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Ellington west memphis North Branford police investigate social media video containing three 6o million racial slurs. GQ: How do you convince voters that motion-capture 16 First Avenue acting is worthy of awards attention?. At a news conference on Haskell, NJ 07420 USA Saturday, the filmmakers and legal team behind "West of 973-248-8080 Memphis" made it clear that they'd be delighted to be sued by Fax: 973-248-8012 Terry Hobbs, the man they strongly suggest is responsible for the [email protected] triple for which three young men spent nearly 20 years in [email protected] prison. "Let him have at it," said Dennis Riordan, an attorney who led the legal battle of , Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelly, the "," to regain their freedom. Wright Flyer Paper: Proposed Core Compe. Volume 2 (by Robert S. Green ). Fabula de Petro Cuniculo (by Potter, Helen, Beatrix, Mrs. ). News Mean Carlene, Shameless among musical acts for West. a 501c(4) Member's Support Non-Profit Organization, and is NOT affiliated with any governmental agency or department. Deutsch English (Australia) English (Canada) English (India) English (United Kingdom) English (United States) Español (Argentina) Español (España) Español (Latinoamérica) Français Bahasa Indonesia Italiano Português (Brasil) Русский Türkçe. Amy Berg: I think it's something that's so hard to imagine, that somebody that you brought into your house actually could have done this. I always check in to see how she's feeling about her situation. I think she's starting to unravel over it. She said to me, "In the past year, I can't stop listening to this voice. I think he did it. I really think he did it.". Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley released in August 'West Memphis Three' spent 18 years in jail accused of killing three boys Steven Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore found dead in 1993 Now Steven's mother Pam Hobbs wants ex-husband Terry Hobbs probed. The West Memphis Three were teenagers back in '94 when they were convicted for the of eight-year-old Cub Scouts Steven Branch, Christopher Byers and James Michael Moore. At the time, police called the murders "Satanic" because the TEENren's naked bodies had been bound and apparently mutilated. However, recent DNA tests did not link the young men to the scene and showed the presence of others who have never been identified. And the new documentary, , suggests the three young boys were never mutilated, but preyed on post-mortem by snapping turtles commonly found in the -Tennessee border town. The Sum of Their Fears: The Relationshi. (by Major Michael R. Moeller, USAF ). Kings' Dirty Operation: Concise Memos o. (by Ghasemi, Peiman ). 's West Memphis 3 Doc Reveals New Allegations. Shodasi: Secrets of The Ramayana: Kund. (by Sharma, Seshendra ). Dreams of agony (by Yadav, Shubham, Sharda Prasad ). Gwen Avery, Teacher: A Mark Upon Her Ge. (by Molloy, Tessa, M, Mrs. ). Man is branded 'ridiculous' for threatening to report his female neighbour for 'antisocial behaviour' for sunbathing in a bikini in the communal garden. Masha Gessen on "Surviving Autocracy": Fight Politics of the Past with Potent Politics of the Future. Există o lume mai bună, dar este foarte. (by Smarandache, Florentin ). Prosecutor's (Scott Ellington) statement on West Memphis 3 plea deal. (08/19/2011). Women in Prison: How It Is With Us (by Shakur, Assata ). The Air Refueling Receiver that Does Not. (by Major Jeffrey L. Stephenson, USAF ). Covid positivity rates among travellers are 22 TIMES higher in some nations on the amber list compared to France (and almost 30% of all cases being spotted are from holidaymakers flying in from Spain and Portugal). Jury consultants, who often have a psychology background, have long been used to test defense strategies with mock juries before trial and to weed out potential jurors who might have a bias. It"s a newer concept to use public-relations experts like Soury after a conviction. Fill out our short form and we will help find and pair you with the best ellington lighting installation and repair contractors in your area. Jewel-Less Crown: Saga of Life (by Murthy, B.S. ). Since then, the Arkansas Supreme Court determined that DNA evidence found at the scene "conclusively excluded" the three, and attorneys for the men had asked for a new hearing to consider new evidence. Connecticut doesn't need to take part in a brewing national hysteria. I have spoken with members of the victims' families and I can tell you they are still suffering the loss of their little boys. Neither this nor any other proceeding can bring those TEENren back. Independent Literature Catalog (by Barry, Mark, owner of Green Wizard Publishing ). Ellington, one of three Democrats running for an east Arkansas congressional seat, said he knew prosecutors faced a tough legal fight in the case. While Berlinger admits that he and Sinofsky may have tilted "pro-prosecution" in the early days of filming, that quickly changed after witnessing how the cases came together and spending time with the three