• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Sit and listen Burnett did, through days of often surprising testimony—none of which proved as sensational as that about the alleged bite marks. First the California criminal profiler, who had called attention to the marks on Stevie’s face, explained how he’d arrived at his opinion that the marks that were described as “bell-shaped” in the autopsy report might have been made by human teeth. That view was supported by Mallett’s next witness, a specialist in forensic dentistry. In a dramatic display, the dentist held up dental molds taken of Damien, Jason, and Jessie. None of them, he said, would have left the patterns seen on Stevie’s face.

THE BITE MARKS DON’T MATCH! the Web site proclaimed that night. But the next day in court, it was the prosecutor’s turn. Davis called another forensic dentist, and this one testified that in his opinion, the marks visible in the photos were not from a human bite at all.404Davis then called Dr. Peretti. The associate medical examiner told the court something he had never said before, nor noted in his autopsy report: that while the boys’ bodies were at the crime lab, “just to be overly cautious,” he had asked a forensic dentist to come in and examine them. Next, Davis called the dentist who Peretti said had examined the bodies. The dentist insisted that he had indeed been called to look at the marks, that he’d paid particular attention to the ones on Stevie’s face, and that he had concluded that none of the marks had resulted from human bites. Under questioning by Mallett, however, the dentist acknowledged that he had not made notes of his examination, had not written a report, nor billed the crime lab for his time.405

For the supporters, it was an indecisive and unsettling outcome, especially since, outside the courthouse, John Mark Byers was once again talking into the cameras, this time about how the medication he’d been taking for his brain tumor had caused him to lose all of his teeth.

Mallett’s Attack

On June 4, 1999, six years and a day after the arrests, Mallett handed Burnett his written arguments. Omitting the entire subject of teeth, he focused instead on the conflicts of interest he said were imbedded in the way attorneys Price and Davidson had conducted Damien’s defense. Mallett excoriated the attorneys’ decision to seek funds for experts from the filmmakers, rather than from the court. “Based only on their belief about what the court would pay,” he wrote, “without actually making an inquiry, trial counsel failed to request funds from the court, then made inadequate expenditures to defend their client.” Moreover, he charged, Price and Davidson had “appropriated” money from the film contract “for themselves as ‘reimbursement,’ contrary to the trust agreement and without [Damien’s] consent. They were in Jonesboro, while he was on death row, thinking the money was being held in trust for the benefit of his child.”406In fact, the fund had been emptied.

On yet another point, Mallett attacked Damien’s lawyer for not disclosing that he had represented two people accused with John Mark Byers in the Jonesboro jewelry store incident.407Similarly, Mallett noted that Price had never told Damien that “he had served as counsel for the witness, Michael Carson, who testified that co-defendant Baldwin had made a jailhouse confession.” In both situations, Mallett contended, “there was a conflict of interest which adversely affected counsels’ performance.”

But the most scathing part of Mallet’s argument concerned Price’s questioning of the psychologist during the sentencing phase of Damien’s trial. “No one watching the movie, trial, or reviewing the transcript will ever forget,” Mallett wrote, “the devastating cross-examination Dr. James Moneypenny presented as a defense witness. Moneypenny told the jury the records showed that unnamed persons told the defendant he could be compared with serial killers Ted Bundy and Charles Manson.” Noting that Price had not jumped up to offer a legitimate objection,