As I wrote in late 2009, DNA at the site where the victims were found in the West Memphis Three case has been identified as linked to one of the victim’s stepfather but none to any of the three convicted in the murders. A defense motion has just been filed, reported in the Commercial Appeal, that seeks a new trial based on this and on the fact that the other person identified by the DNA evidence was with the stepfather just an hour before the time of death.
My post from 2009 also notes that the defense has also raised eyewitness testimony that the boys were with the stepfather the day of the killings, which he had denied in police statements.
No telling who could’ve picked up a hair from whom, but it does make it harder to think that the 3 could’ve been convicted beyond a reasonable doubt. Cf. Casey Anthony.
When HBO did its show about the case, it was obvious that the producers of that show believed that the step-father of one of the boys was the killer. His behavior was questionable, but there was no real evidence toward him, except for a strange incident in which he gave the TV producers a knife.
The murder site is not that far from I-55, and not too far away, through the woods, was a truck stop. If I remember correctly, there was a report of a man in the bathroom at the truck stop who was covered with blood, but that lead was never followed.
Meanwhile, Damian Echols seemed to revel in his notoriety and did just about everything a prosecutor would want a defendant to do in a courtroom to get the jury thinking, “that boy is evil.” Echols’ defense would have been better served if he’d never set foot inside the courtroom.
I thoroughly despise lazy prosecutors, and most of them are lazy, but DNA evidence often merely throws in a red-herring that is meaningless. So an unknown hair is found on one of the boy’s clothes. That means, what, exactly? It means nothing.