I can practically hear some of the people reading that headline. “What is this movie and when did it come out?” “And how is there three of them when I’ve never heard of the first two?” This riveting documentary didn’t technically get a theatrical release and is actually part of a trilogy of docs HBO has made about the infamous case of the West Memphis 3, 3 boys wrongfully convicted of the murder of younger boys in West Memphis Arkansas. I have heard about this case off and on for years (the three men wrongfully convicted have been in prison since 1996) but now the documentaries have something close to an ending as the three men were finally, finally, FINALLY freed late last year!
What Works: Even if you haven’t seen the first two movies, this one can appropriately fill you in on all the horrible details of the boy’s case. The child murders that were said to be the work of “Satanists” without any real proof of such. The confession of mentally retarded Jessie Misskelley after 11 hours of unrecorded interrogations without a lawyer or guardian present. The fact that the three boys were convicted of these murders solely because one of them wore black and was said to be a Satanist. One of the murdered children’s stepfather who has gone from thinking the West Memphis 3 should “burn in hell” to now declaring them innocent! This case just gets gradually crazier and if it were a fictional movie, you wouldn’t believe it.
All the scary facts about how backwards our criminal justice system still is (even when the three are finally released it’s only after having to take a devil of a plea bargain that says they have to declare guilt and take time served…even though everyone knows they’re innocent) can make your blood run cold. [It particularly scared me that the boys kept having to appeal to the same judge that ruled against them in the first place, and him ruling in their favor would essentially hurt his reputation as the original case was his most high profile one.] Also the fact that this film apparently seems to find out who really killed the three children that started all this craziness (the prime suspect now is one of the boy’s stepfathers who was never even properly considered a suspect) just adds to its dark power.
What Doesn’t Work: The movie is about two hours and a good hour of that is just recapping a lot of the same material that was in the first two films, so it can begin to feel a little bit like a rerun. Still, once the movie starts re-opening the actual case with the new evidence collected and re-focuses on a suspect we’ve barely seen in the first two movies, it really takes off.
What I Would Have Done Differently: I can’t criticize this movie because I am just so thankful that a film got three men released from prison that surely would have died there without the attention these documentaries have brought. I just wish someone had done the same for the almost-certainly innocent Troy Davis last year when he was being executed with reasonable doubt.