Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [136]
The deputy prosecuting attorney mocked the defense attorneys’ decision to implicate John Mark Byers “by innuendo.” To the charges of police ineptitude, he said, “Were there mistakes made? Sure…[But] in the overall scheme of things, it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.”
Then Fogleman picked up a grapefruit. “Now, I want to talk to you about these knives,” he said. Jason’s lawyer jumped up to object. In a discussion in front of Burnett, Ford argued that Fogleman was preparing to perform an unscientific experiment with an item—the grapefruit—which had not been placed into evidence. “I’m just going to show the types of marks that this knife makes and that knife makes,” Fogleman countered. “That’s all, Your Honor.” Burnett told him he could proceed.
Fogleman whacked the grapefruit dramatically with each of the two knives—the one from the lake and the one that had belonged to Byers. Holding the grapefruit up where the jury could see the marks, he said that the pattern left by the lake knife matched the wounds on Christopher Byers. With that knife in one hand, he pointed to the autopsy photo showing the stab wounds to Christopher’s groin. “I submit the proof shows this knife caused this,” Fogleman said. “Well, true, it could be another knife like this, but I submit to you the proof—the circumstantial evidence—show that this knife, State’s exhibit seventy-seven, caused those injuries right there.”
Then Fogleman sat down. His closing argument had taken an hour and a half.
Damien’s Closing Argument
For the first time since the trial began, Damien’s infant son was in the courtroom with Domini, his mother. Val Price, Damien’s lead defense lawyer, rose to deliver his closing arguments. He focused on the jurors’ responsibility to consider reasonable doubts. Reminding them that “circumstantial evidence must be consistent with the guilt of the defendant and inconsistent with any other reasonable conclusion,” he recalled the testimony relating to John Mark Byers. Specifically, he asked them to remember Byers’s acknowledgment that he’d beaten Christopher with a belt just before he disappeared; Byers’s claim that he went to the woods in the dark, at 8:30P.M ., “still wearing shorts, still wearing flip-flops, still without a flashlight”; Peretti’s statement that some of Christopher’s injuries “were consistent” with those that might have been caused by the knife Byers had given the film crew; the lab report indicating that DNA found on the knife was “consistent” with that of both Christopher and his stepfather; and the conflicting answers Byers gave when questioned about the blood on the knife. “I think,” Price told the jurors, “this evidence—and the possibility of John Mark Byers as a suspect—is certainly an aspect of reasonable doubt.”
The lawyer then attacked the police department’s handling of the case, as well as the state’s theory of the crime. He recalled the man at the Bojangles and the lost evidence. Noting the lack of blood at the site where the bodies were recovered, he asked, “Was there any evidence at this crime scene area that this is where they were beaten, or stabbed or cut? No. There has been no evidence whatsoever.” In short, he said, “If something fit in with their theory that Damien was involved, the state investigated that. If it didn’t, they chucked it aside. They threw it away. Just like that Bojangles blood.”
Then he addressed the state’s theory of motive. Noting that most trials hinged on the constitutional guarantees enshrined in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments—guaranteeing the rights to a public trial and to a trial by jury—he argued that this case was unusual because it also raised concerns about the First Amendment, the one guaranteeing freedom of religion. Recalling police detectives’ testimony that “Damien wasn’t a suspect until he started talking about