Revisiting Paradise

Early last year, I wrote about two unsettling documentary films, Paradise Lost and its sequel. The films dealt with the murder of three young boys in an Arkansas town, and the three teenage boys convicted of their murders, dubbed the "West Memphis Three." The documentaries paint a compelling and chilling picture of a gross miscarriage of justice. It seems abundantly clear that the wrong people were convicted for the crime, and on prejudicial and circumstancial evidence.

The documentary filmmakers have been at work on a third installment in the series, to debut at a film festival this later, and then run on HBO starting next January. As of today, they have a new ending for their film. The West Memphis Three have been released from prison.

Though it seems the right thing was finally done, it's hard to look on this as anything like justice being served. For one thing, the lives of these three are still irrevocably ruined. True, not as awfully and finally as the lives of the three victims, but they nevertheless have spent half their lives in prison. And they're not even truly vindicated now. The legal technicality on which they've been released is not an exoneration. As I understand it, their "Alford plea" requires them to plead guilty and take credit for time served, even as they simultaneously maintain their innocence. They've done nothing wrong, but had to accept the penalties of saying they did in order to go free.

Even if they had been exonerated, they'd still be unlikely to ever settle into anything like a normal life. The moniker "West Memphis Three" will follow them forever, brandly them falsely as killers. On news sites such as CNN, that ran stories about their release, the comments threads were dominated by people ignorant of the facts of the case, who likened this situation to the recent Casey Anthony saga, lamenting "still more people getting away with murder." (And they weren't talking about the actual killer in this case, who remains at large and unconfirmed -- and probably always will be.)

I'll close by recommending one more time to check out at least the first of the two Paradise Lost documentaries. Before, watching it was sure to just leave you with an unfulfilled sense of outrage. Now at least there is some rough semblance of a happy ending in the matter.