Good news today from Jonesboro, Ark.:
Three men convicted of the murder of three West Memphis boys have pleaded guilty to lesser charges in a deal with prosecutors that will have them released from prison with time already served.
Damien Echols, Jesse Misskelley and Jason Baldwin have been imprisoned since being convicted in the 1993 slayings of Boy Scouts Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers.
In a hearing Friday in Jonesboro, Circuit Court Judge David Laser said that the men entered Alford pleas — a legal mechanism in which guilty pleas are entered but innocence is maintained. …
Echols had been sentenced to death while the others were serving life in prison.
Supporters of the men have argued they were falsely convicted while working to mount legal challenges to the initial convictions.
The initial convictions were a travesty — an instance of Satanic panic in which three teenagers were blamed for the slayings of three young boys based on little more than the fact that the teens dressed differently. Whoever really killed those three young boys has lived free for nearly 20 years while society reveled in the chance to sacrifice its “deviant” scapegoats — celebrating that at long last we were faced with the Satanic baby-killers of our nightmares, lies and legends.
In 1993, the same year the West Memphis 3 were arrested due to the witch-hunting hysteria of Satanic panic, Jeffrey S. Victor published a study of this baffling phenomenon in which imaginary fears produced very real consequences.
This is from Victor’s Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend:
A search for internal enemies can serve … the function of providing a target for displaced aggression and a unifying force for conflicting elements in a society. This is done by defining some social category of people as being traitors to, or deviants from, the over-arching moral values of a society. When moral values are in dispute in a society, a witch hunt for moral subversives serves the purpose of clarifying and redefining the limits of moral conduct. …
The internal enemy, or deviant category, need not actually exist. … Dangerous, criminal Satanists and Satanic cults are an invented internal enemy. The Satanism scare serves the unifying function of a search for evil internal enemies. … The social construction of Satanists as scapegoat deviants to blame for social stress is part of a more general pattern of increased scapegoating in American society. …
When a society relies upon scapegoating processes to manage its internal conflicts, the consequences create even more problems. The fantasy warfare prevents the people in a society from finding real solutions to real problems. …
Update: Much more on the release of the West Memphis 3 from The Wild Hunt.
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