Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [175]
In Davis’s brief to Judge Burnett opposing Damien’s petition, the prosecutor argued that though Mallett had placed Price on trial, the Houston lawyer had failed in his efforts at “character assassination.” Judge Burnett agreed. In a perfunctory ruling handed down on June 17, 1999, the judge denied Damien’s Rule 37 petition for a new trial.
Stidham and DNA
Burnett’s ruling brought Damien closer to the end of his Arkansas appeals—and closer to execution. But Mallett was not through. Stidham was still in the fight for Jessie. And now, as a result of widening interest in the case, additional legal help was gathering in the wings. Quietly, legal support for the three inmates was building. Mallett and Stidham began receiving help from legal experts whose roles in the case would not be known for years. The result in Arkansas was that despite Burnett’s terse denial, efforts on behalf of the inmates intensified. Mallett appealed Burnett’s denial of Damien’s Rule 37 petition to the Arkansas Supreme Court. And in addition, the fight was expanded to two new fronts.
The first of those was also before the Arkansas Supreme Court. In February 2001, Mallett filed a rarely used writ of errorcoram nobis . The title refers to an error so grave that it has affected the very core, or heart, of the trial. In the writ, Mallett argued that Damien never should have been placed on trial at all because of his mental condition at the time. As it was, Mallett argued, Damien had been mentally incompetent—basically, insane—when he was tried and sentenced to death, and a trial under such conditions violated the U.S. Constitution. It was a stunning claim, but Mallett provided extensive documentation to support it. He submitted notes from the jail where Damien was held, documenting his attempted suicide. He supplied the notes Glori Shettles and Ron Lax had made after their visits to Damien, in which they described his hallucinations and paranoid delusions. Mallett also provided records showing that three times in the year before his arrest, Damien had been committed to psychiatric hospitals by a juvenile court in the same district where he’d later been tried.
Mallett also produced important evidence that had not come to light before: records showing that at the time of Damien’s arrest and trial, he had already been declared “one hundred percent mentally disabled by the federal Social Security Administration” and was receiving payments for that disability. Courts generally accord substantial weight to Social Security designations of disability, since they tend not to be granted lightly. But Damien’s mental status had not been explored, except in the sentencing phase of his trial. Neither Damien nor anyone in his family had mentioned the Social Security designation to his attorneys, and though Glori Shettles had requested Damien’s Social Security records, they had not arrived by the start of the trial.409In an affidavit submitted with the writ, Val Price acknowledged that, had he been aware of Damien’s Social Security disability, he “would have dramatically altered the manner in which we conducted investigation, preparation and presentation of evidence on his behalf…. Every aspect of my representation of Mr. Echols would have been affected.”
Stidham launched the other assault, this one before Judge Burnett. In November 2000, he and an evidence analyst paid a visit to the West Memphis Police Department. There, for a couple of days, the two pored over the hundreds of items still in storage from the case. They concluded that there was a reasonable chance that some of the items they examined might yield new information. Nearly eight years had passed since the murder investigations. Those years had seen profound advances in the science of DNA testing. Smaller samples