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Stidham expected a fight as intense as the weather. He’d battled unsuccessfully to keep Jessie’s confession out of the trial. Now, with the confession in, he looked ahead to a difficult defense. While he doubted that Fogleman had much evidence other than the confession, that alone was formidable. For Jessie to be acquitted, the confession had to be discredited. Everything Stidham did—both as he cross-examined Fogleman’s witnesses in the first part of the trial, and then as he presented Jessie’s defense—would have to chip away at the jury’s confidence in the truth of what his client had said.

Despite the hazardous roads, more than ninety of the one hundred prospective jurors who’d been called had made their way to the courthouse. They were men and women accustomed to stern conditions, including the demands of distance. Of Clay County’s seventeen thousand residents, seven thousand clustered in its two biggest towns, one of which was Corning, with a population of about three thousand. One in four of the county’s children lived below the federal poverty level; fewer than seven hundred Clay County residents had graduated from college. The religious attitudes that kept the sale of liquor banned in the county were a point of pride for many residents, as was the county’s claim to a population that was almost totally white. When Judge Burnett welcomed the potential jurors to his court, he began by asking if any of them would hesitate, due to moral or religious scruples, to impose the death penalty. No one raised a hand.

Only thirty-six people had to be questioned to impanel a jury of seven women and five men, plus two male alternates. One man was dismissed when he said he had discussed the case with a close friend who lived in the West Memphis area. When Burnett asked if he could set aside what he had heard, the man answered straightforwardly, “It would be hard for me to.” Corning’s postmaster was one of the jurors chosen. Others included a housewife, a clerk at the local Wal-Mart store, a loan officer from the bank, a factory worker, and a plant manager. The youngest juror was twenty-three years old. That made him five years older than Jessie, who’d spent his eighteenth birthday in jail a month after his arrest.

The thirty-year-old courthouse had never hosted such a high-tech drama. There were television trucks with satellite hookups, a mobile telephone bank, a room full of closed-circuit television monitors for the dozens of reporters. Inside the courtroom, two television cameras, one for the New York film crew, the other for the local news pool, stood near the jury box, though Judge Burnett had issued a warning that no one was to photograph the jurors. Amid all the hubbub, members of the victims’ families sat quietly in the first few rows of spectators’ seats, just behind the table where Stidham sat with Jessie. During a break, Stevie Branch’s mother told a reporter that she was “still enraged” and would like to “jump at” all the defendants. “Sometimes,” Pam Hobbs said, “I just have to hold myself back.” Another spectator commented that Jessie’s trial struck her as a waste of time. “We all know he’s guilty,” the woman said. “They ought to just fry him and get it over with.”

Inside the courtroom, Jessie seldom raised his eyes. He seldom cast so much as a glance in the direction of the jury. Most of the time he sat bent over, chewing gum, head near the edge of the table, eyes directed at the floor. A reporter from Little Rock described Jessie as “a strange-looking little character, small and frail, giving the impression of being deformed in some elusive Dickensian way, his manner that of some furtive rodential creature—a tranquilized squirrel perhaps.” The writer went on to note that there was “a passivity about him so profound it strains credulity; he sits all day facing away from the judge and jury, staring at his feet; slumping farther and farther forward in his chair, as if he might ooze down and become a puddle between his shoes.”210

Stidham