09-29-2010, 08:26 PM
shit. now i'm going to have to read the entire trial transcript. to be fair.
There was a time that Pamela Hobbs believed justice had been served for her young son's murder.
But 16 years after the mutilations and killings of three 8-year-old Cub Scouts, including her son, she has more doubts than ever.
Tear-stricken and angry, Pamela Hobbs sat through the original trial of the three accused teens -- Damien Echols, 18; Jessie Misskelley Jr., 17, and Jason Baldwin, 16.
They were convicted of murdering her son, Stevie Branch, and two other neighborhood boys, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers. The second-graders' bodies were found bruised and mutilated in a West Memphis, Arkansas, ditch; their arms and legs were bound by shoe laces.
The killers became dubbed the West Memphis 3.
When interviewed by media and documentary crews after the trial, Hobbs believed justice had been served. Misskelley and Baldwin had life sentences. Echols was on death row.
But recent developments -- including new eyewitness statements and DNA evidence from the defense -- have uprooted her faith in those prosecutions. Once a staunch believer that the teens were guilty, now she says the teens accused of killing her son in the West Memphis 3 deserve a new trial.
"I wanted to believe in our justice system," said Hobbs, now 45. She moved to Blytheville, Arkansas, shortly after the 1993 trial. "But time heals all wounds, and you start looking at things differently."
Her public change of heart has been supported by new evidence presented by the defense over the past few years. In 2007, DNA and forensic evidence tests revealed no physical evidence at the crime scene that linked the three teens to murders. The evidence was presented to the state.
Furthermore, DNA that might belong to two other men was found in the knot used to tie Christopher.
One of the men is Terry Hobbs, the stepfather of Stevie, the defense says. In 1993, such advanced DNA testing had not been available, attorneys said. (she has since divorced hobbs.)
The defense continues to argue the results of the DNA evidence. In September, the Arkansas Supreme Court received an appeal from Echols, requesting a new trial after the lower courts denied his request to submit new DNA evidence. This month, an Arkansas Law Review article stated Echols should be granted a new trial based on the 2007 DNA evidence.