Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [199]
166. In Arkansas, the actual legal term is “not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.”
167. Until just a few months before the murders, fees for Arkansas lawyers who represented indigent clients, even in cases where the clients faced death, were capped at $1,000. That policy had been challenged in Judge Burnett’s own court by a lawyer who’d refused to represent an indigent woman for the state-mandated fee. Burnett had ordered the lawyer to accept the assignment. But the lawyer had appealed to the Arkansas Supreme Court. There, the justices—citing the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids involuntary servitude—ruled that the lawyer had a right to refuse. In early 1993, the legislature had been forced to amend the state’s law regarding payment of court-appointed lawyers, and at the time of these pretrial hearings, the new law had just taken effect. But how it would be implemented was still uncertain. Crittenden County officials wanted the bill for the boys’ defense to go to the state, which was the responsible party when the lawyers were appointed. The Arkansas attorney general’s office, on the other hand, contended that the state was responsible for the legal bill only from the time of the lawyers’ appointment in early June until July 1, when the new law took effect.
168. According to Stidham, Burnett promised that the lawyers would receive $60 an hour for in-court time and $40 an hour for their work on the case out of court.
169. From Shettles’s interview notes, October 25, 1993.
170. The samples collected on the night of the arrests had been obtained illegally. Though Ford had fought a state’s motion seeking to obtain new samples, Burnett had approved the state’s request.
171. Lax, who by now had worked more capital cases than any of the lawyers, told them he’d never seen anything like it. By August, they’d received some thirteen thousand documents from the monthlong police investigation, but they had no indication which of those pertained to the arrests and which had been discounted.
172. Ford argued, “I feel that he’s going to know within reasonable certainty which of those pages he’s going to use, and he’s going to know that the great majority of it he has no intention to introduce. If that is the case, then we shouldn’t have to be spending all our time and effort reviewing all those documents for the conceivable possibility they may be introduced into evidence.”
173. “When you arrived at the residence of Mr. Baldwin,” Ford said, “basically what you were doing was going from one room to the other, one drawer to the next, one closet to the next, looking for something in that color range or fiber type, the right type of material, the right color of material, that might match what you had obtained in your lab at Little Rock. Is that correct?” Sakevicius answered, “That’s correct.”
174. Author interview with Fogleman, April 2001.
175. Gerald Coleman was appointed to represent the Echols family after they were subpoenaed by Fogleman.
176. The Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbids “cruel and unusual punishment.”
177. Death-qualified juries are those from which anyone harboring reservations about imposing the death penalty is excluded.
178. After a hiatus of fourteen years, during which the death penalty was deemed unconstitutional, executions in Arkansas had resumed in 1990. Between then and the time of these pretrial hearings, the state had executed four men, one by electrocution and three by lethal injection.
179. Wilkins testified at a pretrial hearing in November 1993 that he held a Ph.D. in psychology from Cornell University and that he was a member of the American Congress of Forensic Psychology.
180. The speedy trial rule requires the state to bring a criminal defendant to trial