teens during pretrial jailhouse interviews—particularly Baldwin, who Berlinger describes as "sweet" and "studious.". and listening to Ozzy Osbourne. It's no surprise the juries found the prosecution's narrative compelling, Leveritt says: For them, the image of killer satanists headbanging to was more than plausible. When the credits rolled shortly after the unforgettable final scene, which shows a now-convicted Baldwin and Echols leaving the courtroom in handcuffs and entering a police cruiser as Metallica plays, Baldwin sat stunned. Mojo, however, was considerably more fired up, believing the same thing many of Paradise Lost 's viewers did: that the movie showed an incredible , one that would surely be fixed. "Mojo jumped up," Baldwin recalls. "He said, 'J.B., you're going home, man, you're going home.'". Mojo was right. He just didn't know it would take another 14 years to happen. "My first thought is, 'I hope this dude isn't trying to pull me into some type of escape,'" Baldwin says nearly a quarter-century later. In June 1996, 'Paradise Lost' debuted on HBO, bringing the story of the West Memphis Three to TV sets and showing the power of the camera in the courtroom. A quarter-century later, what does the documentary tell us about citizen activism, the criminal justice system, and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and '90s? Mojo had a different idea of what might get the man he affectionately called "J.B." out of prison. With the guards' blessings, Mojo led Baldwin to Varner's visitation room, where everything had been put away aside from two chairs set up in front of a cart holding a small TV and a VCR. Baldwin remembers grabbing a Mountain Dew and a burrito and sitting down, still unaware of what he was about to watch. "The fact is, if these guys had been acquitted, don't think that Blake wouldn't have had his lawsuit ready to go," Ellington said, referring to Blake Hendrix, Baldwin's attorney. But on that early morning in 1997, Jason Baldwin wasn't concerned with Berlinger and Sinofsky's craft, or legal precedent, or crusading celebrities. He was just taking in the enormity of the defining event of his life to that point, which had been committed to film and was now playing for him inside the cavernous, auditorium- style visitation room. "It was so emotionally taxing to watch and go through it again," he says. "But I had to. I couldn't not watch it at this point. I'm seeing the things I experienced, but not through my own point of view. It was almost like an out-of-body experience.". "That was the one whole ace in the hole for the defendants to get Echols and Baldwin a new trial, when that juror took that evidence back in there and openly discussed it with the others," Ellington said. "I believe that was what was going to be the ringer for getting a new trial, if not by the state court but the federal court.". The attorneys representing Echols and Baldwin believed that the juries wouldn't accept the prosecution's versions of events—that they were too fantastical and tied to second-hand information—and that without conclusive proof, their clients would walk. Baldwin's attorneys even avoided putting him on the witness stand or mounting much of a defense, believing the burden was on the state. But then the verdicts arrived: Both Baldwin and Echols were found guilty on all counts, just like Misskelley had been six weeks before them. The evolution of how the teens were perceived—on behalf of both the filmmakers and even part of the defense team—is captured on camera early as Stidham and his colleagues began to consider whether Misskelley's confession had been coerced. Stidham, who was just 30 years old and not long out of law school when the court appointed him to be Misskelley's attorney, went in thinking he would negotiate a deal for his client, who had told police that his acquaintances Baldwin and Echols committed the crimes and that he was present and played a role as an accessory. But the lawyer quickly noticed inconsistencies in Misskelley's purported confession. Misskelley, who reportedly had an IQ of 72, changed his story several times, and only a small part of his statements was recorded. There also were issues with other details he provided, including how the victims were bound and whether the boys were raped. (Despite Misskelley's statement, the coroner's examination found no injuries on the victims consistent with sexual assault.) But most notably, his initial timeline of events didn't match what was known about the crimes, and every time he offered a detail that diverged from the accepted chronology, the interrogating officers seemed to steer him back in the direction of the official version. Misskelley initially told police that the killings happened during the day; knowing that they actually occurred some time after dusk, the officers corrected him, helping him retrofit his story to the case's few known facts. This document may not be reprinted without the express written permission of Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. "Everybody I'd come in contact with was hostile to the truth," Baldwin