Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [181]
So the question becomes: how should children deal with that authority?
I asked Fogleman if he would feel comfortable if one of his own children was questioned by police without him or another lawyer present. His immediate response was, “Well, I wouldn’t be comfortable myself being questioned without a lawyer.” Then he added, more deliberately, “But this was not Jessie’s first exposure to being questioned and to being advised of his rights. And really, comfort’s not really an issue.”
“What would you advise your children to do if they were brought in by police for questioning?” I pressed.
Again, Fogleman evaded. “In a vacuum,” he said, “it would be, ‘You be extremely polite to the police and answer whatever questions they’ve got. Be truthful.’ That’s in a vacuum. But I don’t expect my kids to be in that kind of trouble.”
But children do get picked up and questioned by police, I said. And the world is not a vacuum. “So if you were speaking to the Rotarians, and someone asked you what they should tell their kids, what would your answer be?”
“I honestly don’t know,” the judge said. “I don’t know.”
If John Fogleman doesn’t know, who does? If even a judge cannot advise parents on how to advise their children, how in heaven’s name are children who are suddenly picked up for questioning by police supposed to figure out for themselves what to do? Fogleman, who’d had years as a prosecutor and judge, could not come up with an answer, yet high school dropout Jessie Misskelley was expected to understand because, after all, his interrogation by Gitchell and Ridge hadn’t been his “first exposure” to being questioned by police.
But the tragedy plummets deeper. The cornerstone of justice in the United States of America is that persons accused of crimes are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Children, supposedly, are presumed to be even more innocent. But here, all of that was swept aside. There were no special protections. There were no juvenile courts. There was not even a basic presumption of innocence. Damien, Jason, and Jessie were not proven guilty. They were presumed guilty. And that, as Jason noted, was “enough.”
Notes
1. Unless otherwise noted, accounts of the search for the missing boys cited in this chapter were drawn from police logs and other records of the West Memphis Police Department.
2. The officer was Regenia Meek. The subdivision where Byers lived was known as Holiday Garden.
3. The manager’s name was Marty King.
4. In some written reports, Dana Moore, as she was usually called, is identified as Diana. In later statements, Moore said that she reported her son, Michael, missing while Meek was at the Byerses’ house, but apparently Meek did not fill out a written report on Michael at that time. According to Meek’s records, she responded to the call at Bojangles, then returned to the Moores’ residence at 9:25P .M., at which time she filled out the report that Michael was missing.
5. These were the Mayfair Apartments.
6. Climatological data for Memphis in May 1993 from the National Climatic Data Center.
7. The West Memphis Police Department claimed in a summary of the night’s events that “the victims were reported missing by their parents at approximately 8.10P .M. 05-05-93, at which time a search was initiated,” but the department’s logbook for that date contains no mention of a search other than the walk through the woods by Officer Moore, from 9:42 to 10:10P .M.
8. Gitchell credited Sergeant Allen with making the crucial discovery, but subsequent testimony revealed that Jerry Driver’s assistant,