West of Memphis is a fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary by Academy-Award win­ner 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.

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