Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [97]
Before Stidham questioned Ofshe again, he asked Burnett, “Your Honor, may I use the word ‘coercive,’ like the prosecutor used?”
“I guess that’s the goose and the gander thing, isn’t it?” Burnett replied. “Go ahead.”
Now that Davis had introduced the word he’d been fighting to keep out, Stidham attempted to explore its nuances. He asked the witness, “Could you give some examples of the police being coercive and leading or suggestive during the course of the interrogation?”
“Yes, I can,” Ofshe said. “Perhaps the most powerful example in my opinion is the example of the eight revisitings of the question of the time at which the crimes occurred.” Ofshe noted that Jessie began by saying he’d gone to the woods at nine o’clock in the morning. The next time Ridge raised the question, Jessie said he was in the woods at “about noon.”
“Ridge now says something that, in my opinion, was an attempt to manipulate Mr. Misskelley’s statement about the time,” Ofshe testified, “because Detective Ridge now says, ‘Okay, was it after school had let out?’ This is immediately after Jessie saying, ‘It’s at noon.’ He’s now suggesting it must be later by saying, ‘Is it after school let out?’”
Gitchell had next raised the question of time, and then Ridge had brought it up a fourth time. Ofshe noted,
And this time Detective Ridge says, and I quote, “Okay. The night you were in the woods, had you all been in the water?” Jessie replies, “Yeah, we’d been in the water. We were in it that night playing around in it.” This is the first time in the record, according to my analysis of it and according to Detective Ridge’s testimony, that it is directly suggested to Jessie that the correct answer is, “This happened at night.”
Immediately upon that being suggested Jessie responds by accepting and now he starts to use the word “at night,” where he had never used it before, where he had consistently said it was during the day. That is an influence tactic. It is a way of getting someone to accept something out of pressure and out of suggestion.
Ofshe pointed out three other points in the interview when Jessie was asked about what time he was in the woods. Finally, Ofshe noted, “Jessie replied, ‘I would say it was about five or so—five or six.’
“So Jessie is now moving in the direction of later, but it’s as if there is the original statement that he made about the morning, and he’s being slowly moved towards the evening. But clearly, in this statement, he has not gone far enough, because five or six, I gather from what I’ve been informed, is too early for the boys to have shown up at the woods.” So, Ofshe said, there was one more attempt to move Jessie’s account of the time. This came when Gitchell told Jessie, “All right, you told me earlier around seven or eight. Which time is it?”
“There are two important things about this,” Ofshe observed.
The first one is it’s obvious that Detective Gitchell is giving Jessie a choice. Pick one and I win, or pick two and I win—either seven or eight. Gitchell can live with either answer, and he’s giving Jessie only those two choices. But what’s even more important about this is that nowhere in the record—including the record of what the detectives say, the notes, the specific statements by Detective Ridge, the transcript of the first interrogation—is there any indication that Jessie ever said, as Detective Gitchell says, “You told me earlier around seven or eight.” There is an absolute absence of anything indicating that. So it’s my opinion that this is a tactic, and it’s a very effective tactic, because Jessie now simply repeats back to Detective Gitchell what Gitchell told him. He says, “It was seven or eight.” Jessie doesn’t even make a choice. He just tells Gitchell everything that Gitchell told him. That’s an indication of someone who is willing to comply and does not want to take any chances of making a mistake and therefore being punished for it through pressure.
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