says. "Here were these guys—at best they were neutral. They weren't telling me I was lying, even if they may have been saying that in their minds. I don't know if they were questioning it, but they weren't mistreating me and telling me that what I was telling them wasn't true.". According to Dan Stidham, the attorney for Misskelley, that money became essential for the cash-strapped defense teams, who needed to pay for expert witnesses and other expenses. Baldwin, who had been coached by his lawyers to avoid speaking to the press, says money was the only reason he agreed to the added pressure of appearing in the documentary, especially when everyone else in a position of authority seemed adversarial toward him. Quickly, however, he realized Berlinger and Sinofsky were taking a different approach. The great irony of the 18-year quest to free the West Memphis Three is that it didn't begin as a crusade. In fact, for the better part of 1993, it was nearly impossible to find anyone who believed they were innocent. In May of that year, police discovered the bodies of Michael Moore, Stevie Branch, and Christopher Byers in the Robin Hood Hills, a small wooded area near the I-40/I-55 exchange. A month later, authorities arrested Baldwin, Echols, and Misskelley—three teenagers who lived in trailer parks near West Memphis and had previous run-ins with the law, though nothing rising to the level of murder. While police had focused on Echols and Baldwin in the intervening weeks because of their reputation, the arrests came largely because of a confession by Misskelley, which was leaked to the largest newspaper in the area, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and ran under the banner headline "Teen describes 'cult' torture of boys." At a press conference shortly after the arrests, the lead investigator was asked how confident he felt about the case on a scale of 1-10. He responded proudly, "11.". Baldwin, the youngest member of the trio that had come to be known as the West Memphis Three, was serving a life sentence after being convicted on charges connected to the 1993 killings of three 8-year-old boys. He had always maintained he didn't commit the crimes, and outside the 's walls, a growing chorus of activists and legal observers were arguing that same thing on his behalf. But inside, he was just another prisoner—Baldwin didn't know who he could trust. That included Mojo, who came calling around 2 a.m. that day trying to coax him out of his cell. Lawyers and supporters of the three men have said they still are pushing for a full . An anonymous donor has offered a $200,000 reward for new information that leads to the arrest and conviction in the 1993 deaths. Speaking on a panel with the attorneys for the three men convicted in the case, Ellington said that he wanted to ensure that a guilty verdict in the killings was preserved when he considered the deal last year. Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley were freed in August under an unusual plea deal in which their original convictions were set aside and they pleaded guilty to lesser charges. "Now, we're still fighting to find the real killers. Those victims never got justice," said Dan Stidham, Misskelley's former attorney and a Green County district court judge. The idea of killer teens in the Christian South, not any greater sense of purpose, was mainly what intrigued Sheila Nevins, then the head of HBO's documentary division, when she spotted a story about the case on the inside pages of . "I had a friend who was working on 20/20, and they had done a film about exorcism in one of the magazine pieces," Nevins says. "She said it was one of the highest-rated pieces they had. So when I saw this tiny little article in the Times, I wasn't about to free anybody that was guilty.. I said, 'I'm going to send some TEENs down there.'". "Getting that kind of creative validation was exciting, but nobody was saying, 'This is an outrageous case that needs to be looked into.'"—Director . The Paradise Lost cameras captured not only the defense's discussions, but the full testimony, in Misskelley's trial, of an expert on coerced confessions. That was more than the people deciding the case were able to hear—the presiding judge made the expert give most of his testimony without the jury in the courtroom because he questioned its relevance. In the joint trial of Baldwin and Echols, which took place separately from Misskelley's, Berlinger and Sinofsky filmed the surreal moments that juries were actually present for: a rundown of the books Echols checked out of the library, a parade of band T-shirts worn by the pair, a copy of a Blue Oyster Cult record found in Damien's girlfriend's house that became evidence because of the word "cult" and song titles like "Don't Fear the Reaper." What the cameras couldn't capture, however, was the introduction of physical evidence—the prosecution didn't offer much of that aside from a knife that was never directly linked to the crimes and fabric threads deemed "microscopically similar" to items found in Baldwin's and Echols's homes, an assertion that has been questioned