West Memphis Three | No Kind of Justice

December 16, 2025·35 min·1 clip

A key prosecution witness admits on record that police threatened her into fabricating satanic cult testimony against the West Memphis Three.

The office is crowded with paper. Dan Stidham has been carrying Jesse Miskelley's case for three years, after three teenagers were convicted in the murders of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis. The work has worn on him, but he keeps looking for proof that the so-called West Memphis Three were wrongly convicted, even after the Arkansas Supreme Court backed the original verdicts. Brent Turvey arrives with doubts about the forensics. His volunteer review suggests the evidence may not support what prosecutors said, and the room shifts from paperwork to a possible opening. Then the hearing tightens. A doctor says curved wounds alone are not enough to prove a bite mark, because individual teeth should be visible before dental comparisons matter. That answer changes the mood. If the injury is not a bite mark, the expert says, it cannot fairly include or exclude a suspect. Damien Echols sits straighter. Edward Mallett tries to steady the argument, but the hoped-for forensic break starts to splinter under competing expert opinions before Judge Burnett. The defense loses ground. What was supposed to help reopen the conviction now looks too uncertain to carry the Rule 37 petition on its own. Mallett changes course. On June 4th, 1999, he files written arguments that set the bite-mark issue aside and attack Echols' trial representation instead. The claim is constitutional. Mallett argues that Echols was denied a fair trial because his own lawyers were incompetent. The episode does not promise exoneration. It follows a defense trying to find a path after one piece of evidence does not hold.

As heard by us

A sharp post-conviction chapter on the West Memphis Three, where forensic doubt gives way to a fight over whether Damien Echols got a fair trial.

American Scandal picks up after the convictions of Jesse Miskelley, Damien Echols, and Jason Baldwin, when attorney Dan Stidham is still working unpaid and still convinced the case against the West Memphis Three is wrong.

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Why you'd press play

You've wondered what keeps a lawyer working unpaid for years on a case the courts already closed.

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