Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [209]
280. As reported by Stan Mitchell in theJonesboro Sun, March 12, 1994.
281. Because the public and the press were barred from this unusual hearingin camera , and Judge Burnett placed a gag order on the participants, what transpired was never reported. It was not carried by newspapers or television news and the jury did not get to hear about it.
282. From the 1923 decision inU.S. v. Murdock.
283. From the 1920 case ofLocking v. State, 145 Arkansas 415, 224 Southwest 952.
284. Burnett told the lawyers that any probative value Morgan’s testimony might have in the case was “substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice and by confusion of the issues.”
285. Record of this argument and ruling exists only in the trial transcript, pages 2286–302.
286. Hicks said he was being paid $500, the cost of his expenses for coming to Arkansas to testify.
287. Hicks said his degree was from the University of Arizona. He testified that his book was titledIn Pursuit of Satan: The Police and the Occult. At one point, Price asked Hicks to read a quotation he had included at the end of his book. It was attributed to Kenneth Lanning, an FBI agent who had researched alleged connections between crime and the occult. Hicks read: “Bizarre crime and evil can occur without organized Satanic activity. The law enforcement perspective requires that we distinguish between what we know and what we are not sure of.” Looking up from the book, Hicks volunteered, “I agree.”
288. Hicks said he grew particularly skeptical about the ideas, promulgated at many of the seminars, “that a belief in satanism or certain occult subjects was indicative of criminal behavior” and “that people found to be practicing these other religious behaviors might also be engaged in crime.” Price at first tried to question Hicks about documents prepared by the West Memphis Police Department that referred to satanism and the occult. But the prosecutors objected to the prospect of jurors hearing Hicks testify about “policies and procedures of the West Memphis Police Department,” and Burnett agreed that they shouldn’t. The judge ruled, “It doesn’t matter what policies, if any, they had.”
289. Jason appeared to some observers to sit through the trial with a somewhat dazed look on his face. That might have been because the boy was seriously nearsighted. Jason said that when Paul Ford found out how weak Jason’s vision was, and that he could not see clearly more than three feet in front of him, Ford had promised that as soon as the trial was over, he’d get Jason fitted for glasses.
290. Charles Linch identified himself as a trace evidence analyst from the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences in Dallas.
291. Six years after the trial, in May 2000, theDallas Morning News reported that Linch, a trace evidence analyst at Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences in Dallas, had been released from the psychiatric unit of that city’s Doctors Hospital, where he was a patient, in order to testify. In a copyrighted article, Holly Becka and Howard Swindle reported: “Declared a danger to himself or others and prescribed powerful anti-depressive drugs, he had been temporarily released to testify in two of the southwest’s most infamous capital murder trials. Notwithstanding circumstance, he was an expert witness.” The paper reported that Linch acknowledged that he had been depressed and “drinking too much,” and that his commitment to the hospital had been involuntary. The paper quoted Paul Ford as saying he had no idea the forensic scientist had been hospitalized for psychiatric treatment, and that it “bothered” him that neither Linch nor his supervisors at SIFS reported that he would have to be released from a psychiatric hospital to testify.
292. Author interview, November