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The prosecutors convicted Echols of checking certain suspicious books out of the public library, and copying off dark passages (“full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”) from the likes of William Shakespeare. God help him if he’d ever discovered Poe. And yet this vague proposition of the murders as an expression of an ignorant boy’s conception of the demands of demonology was the state’s entire case. That’s all we had…. And it proved exactly nothing—except that Damien Echols was being tried, for lack of anything better, for “thoughtcrime.” With Jason Baldwin being dragged along as an afterthought.

“A Packet of Information”

Nothing about the trial had proceeded smoothly, nor would the sentencing that began the next day. Before the final phase of the trial began, Burnett—as he had so frequently—asked the jury to step outside while he consulted with the attorneys. When the jurors had left the room, Burnett explained that he had received reports that the jury foreman and his daughter had received death threats from “someone connected to Damien,” and that another juror had received what she described as a “crank call.” Before asking the jurors to leave the room, Burnett had presented them with a general question, asking whether all still felt that they could be impartial. All the jurors had said yes, and now Burnett was reporting to the lawyers that he was “confident and satisfied” with their responses. But Jason’s lawyers worried that the contacts may have tainted the jury. At their request, Burnett called the jury’s foreman back into the room and questioned him directly. The foreman acknowledged that in the middle of the trial, a member of his family had received a threat, which he had “discussed indirectly” in the jury room. He said the episode had prompted “probably a ten-second conversation” and that the matter “wasn’t brought up again.”

Burnett said again that he was satisfied. But the defense attorneys were not. Noting that a threat had been made and that it had been discussed among the jurors, they argued that the possibility of taint on a jury that was weighing life or death was unacceptable. They moved for a mistrial. Judge Burnett denied the motion, telling the lawyers that they could appeal the matter if they chose. In the meantime, he announced, “We’re going to proceed.”

The trial’s sentencing phase was like the guilt-or-innocence phase, but shorter. Here, the prosecutors would present evidence that tended to increase, or aggravate, the crime’s enormity, in order to call for the most severe punishment. The defense, on the other hand, would present evidence to lessen, or mitigate, the circumstances, and plead for a merciful sentence. In Damien’s case, attorney Scott Davidson would be asking the jury to sentence Damien to life in prison rather than to death. He called a few witnesses to describe difficult circumstances in Damien’s childhood, but the defense team expected Dr. James Moneypenny, a psychologist from Little Rock, to be its most important witness.300Moneypenny had interviewed and tested Damien, and reviewed many of his records. “I notice that there is a packet of information there in front of you,” defense attorney Davidson said. “Are those the records that were compiled in this case?” It was a simple enough question, but Lax, who was sitting in the courtroom, heard it with a sinking heart. He knew what was in those records. And he knew that, now that Damien’s own defense team had introduced them into the trial, they were fair game for the prosecutors—if the prosecutors wanted to explore them. “That’s right,” the psychologist replied.

Davidson proceeded. He asked what the psychologist had concluded from the reports. Moneypenny offered his opinion that Damien suffered from “a severe mental disturbance” that was characterized by depression, and that underlying his depression was “a pretty disordered personality structure.” He described Damien as having “a pervasive or all-encompassing sense of alienation between himself and the world,” along with “a very painful sensitivity