Devil's Knot_ The True Story of the West Memphis Three - Mara Leveritt [99]
“I hope he never sees sunlight again,” John Mark Byers said. “Life plus forty—that’s fine with me. That means Cummins keeps his dead ass forty years after he dies.”233Melissa Byers, with dark circles under her eyes, ranted in front of the cameras. “This doesn’t change anything,” she said. “Christopher’s dead. And he was tortured to death by three murdering bastards on a ditch bank. He was eight years old, and guilty is guilty, and I hope the little sucker, when he hits Cummins, they get his ass right off the bat, because he deserves to be tortured and punished for the rest of his life for murdering three eight-year-old children!”
The couple walked a few steps away. Then, as though Jessie were there, Melissa added, “Prison’s not a safe place, Jessie, sweetie.” To the photographers who were following her she offered a last aside. “I’m going to mail him a skirt.”234
Judge Burnett complimented the news media, noting that he was “well pleased” with the way they had covered the trial. Jessie’s lawyers announced that they’d appeal. And prosecutors Davis and Fogleman dropped the word to reporters that Jessie’s sentence of life without parole might not be exactly final. Noting that Damien and Jason’s trial was just eighteen days away, they explained that Jessie’s sentence would not become final for about four months. During that time, if Judge Burnett chose to do so, he could reduce Jessie’s sentence. They said such a thing might happen if, for instance, Jessie agreed to testify against Damien and Jason at their upcoming trial.
The day after Jessie’s conviction, Glori Shettles visited Damien in a new jail. He’d already been moved to the jail in Jonesboro, the city where he and Jason were to be tried. “He may watch television for a limited number of hours from his cell floor,” Shettles wrote, “but has not been allowed to see the news. His books have been taken from him; however, he has been allowed to choose books to read from the jail library. Great efforts have been made to ensure he and Jason have had no contact; however, Michael laughed and stated he heard Jason ‘howling’ one night.”
Pretrial Concerns
Shettles wrote that one of Damien’s lawyers had visited him earlier in the day and informed him of Jessie’s conviction. She noted that Damien did not seem to be “negatively affected” by the news, but rather “spoke of his hope of having a larger, more educated jury pool, who would consider the evidence with a more open mind.” However, Damien also told Shettles that if his own trial ended with a conviction, “he had no interest in an appeal. He stated he would not be taken out of the courtroom guilty, as Jessie had been, but would attempt to grab one of the deputies’ guns to kill himself or to force the deputies to shoot him.”
Damien’s lawyers let him hold on to his hope that a trial in Jonesboro, the district’s most populous county, would produce jurors more receptive to his case. It was true that Jonesboro was home to Arkansas State University, and that the average income and educational level in Craighead County was higher than in mostly rural Clay County, where Jessie had just been tried. But Val Price and Scott Davidson also knew that Craighead County was one of the most religiously conservative places in the state, and that Jonesboro, the county seat, was home to several large and powerful churches, almost all of them housing fundamentalist Christian congregations. Jessie’s just-concluded trial had dominated the region’s news. Now, after that and months of publicity about Damien’s interest in the occult, Price and Davidson worried that the odds of finding jurors who had not been influenced was not as great as they had allowed Damien