What The Law!?

Roger Ebert's review of the documentary West Of Memphis brought to my attention the infamous case of the West Memphis Three: three teenagers accused of murdering three young boys in West Memphis in the summer of 1993. Hyperlinks to the reviews of three other documentaries were provided in the West Of Memphis review, so as I usually do (because Roger Ebert is worth reading more for how he writes than what he writes about), I read the reviews of all the three documentaries: Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory. As is clear, they are a series of documentaries about the same topic. In fact, they are a series of documentaries chronicling the case of the West Memphis Three.

My curiosity was sparked by the review of West Of Memphis, and by the time I finished reading the reviews of the three Paradise Lost documentaries, I was transfixed. I immediately checked YouTube for the four documentaries. I was unable to find West Of Memphis, but to my great good fortune, all three Paradise Lost documentaries were available in full. I recently got the chance to watch all three documentaries in succession, and during my viewings, I was, in no particular order of chronology or degree of intensity, sad, angry, depressed, and grateful. I was grateful because the three teenagers, now men in their late 30s, were correctly found not guilty during a belated retrial and released into the free world. I was sad, angry, and depressed for a number of reasons: three innocent young boys had been so sadistically murdered; three innocent teenagers were not only falsely accused of the crime and arrested purely on suspicion bred by the way they dressed and talked and the kind of music they listened to and books they read but also wrongly imprisoned--including one being on Death Row--for almost two decades; details of the deaths were shoved down the teenagers' throats via egregiously leading questions and then systematically extracted out of them, especially from the teenager later revealed to be mildly mentally retarded, in the form of "confessions"; an entire community and legal establishment could be so consumed with rage and fear as to be blind to the truth of the matter in order to demonstrate a facade of pathetic revenge and ruthless justice. 

Remarkably enough, and I confess I was a bit surprised when I considered it, the chief police officer on the case and the prosecutor at the trial are not bad people. They do not have a personal vendetta against the three teenagers. Viewed objectively, they are simply doing their jobs. They seem to be good, smart, competent professionals trying to do the right thing based on their frame of reference. The parents of the three young boys, understandably, have nothing but hatred for the three teenagers. It is chilling to hear the words they have to say about the accused and to watch the determination and matter-of-factness in their eyes while saying those words. 

My purpose in writing this entry is to express my ambivalence about law. Of course, law is a necessary component of society that helps maintain decorum, but at what cost? The arbitrariness of law is what I am afraid of, the paradoxical irrationality of it. Were the arrest and incarceration of the three teenagers driven by logic or emotion? In the previous paragraph, I wrote, "The parents of the three young boys[...]". I could have written, "The parents of the victims[...]". But now that the West Memphis Three's innocence has been proven, were the young boys that were killed the only victims of this painful saga? What must it be like for the three teenagers to have spent the prime of their lives imprisoned? According to Wikipedia, they are spending their days learning to drive, enrolling in college, etc. Who has to pay the price for "justice" being administered so swiftly? Not the officials, certainly.

Perhaps one can consider the whole situation in a detached manner by accepting it simply as a bad roll of the dice. But what about the upholding of the truth in an impersonal, clinical way? If officials we have empowered with our trust to do the right thing are swayed by the sentiments of an overwhelming majority of the very public that has empowered them, why do we need the officials? To upkeep a pretense of law and order, right and wrong? I remember reading a book titled Mean Justice some years ago, and it shook me to my core. Perhaps in my days of innocence and belief that nothing so outrageous could occur in America, I was shocked that an obviously innocent man could be so relentlessly and single-mindedly pursued by the law that he himself became convinced of his own guilt. It is giving me goosebumps just thinking about it. Who's to say it couldn't happen to me? If personal demons are driving professionals supposed to display rigid adherence to facts, then what remains?

I don't know if I'm coming across as cynical about the law, but I am certainly skeptical and not a little discouraged. And scared. It is downright frightening to think of the hate, prejudice, selfishness, narrow-mindedness, and myopic instinct for self-preservation we have within ourselves. Instead of regarding the world for what it is, we regard it for what we think it is, what we want it to be. There is nothing in the universe scarier than a human being.