Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [90]
Along with suggesting deficiencies in the police investigation, Stidham wanted the jury to know about Jessie’s deficiencies, too. But now it was the prosecution’s turn to score a behind-the-scenes coup.
Dr. William Wilkins
In an attempt to establish Jessie Misskelley’s intellectual vulnerability, Stidham wanted to have him evaluated by a psychologist. “But,” as he later recalled, “we didn’t have money to go out and hire a psychologist. We had no budget at all for experts. We filed a motion to ask for experts, but for the state to approve anything, we would have had to spell out everything we wanted to do. We would have had to lay our cards on the table. Later the state created a public defender’s office with a budget just for that. But in 1993, essentially all we had was my gold card and the ability to beg people to come in.” The expert Stidham begged was William E. Wilkins, Ph.D., a local psychologist whom Stidham had met in a child custody case. Wilkins was interested in examining Jessie and agreed to work without pay.
The report Wilkins prepared depicted Jessie as a teenager who bordered on being mentally retarded, whose maximum scores for academic achievement were in the third and fourth grade levels, and who had never passed any of the Arkansas minimum performance tests.223
Stidham expected that Wilkins’s testimony would be crucial to his case. “But on the eve of his testimony,” the lawyer would later recall, “[Prosecutor] Davis dropped the bombshell that Wilkins was about to lose his license. There were allegations that he had made some little boy drop his pants to look for a birthmark, when there were no witnesses in the room.” To Stidham’s great dismay, he learned that Davis’s information was correct. (Wilkins did, in fact, have his license revoked a few weeks after Jessie’s trial, when the Arkansas Board of Examiners in Psychology found that he had engaged in “serious professional misconduct.”) But even knowing that Davis would roundly discredit his witness, Stidham put Wilkins on the stand. He felt that he had no choice; he needed someone to let the jury know about Jessie’s intellectual limitations, and there was no time to find a new examiner. “It’s hard to find a psychologist who will work for free,” Stidham explained, “and it’s even harder the night before he’s supposed to testify. It became a very embarrassing and horrible thing for us. He hurt us, no doubt about it.”
Wilkins had been one of three main witnesses on whom Stidham planned to base his defense. The other two were Warren Holmes, a nationally recognized expert on polygraph techniques, and Dr. Richard Ofshe, a nationally recognized expert on coerced confessions. But as it turned out, the jury would never hear much of what Holmes and Ofshe had come to say. Fogleman and Davis vigorously objected when each of the men started to talk, prompting Judge Burnett to hold lengthy sessions between the witnesses and the lawyers without the jury present. Thesein camera hearings, where lawyers debated before Judge Burnett what testimony should and should not be allowed to be presented in front of the jury, constituted a significant part of Jessie’s trial. For Stidham, they were also among the most disappointing.
Warren Holmes
As part of his attack on the police, Stidham wanted to persuade the jury that, whether deliberately or not, Detective Bill Durham had played a dirty trick on Jessie. Stidham believed that a turning point in Jessie’s interrogation had come when Durham told Jessie that he had failed the polygraph test. Stidham believed Jessie had been telling the truth, but that when confronted with Durham’s technological “proof” that he was lying, he’d felt trapped and overwhelmed. Once again needing an expert, Stidham got on the phone, and as before, he went begging. The expert he wanted was Holmes, a veteran homicide detective and polygraph examiner. Holmes had served as a consultant to the FBI, the Texas