It’s been 16 months since Damien Echols walked out of the prison where he spent 18 years for his purported role in the murder of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Ark. Echols and his two co-defendants—Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley—became known as the “West Memphis Three,” and they had fought in the courts for nearly two decades to clear their names.
The three were teenagers in 1993 when the killings occurred, and Echols found himself cast by authorities as the ringleader; police and prosecutors argued, based on little more the suspects’ taste for heavy metal music, their perceived role as outsiders in the community and a questionable confession by Misskelley, that they killed the boys during a satanic ritual. Echols was sentenced to death and Baldwin and Misskelley to life in prison.
