18 Years and 78 Days

I had to spend the weekend in jail once.

I was convicted of violating a personal protection order on a Friday afternoon and was handcuffed right in the courtroom and taken directly to the county jail, where I stayed until 6:00 p.m. on Sunday when Anita picked me up. (The PPO had been falsely obtained but that’s another blog post.)

The loss of freedom, the sense that I was caged and this just wasn’t right and I was under someone else’s control, were almost overwhelming – so much so that I had to “unplug.” I fought down the rage and frustration like bad food trying to exit my body and did my best to distract myself from the fact that I was trapped, confined, unable to leave the room. I borrowed a lousy paperback from a fellow inmate. We all took turns trying to shoot a wadded up piece of paper into a trash can on the other side of the room. I slept as much as I could.

Others would argue about who was getting my food because I wasn’t eating – the food was disgusting and I didn’t want to have to relieve myself in front of 20 strangers. The deputy who controlled the television that was bolted to the ceiling derived pleasure from exercising his Awesome Power sparingly and ignoring our attempts to kiss his ass and get him to let us escape by watching something, anything, besides a fly caught in a spider web and the sun coming up and going down.

My practically unbearable sentence lasted 52 hours. By 7:00 on Sunday night I was drinking Port wine and watching Seth Rogan exchange clever repartee with Kathryn Heigl in “Knocked Up,” the DVD that Anita rented.

I can’t imagine being convicted of a crime I didn’t commit and ending up on Death Row or spending my entire adult life behind bars. I can’t imagine the panic, the rage, the despair. I can’t imagine how that would reduce me, kill my spirit, turn me into an uncaring animal.

Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley were freed from an Arkansas prison yesterday where they had been held since 1993. They had been convicted of killing three little boys – eight-year-old Cub Scouts named Stevie Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers – and dumping their hog-tied, naked bodies in a ditch.

The crime scene had been contaminated, important leads had been disregarded, confessions had been coerced, the prosecution’s case had more holes in it than a wiffle ball, evidence had been mishandled, none of the DNA recovered at the scene matched that of the supposed perpetrators, other potential suspects were ignored...yet Echols ended up on Death Row and Baldwin and Misskelley were given life in prison for the murders.

Johnny Depp and Natalie Maines from the Dixie Chicks and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder have all made supportive statements about the “West Memphis Three,” as they’ve become known, as have a number of less-famous people. HBO received accolades for “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills,” one of two documentaries about the case. Henry Rollins and other musicians raised money to help defend the West Memphis Three and books have been written critical of the verdict.

The three teens were clearly railroaded. Satan worshippers were the Boogey Men of the day and one of the young men fit the description of what they looked like, people thought. They’re not troubled, teenaged heavy metal fans anymore, though. They’re 35-year-old men who were falsely imprisoned for 18 years and 78 days while the real killer remained free.

I hope they make a mint from the books they write.