After they exhaust their state appeals, they can appeal in federal court. I wish the 48 Hours special had been 2 hours instead of 1 hour. Also, I wish there had been more of an update on Jason and Jessie.
Arkansas law holds that the original trial judge is the person most familiar with the case and therefore the person most suited to understand any procedural errors that may have taken place during the original trial. That said, David Burnett is currently running for state senator and will hear no more appeals. He actually retired last year but came out of retirement/was specially appointed to hear Jesse Misskelley and Jason Baldwin’s Rule 37 appeals (which he denied on 1/20/10).
http://arkansasnews.com/2009/12/29/judging-david-burnetts-blunders/
John Fogleman, one of the prosecutors for the original trials, is running for the ASSC. Hopefully, he’ll have to recuse himself if he wins and has to hear any WM3 appeals.
IANAL and IIRC, Damien Echols’s next move is to appeal, to the ASSC, Burnett’s 2008 decision to refuse him a new trial based on the new dna evidence. Misskelley and Baldwin’s next move is to go before the appellate division. At some point, if they don’t get relief at the state level, they move to the Federal courts up to and including the USSC. How long this would take, what are the procedures to get there, I’m not sure. Also, Echols’s appeals process is different than Baldwin and Misskelley because of his death penalty sentence.
The show was a nice overview. I had heard it was going to be 2 hours long but apparently the powers that be decided to cut it to 1 hour. I don’t know if it really matters, though. You could do a year’s worth of 48 Hours and you still wouldn’t cover everything. I do wish, however, that the allegations of juror misconduct had been covered more thoroughly. There is some information the show left out and IMHO and IANAL, those allegations are the best chance for winning an appeal.
Hi everyone we have a discussion forum about this case if you would like to learn more or just discuss it. there is so much information available it is almost impossible to imagine how these three are still in prison and I am so glad that it is discussed in so many places every post on every forum adds to awareness
Fully agreed. Mark Byers did the crime (probably killed his second wife too). Plain and simple.
I always find it extraordinarily ironic that people will say the WM3 are innocent and that they were railroaded because of what they wore, what music they listened to and how they behaved but then they’ll turn around and say Byers must be guilty, just look at how he acts and what he says.
I’m not saying he’s not a possible suspect nor am I saying he’s ever going to be someone I’d like to hang out with but if you’d read all of the available evidence, it’s impossible to come to the conclusion he’s guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and the same goes for Terry Hobbs. Railroading people because of ill-informed opinions is wrong no matter how distasteful the person might be.
That’s mighty damn suspicious.
He also had the knife with his kid’s blood on it. That. all by itself, is more evidence than was ever produced against the WM3.
I’m not convinced Byers is the killer. I’m convinced he’s crazy as hell and that if the term ‘white trash’ didn’t exist before it surely would have been coined just for an apt description of him but I don’t think I could vote to convict or even indict with what’s known. I’d be less surprised to learn he had something to do with his wife’s death; he even referred to her death (which happened years after the WM3 were convicted when only he and her son and the son’s girlfriend were in the house) as a ‘murder’, and those crocodile tears/breakdown he had at her grave in one of the documentaries make Glenn Beck’s breakdowns look like Brando in his prime in terms of sincerity.
One thing I remember reading about his wife’s death made me think the Byers are officially “the white trashiest family ever”- as in ‘there should be a lavish banquet with Courtney Love and Merle Haggard performing a duet and the mother of Anna Nicole Smith presenting the award’ worthy. When his wife died- under mysterious circumstances (the official cause was undetermined but it’s believed it was an overdose on illegally obtained Dilaudid to which she’d been addicted since before the murder of her son), when the EMTs arrived they found her older son and his girlfriend naked and making out on the sofa! I’ve never done it personally but I’ve nothing really against using sympathy to get sex, but good God- there’s a time and a place! “My mama’s dead- let’s have a quicky before they get her body out of the trailer and my mood improves!” isn’t either one.
