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received, in this statement to the prosecutors, he did not mention any names. Davis asked, “Were the three little boys, were they saying anything, doing anything during this?” Jessie answered, “They were saying, ‘Stop. Stop.’” Davis: “And what about the boy that you were hitting? Was he saying that?” Jessie: “Yeah, he was telling me to stop, and then I stopped. And Damien told me, ‘No. No, don’t stop.’ And I got on ’m again.” Jessie said he saw Jason “swinging” a knife at one of the boys, sending blood flying into the weeds. In the first part of the statement Jessie said he never saw any of the boys unconscious. But when Davis asked what happened to the boy whom Jessie was beating, Jessie replied, “He’s unconscious.” Davis wanted to know when the boys were tied. Jessie said one boy had been castrated and another was unconscious, when “we tied ’em up.”

241. At the end of the interview, before the tape recorder was turned off, Jessie’s attorneys inserted a statement of their own. They pronounced their “strong” belief that Jessie had perjured himself.

242. Stidham also complained that despite his notification to prosecutors that Jessie would not testify, Judge Burnett had ordered the boy brought from prison to the judicial district. “While it is not uncommon for state prisoners to be moved to a county jail to testify,” Stidham argued, “it is quite uncommon for them to be moved this far in advance. This ‘advance time’ gave the prosecution an opportunity to work on Jessie.” Stidham cited Davis’s and Fogleman’s meetings with Jessie in the three days leading up to the trial, all without Stidham’s knowledge, as a “gross instance of misconduct.” He charged that “nothing” in the prosecutors’ conduct in the events had been “fair or honorable.” Damien’s and Jason’s lawyers were also indignant. They handed Burnett a brief of their own, charging that the prosecutors had “made a mockery of the law.” Damien’s attorney Val Price wrote, “The defendants anticipate that the prosecution will argue that they did not violate Jessie Lloyd Miskelley, Jr.’s Fifth Amendment rights because they granted him ‘use immunity’ before taking a statement from him, and therefore nothing he says can be used against him.” But, Price argued, “the court should analyze how this grant of immunity was effectuated. The grant of immunity was obtained by prosecutorial misconduct…. Had the prosecutor acted properly, he would have never been in a position to even offer the immunity…. The prosecution should not be allowed, and the court should not condone, the violation of one co-defendant’s rights to the extreme detriment of the other co-defendants.” Price added that the prosecutors had “improperly drawn attention to Jessie Lloyd Misskelley, Jr.’s alleged confession, which he [Jessie] submitted throughout the course of his trial was coerced,” and that the effect of this “grand-stand play” on the pool of potential jurors had “seriously undermined and impaired” the defendants’ right to a fair trial.

243. Burnett told Jessie’s lawyers that the whole issue had apparently arisen because they had sent “mixed signals” to the prosecuting attorneys. The judge said he was appointing another attorney, Phillip Wells of Jonesboro, to meet with Jessie to ascertain the boy’s true wishes.

244. Stidham, who recalled having seen the tip in police documents he’d been supplied, brought it to Lax’s attention. Lax, who was unaware of the report, could not find it in a search of the documents that had been supplied to Price and Davidson.

245. Lax wrote in a memo in February 1994 that Sandra Slone had been “quite candid in informing me she was afraid of her ex-husband, Mark Byers.” Lax noted that Slone “stated she met Mark in church in 1977, and they married in 1978. Byers had had a drug problem and his mother informed Ms. Slone his problem began when he was in Texas [a jewelry school]. According to Ms. Slone, Byers was supposed to be ‘cleaned up’ at the time she met him and promised her he would never become involved in drugs again; however he continued to do so. Ms. Slone informed me that