Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky Help Free the WM3

For eighteen years, directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky have been documenting the case of the West Memphis 3– three teenaged boys who were convicted of murdering three eight year old boys in 1994.  Three films have resulted from their exhaustive work, “Paradise Lost”, “Paradise Lost 2”, and “Paradise Lost 3”.  Earlier this year, after eighteen years in prison, all three boys were released, as a result of an unusual bargain that required them to plead guilty.  Berlinger and Sinofsky came by the SiriusXM studios to talk with Ron Bennington about the film and the case.  What follows are excerpts from that interview.

Ron Bennington: Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory premiers January 12, 9:00 on HBO, it’s good to see you guys. Just from a filmmaking point of view, what a strange thing to have this kind of become your life’s work.

Joe Berlinger: You know it’s amazing. I was about thirty when we started, I’m about fifty now. I’ve had two children, one during the making of each film, and my daughter is about to go to Columbia University. So it’s really marked our lives both as filmmakers and as people haunted by this case.

Ron Bennington: Well it’s also a tough thing for us to watch when you see how young and innocent they looked and now they’re middle aged men.  Half their life, their whole adult life, has been spent sitting behind bars.

Bruce Sinofsky: And Damien was on death row, which is obviously worse than just being in a cell. And think about how much the world has changed in the last eighteen years. And they’re not privileged– well they are now– but they were not privileged to experience cell phones and computers and all of those things.

Joe Berlinger: I think the hardest, especially for Damien, is, he was in solitary confinement for years; has no sunlight on his body for the last ten years; spent most of the time being shackled. Even just using a fork after eighteen years was a new experience for him. So I can’t imagine what they’re going through. But the thing that most impresses me about these guys is that they’ve turned into incredibly thoughtful, articulate, non bitter people. I would be so bitter if I was railroaded and spent eighteen years under the conditions that they spent, particularly Damien. It’s amazing to me that they’re just looking forward to getting on with their lives.

Ron Bennington: And when you guys first said, we want to follow this case, you didn’t know whether they were innocent or guilty, right?

Bruce Sinofsky: Actually we thought that they were probably guilty based on the article that was in the New York Times. But when we went down there, at the behest of HBO and Sheila Nevins, one and one wasn’t equaling two. We were seeing a lot of things and meeting a lot of people, and we were getting information that we didn’t know even existed so between the two of us we started thinking, well maybe these guys didn’t do it. Maybe this is a miscarriage of justice. Maybe this isn’t a real life Rivers Edge as we thought when we were going down there.

Ron Bennington: And that’s what Sheila Nevins thought? What brought this in to her world?

Joe Berlinger: There was a local very big article about the guilt of these guys having just been arrested, and the fact that there had been a confession. And it seemed like a very open and shut case and then the AP wire picked that story up and of course in that process things get condensed and it just becomes this cut and dry news item that appeared on page B20 of the New York Times. That caught Sheila’s eye and she sent it to us, and we discussed it. We had been interested the year before in making a film about this UK Case– the Jaime Bolger case, where a ten-year old kid out in Liverpool had lured a younger kid onto the railroad tracks and had beat him senseless, dead. And we thought this was another one of those kind of cases and we were going to make a film about disaffected youth;  about how three teenagers could be so rotten that they would sacrifice three kids to the devil. And frankly that would have been the easier film to make.

Bruce Sinofsky: It wouldn’t have been eighteen years.

