Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [133]
Jason was a bit dismayed, too. He had expected his lawyers to call some of his teachers, to testify about his demeanor in school, including on the day of and the day after the murders. He expected to hear some testimony to support his alibi. In retrospect he thought he would like to have taken the stand himself, if only so that the jury could have heard him say something on his own behalf before they left to consider his fate. As the one witness his lawyers had called stepped down from the stand, Jason later said he felt “lost.” He felt young and alone, and he was worried about his family.294
Midway through the trial he had made a second crucial decision based on his own ethics and his belief, as he put it, that “the truth was going to come out.” It was never reported, but at near the point where Fogleman and Davis decided to play the occult card, they’d approached Jason again, and this time they’d sweetened their offer. Years later, Jason recalled the tenor of that exchange. “Before the trial started, it was forty years,” he said, “and then, after the trial got going, they came back and it was twenty.” Jason said he was not tempted to accept either time. “It was wrong. It was against everything I was brought up to believe in,” he explained. “We weren’t rich, moneywise, but my mom instilled good values in us. They were telling me, ‘All they really want is Damien. Just testify against Damien. Say he done it. Get up there and lie.’ I told him I couldn’t help him with anything like that. I told him, ‘I couldn’t do it even if you said you’d let me go right now.’ And I told him, ‘I didn’t want to hear no more about it.’”
Jason had gone into the trial believing that, as he explained, “I didn’t think there was no possible way they could find us guilty when we didn’t do it. Not in America. It’s not what I was raised up to believe would happen in America.” But now, having fended off two deals, while watching the vigor of the prosecution against him, some long-held beliefs were crumbling. He’d seen his lawyers “fighting hard,” but now he also saw, as he put it, that “it was hard to fight against Judge Burnett and the prosecutors too.” It looked to Jason like “everything we tried to do, Judge Burnett wouldn’t allow it. He’d find some reason to turn us down. Even I could see that, and I didn’t know anything about it.”
Jason said he’d told his attorneys that he wanted to testify. He wanted to tell the jury that he’d been cutting his uncle’s grass on the afternoon the boys disappeared, and he wanted them to call his uncle to verify that claim. He wanted to say that he had no recollection of ever seeing Michael Carson at the juvenile detention facility, and that if he had encountered him, he never would have said what the other teenager claimed he did. Mostly, he wanted the jurors to hear him speak in his own behalf, before they adjourned to judge him. But, he would later recall, his lawyers “kept giving me the runaround, telling me I was sixteen and saying, ‘You don’t need to testify.’ They told me, ‘Anything you say, the prosecutor is going to twist it and use it against you.’”
Now, Jason reflected, it looked like they’d been right. He felt that any defense was futile and that under Burnett he and his lawyers faced “a no-win situation.” “All that mattered,” he concluded, “was that Damien was weird and I had black T-shirts.”
The three weeks of testimony had produced some remarkable twists and turns. Now, even with the testimony concluded, the trial’s peculiarities did not end. Two more oddities developed before the lawyers could make their closing arguments.
Lesser Charges
Ordinarily, when a defendant is tried on a charge of capital murder, he will ask that the jury be instructed to consider lesser charges, such as first-or second-degree murder, since lesser charges carry lighter sentences. Often, though not always, prosecutors oppose that request.