demanded to know why no arrests had been made. Police and prosecutors obliged by bringing in Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. Echols, who stood out in West Memphis for his Gothic proclivities, was sentenced to death. His friends got life. They were accused of being part of a Satanic cult at a time when rumors of such things were rampant in the media and sated the dark appetites of Protestant fundamentalists. The murdered boys were deemed victims of a Satanic ritual by a self-proclaimed expert on the occult with a mail order Ph.D. The West Memphis 3 may have been guilty of nothing more than tagging an overpass with their names, a pentagram and references to heavy metal bands. Celebrities such as Eddie Vedder, the Dixie Chicks and Johnny Depp embraced the original Paradise Lostand if the specter of a celebrity cause makes your eyes roll, here's a case in which the People magazine crowd leveraged their fame for good ends. Money was raised for new lawyers, new appeals and a team of pathologists who found no DNA linking the West Memphis 3 to the crime scene. The mutilated bodies of the victims were explained by the predations of animals, not Satanists. Eventually, Arkansas freed the 3 through an obscure mechanism only a lawyer could love. The trio offered an “Alford Plea,” pleading guilty while professing innocence. It's not the ideal of justice but was preferable to prison and the threat of a lethal injection. Paradise Lost 3 is a compelling story of lynch mob mentality in the media age.