Today at Rattle.com we feature a pair of short poems by Damien Echols, who’s bio places him on death row in Arkansas for a crime he didn’t commit. As they say, everyone in prison is innocent–only Damien really is. If you’re unfamiliar with his story, watch Paradise Lost. If you support the death penalty, here are some facts:

  • Since 1973, more than 125 people have been released from death rows throughout the country due to evidence of their wrongful convictions. In 2003 alone, 10 wrongfully convicted defendants were released from death row.
  • A 2007 study of death sentences in Connecticut conducted by Yale University School of Law revealed that African-American defendants receive the death penalty at three times the rate of white defendants in cases where the victims are white.
  • Ninety-five percent of death row inmates cannot afford their own attorney.
  • Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 80% of all executions have taken place in the South. The Northeast accounts for less than 2% of executions.
  • In 2007, 88% of all known executions took place in five countries: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the USA. Only four countries execute more of their citizens than the United States.

And so on, courtesy of Amnesty International.

But as horrific as capital punishment is on the whole, Damien Echols’ case is so much worse. You can read about it in detail here, but the gist is, three young boys were found brutally murdered in the woods in Arkansas. Despite there being no direct evidence linking Echols and his two younger friends to the murder, the investigation turned into a witch hunt in every sense of the word, the whole town panicking about satanic cults because these three outsiders dressed in black and listened to Metallica.

The police made a mess of the investigation, but coerced a confession out of Jessie Misskelley, Echols’ developmentally disabled friend. The interrogation lasted 12 hours, without the boys parents or lawyer present — only 46 minutes were recorded. The D.A. then gave Misskelley the option of testifying against his friends to reduce his sentence, but he refused, saying that the confession wasn’t true. But that was enough in this backward town for the jury to convict.

There’s much more to the case, including one victim’s crazy father having a knife with the boy’s blood on it and the biggest joke of an expert witness you’ll ever see, but you’ll have to watch the documentaries. They’re worth it.

What stands out more than anything is that, even as a 17-year-old, Echols is the most intelligent person in that courtroom. At one point he references the Salem Witch Trials, and everyone in the room gasps — he must be a witch! Echols is a thoughtful, articulate, inquisitive young man, in a town where that’s not the norm. With a mind like his, it’s no surprise he became a poet.

The chilling thing is that this could happen to anyone — any of us could find ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, and be left to the mercy of a failed justice system. If Echols could have afforded a defense, he wouldn’t be fighting for his life right now.

What’s more, if HBO didn’t happen to bring their cameras into the courtroom, we’d have no idea that this had happened. Maybe Echols would still have these poems in Rattle, but the line about his innocence would seem just as specious as they usually do. Margaret Cho, Marilyn Manson, Eddie Vedder, and even Bill Clinton support Echols–but how many people are rotting in jail right now, facing the same injustice without the same kind of exposure?

More horrific than the West Memphis Three are all those ghosts they stand for, the thousands of people wrongly convicted before The Innocence Project and DNA testing could set them free.

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