Then years-old, the correctional officers at the time decided to "welcome me to the neighborhood. His fellow inmates smuggled him food and appealed to a deacon who visited death row to get him out. Don Davis — the man the state plans to execute first — stood out as a savior in that instance and went on to watch his back for 18 years, Echols said. Davis, believed to have an IQ between 69 and 77 — according to an investigation by Harvard Law School's Fair Punishment Project — murdered a year-old woman while he burglarized her home in According to Echols, Davis, who has been on death row for more than 25 years and admitted his guilt, is tormented by the murder.
Crane does not believe the death penalty is necessary, and that it dehumanizes everyone involved, one of the reasons he now works as a postal worker in his home state of Kansas. While it is not fun to relive his time in prison, or the thoughts he had while waiting for his execution to be scheduled, he wants people to consider his story and imagine what might have happened if no one had paid attention to his case.
IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. Politics Covid U. News World Opinion Business. Three 8-year-old boys — Christopher Byers, Steve Branch, and Michael Moore — were murdered, their bodies found hogtied, naked, and and abandoned in a West Memphis, Arkansas creek in May Echols, then 18, was soon charged with the crime, with police insisting it was a satanic ritual murder.
His close friend, year-old Jason Baldwin, and a year-old acquaintance, Jessie Misskelley, were charged as well. On the basis of Misskelley's confession which he later claimed was coerced and not much else, the three were found guilty of murder. Misskelley and Baldwin were sentenced to life in prison, Echols was sent to death row. Of course, their story had a somewhat happy ending: All three were released in after the discovery of new forensic evidence; while they were not exonerated, they entered Alford pleas, which means they maintained their innocence but acknowledged there was enough evidence against them to convict.
But while Echols survived death row long enough to walk out a free man, it wasn't, as he admitted during a talk Thursday at the NYC true crime festival Death Becomes Us, an easy task. For the first 10 years he had access to other people, he claimed, but as the years went by, the inmates were separated more and more until he ended up in his solitary cell, which had just one window.
Barely any light came through, as there was a brick wall just a few feet in front of it. He told tragic stories stories of fellow inmates, like a man who cut his throat with a shaving razor and curled up in a blanket so it would hide the blood and allow him enough time to die before the guards noticed, and of someone who broke his fists pounding on his cell, screaming the devil was in there, only to get out, have his hands bandaged, and be thrown back in.
And it wasn't just the bad food, the omnipresent specter of death, and the solitary confinement that made death row so hellish. Echols recalled vicious guard beatings that left him "pissing blood. I was beaten [because] of the new evidentiary hearing, less than an hour after the announcement, they destroyed and took everything in my cell because I was going back to court. But Echols said he was able to make it through all these hardships because he started practicing magick, which made conditions bearable and kept him sane.
Comedian Dave Hill, who interviewed Echols Thursday, joked a bit about magick, knowing many aren't super-familiar with the topic. Magick, as Echols puts it, "is the western path to enlightenment. Today was my original execution date, in If it would have been carried out, I would have been dead 21 years today. Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr. Echols received three death penalties, while Misskelley — who reportedly had an IQ of just 68 — and Baldwin were sentenced to life in prison.
The men were the subject of numerous documentaries , books and articles making the case for their innocence. The case also received considerable celebrity attention , with Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder and the Dixie Chicks voicing public support for the trio. Amid new DNA evidence, legal teams for the three men were able to secure their release from prison after changing their pleas from not guilty to guilty.
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