in the years since the trials. The prosecutor would later say, "There was a lack of physical evidence to tie anyone or anything to the crime scene," while the lead investigator—the same one who told the press the case was an "11" out of 10—would concede, "You've got a lot of circumstantial evidence is what you've got. There's no smoking gun. This is not a smoking-gun-type case.". "There was no reason not to believe the press," Berlinger says. "At that time, I was a little naive that what you read in the paper must have some truth to it, and all the press reports coming out of Arkansas were saying that this was like a slam dunk, an open-and-shut case with a confession that was printed in the newspaper.". Jason Baldwin had no idea what was happening when a fellow inmate at the supermax prison in Varner, Arkansas, woke him up early one morning in 1997. Even without a smoking gun, the circumstantial evidence was enough for a conviction in a place like Crittenden County, Arkansas. West Memphis is in the heart of the Bible Belt: just a two-hour drive from where, legend has it, the devil tuned Robert Johnson's guitar, in a state that's 46 percent evangelical Protestant. The specter of the church looms over Paradise Lost, best represented by an early scene in which Mark Byers leads his congregation in prayer and song. Mara Leveritt, a journalist who followed the case throughout the 1990s and wrote the 2002 book Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three, calls the strain of Christianity that runs through the region "very literal" and says that even her TEENren faced harassment as teenagers for playing Dungeons & Dragons. For the next two hours and 29 minutes, the two inmates sat in near silence watching Paradise Lost: The TEEN Murders at Robin Hood Hills, the landmark documentary released on HBO 25 years ago this week that captured the trials of Baldwin, Jessie Misskelley Jr., and Damien Echols, the three teenagers convicted in 1994 of the crimes that ripped through the small, working-class community of West Memphis, Arkansas. As the first in a trilogy of Paradise Lost films about the case, the 1996 movie was a stunning example of cinéma vérité, as directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky embedded themselves with the prosecution, the defense, and the families of both the slain and the accused to put human faces on a heart-wrenching tragedy, as well as highlight the overblown worries of satanic rituals and murderous cults that proliferated throughout the 1980s and '90s. A spiritual successor to Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line, and a forerunner of more recent documentaries like Making a Murderer, the film stands today as the most affecting examination of one of the most studied legal cases in U.S. history—one that put heavy metal lyrics and black T-shirts on trial and helped lay the groundwork for the current thinking around false confessions. Paradise Lost also led to a famous citizen-activist campaign championing the release of the three teens that caught on at the dawn of the Internet Age and would eventually pull in , , and a who's who of the rich and famous. Berlinger and Sinofsky, the latter of whom died in 2015 at age 58, were able to gain incredible and immediate access to seemingly everyone the case had touched: the families of the victims and the accused, the judge, the lead investigator, members of the community. Berlinger says that after months of filming, the parents of one of the victims raised the issue of payment. That November, he says, HBO agreed to give an honorarium—roughly $5,000—to the families on both sides. In a scene from Paradise Lost, Damien Echols, foreground, and Jason Baldwin listen to testimony in their joint trial. By getting to the story quickly, the directors were able to document the post-arrest period and two trials that followed in painstaking detail. The footage included raw jailhouse interviews with the defendants, strategy sessions held by legal teams on both sides, and extended monologues from Mark Byers, the tall, goateed stepfather of one of the victims, who spoke as though he were reciting the Book of Revelation and who, at one point in Paradise Lost, fired a handgun at a pumpkin while reciting the names of the accused. "I knew it was looking pretty drastic when you have million dollar experts and million dollar lawyers that are working for free," Ellington said in the discussion, part of a day-long symposium on the case at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's Bowen School of Law. "It was going to be a difficult case.". Those "TEENs" turned out to be Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, the young documentarians who had recently completed the acclaimed Brother's Keeper, a film chronicling a death and the resulting trial in a small upstate New York village. When the pair got the call from Nevins, they mobilized immediately, landing in Arkansas shortly after the arrests. The idea, Berlinger says, was to tell a story of disaffected youth—about "TEENs killing TEENs.".

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