Response to a reader's comment

March 11, 2005 10 Comments

Yesterday “Jail the wm3″ responded to my post about the DareDevil comic based upon the West Memphis Three by simply saying “They did it,two of them failed lie dectors!”

Okay, let’s say this is true. I have three main points to bring up:

What about, during the interrogation of a slightly mentally disadvantaged young man, which lasted about 12 hours and was devoid of a legal representative, the lack of recorded interrogation aside from about an hour? If you read the court transcripts of the interrogation tape, one can easily see how he followed what the police were saying. They even corrected him when he said the wrong thing.
According to George Mason University, the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association contend that polygraphs yield little more than a 50/50 chance of success. Polygraphs work on the assumption that people telling lies are uncomfortable. Maybe not very much, but nevertheless they feel differently to when they’re telling the truth, resulting in changes to heart rate, breathing, perspiration and so forth. Taking into consideration the above mentioned interrogation alone, it would be easy to see why this young may would have appeared to be lying. He had, however, admitted that he went along with what police were telling him as he just wanted to go home.
What about the severe lack of any physical evidence linking the three to the crime? Seasoned criminals cannot commit crimes, let alone a triple homicide, without leaving physical evidence linking them to the crimes they committed. So, please, tell me how three teenagers from Arkansas, one mentally disadvantaged, could subdue, tie up, nearly castrate one of the victims and kill all three of them without leaving any evidence. Oh, excuse me, I forgot to mention the “evidence” of denim jean fibers. That alone is not enough to justly persue a conviction – you cannot tell me these three kids were the only ones in Arkansas wearing denim jeans on that day.

Now, as I’ve said all along, I do think that the WM3 are innocent and wrongly convicted. But I wasn’t there. I don’t know who did/did not kill those three boys. However, regardless of that, the WM3 deserve to have their cases re-evaluated because of the lack of professionalism, dilligence and, quite honestly, the lack of common sense of the local law enforcement. I mean, when a deputy says, under oath during trial that they claim to have had physical evidence from the scene but they lost it, what does that show you about the quality of investigative work that was conducted? What kind of a cop, investigating a brutal triple homicide loses the crime scene evidence?

There is a far too big shadow of doubt over this situation and they at least owe it to the WM3 to have a fair trial.