Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [147]
The Supreme Court recognized that Jessie had gotten some significant details wrong. “The appellant [Jessie] initially stated that the events took place about 9A.M . on May fifth,” Justice Jesson noted. “Later in the statement, he changed that time to noon…. [In a later statement], the appellant said he, Echols and Baldwin had come to the Robin Hood area between 5 and 6P.M . Upon prompting by the officer, he changed that to 7 or 8P.M . He finally settled on saying that his group arrived at 6P.M ., while the victims arrived near dark.” But all seven justices waived off the discrepancies. “When inconsistencies appear in the evidence,” they noted, “we defer to the jury’s determination of credibility.”
Attorney Stidham argued in Jessie’s appeal, as he had at Jessie’s trial, that the confession had been involuntary. The justices acknowledged that “the age, education and intelligence of the accused” were “factors to be considered” in determining the validity of a confession. They also recognized that a confession made while a subject is in the custody of police “is presumed involuntary” and that “the burden is on the state to show that the confession is voluntarily made.” Despite those requirements, however, the chief justice wrote that the entire court had found that Jessie’s confession had been voluntary.
Nor was the high court swayed by Stidham’s pleas regarding Jessie’s age and mental capacity. “Persons younger than he have been held capable of giving voluntary confessions,” the chief justice noted. Furthermore, he added, “A low score on an intelligence quotient test does not mean that a suspect is incapable of voluntarily making a confession or waiving his rights.”318
The high court also agreed with Judge Burnett’s decision that the techniques used by Inspector Gitchell and Detective Ridge—the circle diagram, the polygraph, the picture of the victim, and the tape recording of Aaron Hutcheson’s voice—had not been overbearing. Though they acknowledged that “the boy’s voice gives us pause” and that this type of tactic “comes perilously close to psychological overbearing,” the justices concluded that “in this instance, since numerous other factors point to the voluntariness of the confession, we will not invalidate the confession.”
But none of those conclusions constituted the most controversial part of the opinion. The part that would reverberate through the Arkansas justice system for years to come centered on Jessie’s status as a minor and the fact that detectives had failed to have a parent sign his waiver of rights. The issue was particularly troubling in Jessie’s case because, as the high court noted, “At the time the appellant signed his waiver, [Arkansas law] provided that a juvenile’s waiver form must be signed by a parent, guardian, or custodian.”319Despite the law’s apparent clarity, the high court nevertheless concluded that it did not apply in Jessie’s case. That was, the chief justice wrote, because at the time Jessie was questioned, the State Supreme Court had already ruled “that, when a person under age eighteenis charged as an adult in circuit court, failure to obtain a parent’s signature on a waiver form does not render a confession inadmissible….” In that opinion, the court ruled that “when a juvenile is charged as an adult, he becomes subject to the procedures applicable to adults. Therefore, the requirement of parental consent is limited to juvenile court proceedings.”320
To Stidham, the ruling was both maddening and absurd.