The West Memphis Three Case and Used Evidence
The documentary West Memphis explores the case of the imprisonment of three teenagers for the brutal murder of three children in 1993 Arkansas. By examining the evidence and conducting interviews with members of the family, legal experts, and professionals, the documentary explores possible flaws that were made during the investigation, which led to wrongful convictions. It argues that three teenagers were victims of a flawed system and a rush to judgment while emphasizing the massive work of journalists and activists in this case. Finally, the three convicted were released from prison in 2011, under the Alford plea, and were proven to be innocent.
Although the case happened thirty years ago, the film emphasizes the legacy that this case has left on the US judicial system and how it started to reshape the perception of guiltiness and justice in the modern era. The film points out that injustice and prejudice occur widely within low-income families, while outsiders of society, like three teenagers from Memphis, can be convicted and left unprotected due to their social status. The sense of occultism that investigators tried to find also led to subjective and emotional evidence provided to convict the teenagers. Still, with the large impact of the media, the case of Memphis is seen more from the perspective of unfairness and injustice since it was widely reshaping the perception of the case, as noted by the documentary.
The eyewitnesses, panic perception of a satanic cult, and the absence of direct physical evidence were wrongfully accepted by the judge and prosecutor, which led to the conviction. Other evidence also can occur within the fact that teenagers were denied their constitutional rights to a fair trial in which a false conviction was made. Spohn et al. (2019) describe the importance of due process in protecting individual rights and following a fair trial. In this case, the confession made by Misskelley was under the high pressure of the personal perspective of the interrogator, and it was done without the defending attorney. These critical details define the lack of proper evidence in the case of West Memphis.
Errors Made During the Court Case and Investigation
Various types of errors were present in the West Memphis case. From the lowest level – police investigation, to the highest – the court verdict had flaws that are provided in both the paper and the film. One of the first pieces of evidence is the police interrogation that lasted more than twelve hours, leading to serious pressure on the teenagers to confess to the case. This policy error of using pressure as a means of conviction was both an inefficient and mischarged action that led to dramatic consequences. An essential point of this interrogation is the absence of correction at a higher level of the investigation. This was described in the paper as the ratification of error (Ramsey & Frank, 2007), in which mistakes on the low level are usually ignored and never corrected in higher levels of investigation, leading to wrongful convictions.
It is also partly the prosecutor and judicial error, in which false evidence, such as eyewitnesses of unknown individuals and teenagers’ relation to a satanic cult, were used for the given result. The prosecutor, as one of the most influential individuals in the case, can decide to correct the false evidence by following their rationale and perspective on the case (Ramsey & Frank, 2007). This case can be said to be led by the personal bias of the prosecutor, who had false intentions towards occultism panic that was popular at that period. It is also similar to the judicial bias that happened in the case. The bias towards outsiders in society, as described by three teenagers, can lead to controversial conclusions of judges that can accept false and unconvincing evidence.
Myths and Misconceptions
The confession of one of the members of the defendants was highly opposed by the media and other researchers as false due to several misconceptions made in the case. First of all, the pressure of police interrogation might lead to false confession since the stress that teenagers experience can lead them to confess just to escape the situation of being pressured. It can be explained by one of the myths of Kassin (2008), in which interrogators are reassuring in their professional skills of identifying lies and truth. However, this is based solely on personal bias and the interrogator’s viewpoint and has nothing to do with professionalism since there are no identified techniques for receiving confession with higher accuracy. There is no proper study and evidence to support the concept of professionalism among interrogators in finding the criminal and receiving confession from them.
Although Misskelley confessed in the interrogation, he later claimed it was due to police pressure. There was no attorney present, as well as there were no proper legislative procedures to protect the defendant. The described paper Miranda rights were useless for the case since it does not correctly protect the defendant from mental abuse and pressure. It can also be assumed that police interrogation followed the logic of the third myth described in the paper, as people usually will not assert or confess to a crime they did not commit. This is profoundly false since there were numerous studies on the effect and the pressure of the interrogation room and the environment on people.
The Freedom of West Memphis Three
The defendants were freed under the Alford plea, in which they formally acknowledged themselves guilty and accepted punishment while remaining innocent. In 2011, the Arkansas state provided the agreement for the defendant that allowed them to be freed after 18 years of imprisonment. Regarding the co-responsibility of the miscarriage of justice against West Memphis Three, the judicial branch of Arkansas state has a definite responsibility in the case. However, they disapproved of them, blaming the systematic error that could have happened in any case. Still, there is an evident responsibility of the court judge David Burnett, who allowed to prove the case with unrelated evidence, such as Echol’s attraction to heavy metal music. In addition, the court has no incentive to renew the case and accept the miscarriage of justice.
The Assessment of Criminal Case
The Memphis Three case is an example of how the judicial system in America can be exploited by personal bias, controversies, and outsiders of the community. Although this case is widely popular and has many media supporters review it after twenty and thirty years, it is not the only case in the system. It represents that various defendants were wrongfully convicted and are still imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. Ramsey and Frank (2007) noted that wrongful convictions in the US system could occur from a 5% to 20% chance, which is hundreds and hundreds of individuals a year. These wrongful convictions, according to study materials, are decided mainly by prosecutors in the first place representing the power imbalance between different powers in the judicial branch. The systematic errors in the US are not the result of the wrong policies but the people themselves. One of the negative sides of it is the fact that the judicial branch itself does not take any responsibility for such actions, as well as those who used personal bias during the investigation are left discharged. For the consequence of the wrongful conviction, the symptoms of the judicial branch should be reevaluated.
References
Kassin S. M. (2008). Confession evidence: Commonsense myths and misconceptions. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 35(10), 1309-1322.
Ramsey R. J., Frank J. (2007). Wrongful conviction: Perceptions of criminal justice professionals regarding the frequency of wrongful conviction and the extent of system errors. Crime & Delinquency, 53(3), 436-470.
Spohn, C., Hemmens, C. T., & McCann, W. S. (2019). Courts: A text/reader (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage.