Jackson, Walsh and Berg said “West of Memphis’’ amounts to the fair trial Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley — known as the West Memphis Three — never got as Arkansas teenagers when they were convicted in 1994.
“We went into this case believing that they didn’t do it, and the facts and the evidence we came out with at the end completely supported that,’’ Jackson said in an interview. “So is the documentary sort of providing the prosecution’s point of view? No, it’s not. We’re not interested in that. They had their go back in 1994. … The documentary, it’s the case against the state, really.’’
The case was a shocker in the rural Arkansas community where 8-year-old Cub Scouts Michael Moore, Steve Branch and Christopher Byers were slain in 1993. Found naked and hogtied, two of the boys drowned in a drainage ditch, while the third bled to death, his genitals mutilated, evidence prosecutors used to claim the children were killed in a satanic ritual.
The defendants were convicted based in part on a confession Misskelley later recanted. Misskelley and Baldwin were sentenced to life in prison, while Echols was condemned to death and once came within weeks of execution.
The case became a cause after Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s documentary “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills,’’ which premiered at Sundance in 1996 and questioned whether justice or misguided public opinion was served in the trial. Over the years, celebrities such as Johnny Depp, Patti Smith, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam and Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks joined the effort to free the men.
Jackson and Walsh watched “Paradise Lost’’ in 2005 and were outraged over the case. From their home base in New Zealand, they got in touch with Lorri Davis, who had met and married Echols while he was on Death Row and was leading the fight to free the men.
