• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 657 0

in his cell as a way of demonstrating the level of autonomy he exercised in the prison.312After the knife incident, the man offered Damien protection—and introduced him to elements of a plot that had been hatched long before Damien’s arrival.313As Damien quickly discovered, Arkansas’s maximum security unit was at the time a place rife with corruption, and Damien’s self-appointed protector was exploiting the situation. Because he and some friends on death row had access to large amounts of money from outside sources, they had been able to bribe guards and certain prison administrators, securing drugs, luxuries, and other contraband items. The ringleader’s unique status on death row was evidenced by, among other things, the presence of a recliner in his cell. He also had a Polaroid camera, with which he photographed parties he threw in his cell. The photographs graphically demonstrated the breakdown of security at what was supposed to be the state’s most secure prison. By the time Damien arrived there, the inmate and his cadre of friends were using the situation to plan an escape. They had already loosened a window, and they’d removed a cinder block in the wall between the ringleader’s cell and the one adjoining it. Shortly after Damien’s arrival on death row, he was assigned to that adjoining cell.

The escape plan failed. There was a change in the prison administration, and soon afterward, guards discovered the loosened window and the hole in the wall between the cells, as well as hidden tools and gunpowder. The ringleader was punished severely, his privileges taken away, and when he was finally released from the hole, he wanted to retaliate. He wanted, at the very least, to embarrass prison officials, whom he considered corrupt and equally culpable. Toward that end, he smuggled photographs of his recliner and the parties to a reporter, and they were published in theArkansas Times . Coincidentally or not, at approximately the same time, Damien wrote letters to state officials and to the media, claiming that the veteran inmate had repeatedly raped and beaten him. In the letters, Damien reported that the assaults had begun shortly after he had arrived at the prison, that he’d been photographed in “states of nudity and semi-nudity,” and that “several high-ranking officers [at the prison] were already aware of the fact, and would do nothing to prevent it.”

The allegation, leveled in March 1995, after Damien had been at the prison for a year, raised the question of how one death row inmate would even have had access to another.314In his letter, Damien claimed that “part of the wall was missing…so that our cells were joined.” The sensational assertion, combined with the photos published by theArkansas Times, called public attention to the breakdown in security at the prison.315The Arkansas State Police conducted an investigation, and though investigators said they could not substantiate Damien’s claim that he had been raped, three staff members, including an acting warden, were fired as a result.316

Jessie’s Appeal

As promised, the lawyers for Jessie, Damien, and Jason all filed direct appeals to the Arkansas Supreme Court. Jessie’s appeal went to the high court first. In a unanimous opinion handed down on February 19, 1996—two years after his conviction—the seven Supreme Court justices noted that Jessie’s statements to police were “virtually the only evidence” offered against him; that they amounted to “a confusing amalgam of times and events”; and that they contained “numerous inconsistencies.” Nevertheless, the court found the statements to be sufficient to support the jury’s verdict.317

Chief Justice Bradley D. Jesson wrote the opinion. In it, he pieced together what he called “the substance” of Jessie’s statements to the West Memphis police, laying it out “in such a way as to reveal with clarity” Jessie’s description of the crime. Unlike Jessie’s statements to the police, the chief justice’s summary was presented as a coherent narrative. It noted, for example, that Jessie said he’d been invited to meet Jason and Damien