Devil’s Knot goes into Byers pre WM3 history and that in and of itself is amazing. He had a history of violence (bar fights/assault type stuff), grand theft, possessing and selling drugs (usually of the illegally obtained prescription variety), fencing stolen goods when he had a pawn shop, DUIs, being a deadbeat dad (from his previous marriage), and all manner of misdemeanors. Almost any of these things in and of themself you would think would send any of us- at least who isn’t a millionaire able to afford great lawyers (which he isn’t) or with an immediate family member in high places AND willing to help you out (which he doesn’t have) would send you to jail at least briefly in and of itself, and in combination would send you away for years, yet Byers had spent remarkably few nights ever in jail. It’s known he was a police informant (he himself has admitted that) which would explain some of the slaps on the wrist but you’d think that even small town justice would eventually get sick of him. I’ve wondered if he has the dirt on somebody in power- if he sold drugs or something else illegal to a big shot (or a big shot’s loved one) or something similarly embarassing if it got out and that he could prove. It would explain a lot.
AFTER the WM3- after the first documentary aired even- he forced two boys to knife fight; characteristically he got into some trouble for it but the charges were dropped. He was convicted in the late 1980s for burglary AND for selling Xanax to an undercover cop and sentenced to 8 years- served 15 months.
I got this from this web site but it’s confirmed from DEVIL’S KNOT (DK) with page numbers, and this isn’t ALL he did. Bolding and emphases mine.
How in the hell does this guy stay free unless he’s got some serious shit on somebody? And even then- you’d think if it was anything really serious he had that whoever he had the dirt one wouldn’t have much moral problem with hiring another prisoner to shank him. Do police usually take this good a care of their informants?
Perhaps? But does it make him guilty beyond a shadow of doubt? No. Byers has always said his teeth were removed because they were in terrible shape due to a variety of reasons including his use of Dilantin. Dilantin is an anti-seizure medication and gum disease is one of its side effects.
The teeth controversy is a moot point however. The defense’s experts (Dr. Michael Baden, Dr. Janice Ophoven, Dr. Richard Souviron and Dr. Werner Spitz) have all testified that most of the wounds, including what were thought to be human bite marks in PL2, were caused by animal predation (the prosecution obviously disagrees).
C’mon, you know this isn’t really true. Genetic Designs, the outside lab used by the West Memphis for this case, found that the blood on the knife matched the HLA-DQ Apha type of Byers and his step-son (not to mention Michael Moore but for brevity’s sake I won’t go there or mention the weird statistical anomalies with the results of Genetic Designs’s tests).
http://callahan.8k.com/images/geneticd/case_report_01-27-94_attach_1.jpg
Byers has given conflicting statements on how the blood got on the knife but again, I think it’s a moot point as the defense experts contend most of the injuries to the boys were caused by animal predation either perimortem or postmortem. Additonally, I know I said, in an earlier post, that the knife was not retested by the defense but I was wrong. The knife was submitted to Bode Laboratories for STR analysis and no additional results were obtained. JMB’s knife simply isn’t a factor anymore no matter how many times you repeat it.
This isn’t true. Norm Metz, the neighbor Byers called to help him with Melissa Byers, said that when he entered the house, Ryan and his girlfriend were lying naked on a sofa. Metz then went to check on Melissa in her bedroom, couldn’t find a pulse, went and called an ambulance, returned to Melissa and found Byers and Ryan putting pants on her. After the ambulance took Melissa away, Ryan left.
I’m not saying this isn’t sordid stuff, it is but Ryan Clark had a non-existent natural father, a drug addicted mother and stepfather (among their many problems), lived in absolute poverty at the time of his mother’s death and of course, his brother was killed in one of the most notorious murder cases in Arkansas history. I don’t think teaching him good manners was a priority so you should really cut him some slack.
