BBC News has an article about the West Memphis Three-- Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelly-- in reference to an awareness day benefit that was held by Free the West Memphis Three this past weekend. The three were convicted of the murder of three small boys in 1993 and have been in jail for about twelve years now. Damien Echols' lethal injection date is looming.
I don't know much about the case, although it seems like it was shoddily prosecuted during the "ritual murder" heydey in the '90s when everyone was firmly convinced that roving bands of satanists were stealing and eating small children. What particularly caught my eye was this quote:
Damien Echols was interested in the Wicca religion - a pagan belief system that incorporates witchcraft.
But the prosecution suggested that his wearing of black clothes, listening to heavy metal music and reading Stephen King horror books were also evidence of his guilt.
(emphasis mine)
I remember that "satanic crimes" hysteria, and I also remember when it slowly started to come to light that most (probably all) of that WAS hysteria and pretty much bullshit. I intend to read up some more on this case (the FtWT3 site above has a page with a lot of information from the case) but it sure wouldn't surprise me if this was more of the same. You know, in theory I'm quite in favor of the death penalty for certain cases. In practice, I am very rarely in favor of it, because the country is full of narrow-minded, bigoted assholes and lazy bureaucrats who just want a (preferably poor and uneducated) body to shove in the chair so their statistics will look good. And it's cases like this, where it looks as though some outcast kids (at least one of whom was suffering from a learning disability) got fingered for a horrible crime because they were weird and probably somewhat antisocial, that make me think that maybe the system is just far too imperfect to ever responsibly use capital punishment.
(This is not to suggest that there are not many, many fine, responsible, fair-minded people working in the extremely difficult field of law enforcement and criminal justice. But the bad apples aren't just rotten, they're toxic to society.)
What irritates the piss out of me is that clearly just about everyone involved with this case was some combination of ignorant and bigoted, because if you know the first thing about Wicca you know that 1) it is SO not the same thing as Satanism, and 2) no serious practitioner of Wicca ever advocates harming people and certainly not murder. A Wiccan is no more or less likely to kill anyone than your average Christian or Jew-- and for that matter, neither is your average Satanist. I've actually known some Satanists, which is I'm sure more than anyone in that courtroom (possibly including the defendants) ever have, and the notion that Satanism is all about weird ritual sacrifice is, well, just silly. Read a book, people!
I could also get into a much bigger rant about all this, but it's going to have to wait for another day. Too much left to do tonight...
Anyway, I'll be following and reading the background of this case-- they have filed a new appeal and DNA evidence is now being examined, so we'll check back in from time to time. Stay tuned!
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