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be quiet. “He said, ‘Be quiet. I want to hear this,’” Mallett recalled. “’It’s about a guy from Arkansas.’” Mallett didn’t hear the particulars of the case, but he understood that a group was forming to help with the Arkansas death row inmate’s postconviction appeals. Fogelnest told him that he and Scheck had agreed to help. “I said, ‘Sure, sign me up,’” Mallett recalled. “At that time I didn’t even know the name of the defendant. It was probably a couple of hours later, when we were out of the meeting, that I asked what the case was about.” Fogelnest explained that he and Scheck had been asked to review the movieParadise Lost, in hopes that their approval might be used to help in the film’s promotion. “But, in fact,” Mallett said, “after seeing it, they were shocked, dismayed, and offended by the conduct of the defense attorneys.” Mallett said that the two New York attorneys had found it incredible that the lawyers representing the teenagers had agreed to let them participate in the film, both before and during their trials. Scheck and Foglenest reportedly felt that at the very least, that decision had created a distraction, taking the attorneys’ focus away from their clients’ defense. “I agreed with that,” Mallett said. He, Scheck, and Fogelnest discussed the case after the meeting and concluded that the Arkansas attorneys’ decisions with regard to the film provided a strong starting point for a Rule 37 petition.

396. The payment was to be broken down as follows: Price, $30,500; Davidson, $25,000; Stidham and Crow were to split $40,000; and Ford and Wadley would split $46,500.

397. For their services, Lax was paid $7,000 plus interest, Warren Holmes was paid $1,216 plus interest, and Dr. Richard Ofshe was paid $1,500 plus interest.

398. When the filmmakers learned that Damien’s new lawyer from Houston was intending to use their film as proof of Damien’s ineffective assistance of counsel, they were astonished. In an interview in February 2002, Sinofsky commented, “I think it’s got to be one of the most ridiculous defenses in the world.” Far from working against Damien, he said, the film had focused attention on the case and had helped attract the new lawyers to it. Despite the filmmakers’ chagrin, they agreed to work with Mallett. “We said, ‘Fine, do what you have to do,’” Sinofsky recalled, “‘but we don’t think we did anything wrong.’ We felt that, if the defense worked, and the Rule 37 hearings brought about justice, we wouldn’t care what was said about us.”

399. Jessie and Jason filed their petitionspro se, meaning that they did not have the official help of a lawyer in drafting them. Both, however, are professionally written. Stidham said “a little bird” helped write Jessie’s. The “little bird” was necessary, in part, because one of Jessie’s claims was that his lawyer had been ineffective in several respects. The petition noted that one of Jessie’s “principal lawyers at trial, Dan Stidham, had never tried a murder case as lead counsel. Many of the issues encountered and raised during the course of this case were issues with which neither attorney Stidham nor his co-counsel Mr. Crow were familiar.” In addition to Jessie’s Rule 37 petition, Stidham also filed a petition with the state Supreme Court for a rehearing of his case. In Jessie’s petition for a rehearing, filed March 6, 1996, Stidham argued that police had withheld pertinent evidence when Officer Allen and other detectives “somehow forgot to turn over to the defense the tape recording of the little boy’s voice which was used during the interrogation. This tape recording, which this court said gave it ‘pause’…[and] came ‘perilously close to psychological overbearing,’ was not even disclosed to the defense until the suppression hearing itself.” Jason raised seven issues in his petition, the most striking of which was his charge that the prosecutors and Judge Burnett had engaged in official misconduct when they met after discovery of Damien’s blood-specked pendant, without the defense lawyers present.

400. Mallett was joined in his work on Damien’s Rule 37