West of Memphis is a feature-length documentary by Academy-Awardwinner Peter Jackson, offering a penetrating look into the murder convictions and eventual freeing of the West Memphis Three. Jackson has called it his “most important film.” Three teenagers, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley, were convicted of killing three young boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, in 1993. Echols was sentenced to death after a trial that painted the defendants as steeped in satanic rituals. Subsequent DNA evidence did not connect them to the crime scene. After almost two decades of steadfastly claiming their innocence, and the constant work of a large community of activists, celebrities such as Eddie Vedder and Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, and their legal team, the defendants were released in 2011, accepting a guilty plea in which they maintained their innocence. “West of Memphis” will debut in select theaters on December 25. View the trailer.
(Sony Pictures (2012); various other sources; DPIC posted Dec. 12, 2012). See Innocence and Multimedia.