I agree that there isn’t evidence to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Mark Byers was involved in the murders. But if he wasn’t involved in committing the murders and doesn’t know who did the murders, it’s hard to fathom why he acted the way he did during the filming of the two documentaries. Why did he tell police conflicting stories about what that knife had been used for? Why did he tell conflicting stories about when and why his teeth had been removed? Why would he want to act out in a violent and angry manner for the movies, shooting guns at pumpkins while he calls out the names of the accused murderers? They also filmed him saying similar things years later while setting a fire near the site where the murders had been committed. He volunteered that he had been abused in a manner similar to what had been done to his son during the murders, and at one point during the film he seemed to ask for his son’s forgiveness for harming him. Basically, there’s nothing solid, but plenty of things seemed “off” about him in the films. I do feel that he has been treated with an air of suspicion, which is unfortunate if he is innocent as he claims, but it appears that he brought a fair amount of suspicion upon himself.
Sorry, that should have been “beyond a reasonable doubt” and not “beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
That said, I think he did all the things you’ve listed because Byers his own worst enemy just as Damien Echols did himself no favors when he (supposedly) blew kisses at the victims’s families.
Understand, I think Byers is still a reasonable suspect though not for the reasons other posters have listed. Convicting someone, however, in the court of public opinion solely because you don’t like the way that person behaves is repellent. And it is especially hypocritical to do so when you claim that someone else was railroaded because the public didn’t approve of his music, clothes and religious choices.
Additionally, there’s a huge amount of new case material that has come out in the past couple of years, evidence that leads away from Byers (and of course, the WM3) but do the posters who claim to be so interested in this case mention it? Or even know about it? No, because it’s good enough for them that the freak with the bloody knife (blood that matches the freak’s own HLA-DQ Alpha type) and who had his teeth pulled by a dentist (imagine that, having a dentist pull your rotting teeth and fit you for dentures) is the murderer. A lot of people now have their sights on Terry Hobbs (Steve Branch’s stepfather) for similar reasons. Like Byers, I think he’s a reasonable suspect (and an all-around terrible person) but there simply isn’t enough evidence to convict him. It’s a shame.
No one has to provide the real murderer before the injustice done to the WM3 can be made right.
Of course not. I was just engaging in speculation. The murders may very well have been committed randomly by some person from the community or even someone who was just passing through town. I think it’s human nature to wonder who actually did it, though.
I knew what you meant. 
I agree. Stress and grief can have strange effects on people. It troubles me a bit that Damien is believed to have done that, and that he came across as arrogant and aloof during the original trial. But I tend to give Damien some benefit of the doubt because he was only 18, and people were taunting him whenever they could, accusing him of all sorts of crazy things. Mark Byers was (supposedly) a mature adult, and given his criminal past, you would think he would have been more careful about acting suspiciously. But no one can really understand the stress Byers was under, and I think he’s probably a weird guy with some mental health issues, who might have been drunk or high when he said and did those things.
I seriously doubt the case will ever be solved. It’s way too ‘cold case’ by now and so much evidence was lost or just never collected at the time of the murders. I think this is one reason the WM3 have never been granted another trial. (Where’s Cousin Vinnie when you need him?)
Sampiro, I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Do you think the WM3 haven’t been granted another trial because they haven’t been able to prove who really did the crime? Or that it hasn’t been granted because so much evidence was lost or never collected? Or something else?
I mean that I don’t think the case will ever be solved, and that the fact that without the WM3 as scapegoats there’s nobody to take for the fall for a terrible crime is one reason they’ve never been granted new trials.
Hi Everyone this case is finally getting the attention it deserves and as much as I appreciate all the celebrities coming out in support, I wonder why does it takes celebrities to make so many people do the right thing ?
Anway I am looking forward to the next movie and hope it has the proverbial happy ending
Is there a release date for PL3 yet? Is it going to be on HBO? (I think a theatrical release through independent cinemas would be a great fundraiser.)
Thanks for the links to your message board. It’s OK to post your links, but the custom here is generally to give a bit more of an update/contribution to the discussion.
It would be awesome if the new movie could have a happy ending, but that would require the WM3 to be exonerated via some procedure other than federal appeals, which I understand would take some time. Has some other type of appeal for action been made recently?