Joe Berlinger: The first couple of months we were primarily spending time with the parents of the victims, who were obviously convinced that these kids were the killers, and we had no real reason to think otherwise. It took us a few months to gain access to the West Memphis Three–  although they weren’t called that at the time– once we negotiated access to them and we did the initial interviews, Bruce and I both looked at each other and said, man something is not right here.  Jason Baldwin, who was a very shy but articulate kid at the age of sixteen and now articulate as a man– he just dripped with credibility. You just didn’t believe that he could do such a crime by what was coming out of his mouth. Furthermore the state’s theory of the case was that Jason was the knife guy and wielded this big survival knife and caused all of these horrible wounds. And Bruce and I just said it doesn’t make sense. His wrists were just not big enough! Tiny! And we just felt like hey, something’s not right here. And Damien too was just very believable. He was a little more difficult to read – slightly narcissistic, teen, kind of enjoying the attention.  Because he didn’t think it would ever go as far as him getting convicted. So in the early days, he was kind of enjoying the attention. The more the defense attorneys trusted us, and the more we got into the evidence,  it just was not an eleven, it was more of a two. And the thing that rose to the top from the earliest days as to why this was not a realistic scenario that the prosecution was putting forth was, they found no blood at the crime scene. And the prosecutor’s theory was that three teenaged unprofessional killers dragged three eight-year-old kids into the woods and slaughtered them mercilessly at dusk. And, you know, eight-year-old kids are going to be writhing and trying to escape, so the idea that the prosecution says well they washed the blood off the banks of the little creek that they were found in?  That is just so implausible that three kids would be slaughtered and there would be no blood or tissue found at the crime scene.  So for us we always felt that was kind of a dump site instead of the place where the murders happened and if that’s the case than the entire theory of the prosecution goes out the window.

Ron Bennington: Well it’s not giving anything away to say that these guys got out now, but the part of how they got out, I found to be almost heartbreaking as an American. Seeing that there was no real victory lap to this.

Joe Berlinger: Bruce and I went through a range of emotions when we experienced that August 19th hearing. From tears of joy that these guys are actually going to breathe fresh air, to just utter indignation that the State of Arkansas cowardly cobbled together this Alfred Plea which is this rarely used legal maneuver in which defendants in a legal stalemate can, for legal purposes, plead guilty– in this case they pled guilty to lesser charges and then were sentenced to time served – while still maintaining their innocence. So officially they are still maintaining their innocence but they walk out of prison as convicted killers. It’s a travesty on a number of levels. First of all, there’s no prosecutorial accountability for decisions that were made in prosecuting this case. There is no ability for the West Memphis Three to sue for wrongful conviction. Which is– you’ve robbed somebody of the most important years of their life which is 16 years old to age 34. Those are chunky years to steal.

Ron Bennington: Do you think it is about money?

Joe Berlinger: Without question. Scott Ellington, the prosecutor at the press conference says,  “one of the reasons I did this is we’re going to save the state millions of dollars from a lawsuit.”

Bruce Sinofsky: They were very fearful. There was going to be an evidentiary hearing in December of last year. And it was very very likely that they were going to get new trials and the amount of egg that was going to be on their faces is dangerous for them. But you know, the victory lap that you were talking about? The rest of their lives is going to be their victory lap.

Joe Berlinger: And the worst thing though– we always forget about the victims. Three little eight-year-olds were mercilessly slaughtered that night. And the parents of the victims are being told by the State of Arkansas, hey, we’re not going to go find the real killer. Because there is no way that the State of Arkansas in their hearts believe that they’ve released the killers. Could you imagine releasing child killers? Either shame on the State of Arkansas for knowingly releasing killers under this arrangement, or shame on the State of Arkansas for – if they believe that they’re innocent– for making them cop to a plea that is unjust.

Bruce Sinofsky: And shame on them for not going out and looking for the real killers. Not in the last eighteen years and not now.

Ron Bennington: Do you guys think that there’s enough evidence to go after the real killer?

Bruce Sinofsky: I don’t think so.

Joe Berlinger: I think there’s enough evidence that an interested, compassionate, caring, legal system could then take and look further into. I think the fact that they’re doing nothing is criminal.

Ron Bennington: It’s an interesting watch but it is a tough watch, and I don’t think it’s going to be the last film. I think there will be something years from now to wrap this up because there’s just this feeling about this whole story that it’s going to mean something even bigger. Maybe tie in with other trials, or maybe there will be a law. I don’t think that the whole story has been told yet.

Joe Berlinger: I agree that it’s not over but we’re going to pass the baton on to others now.

Ron Bennington: HBO. They always have the finest documentaries. January 12, 2012 at 9:00.

Here’s an audio clip from the interview where Joe talks about the plea deal that the three boys accepted:  [powerpress = “https://theinterrobang.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/wm3-DropwithRonSetUp.mp3”]

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Joe and Bruce said they had mixed feelings about the “Alfred Plea” that Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley were offered, and took.  What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

You can hear this interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.  Not yet a subscriber? Click here for a free trial subscription.

For more information on the film check out hbo.com and you can follow Joe Berlinger on twitter @joeberlinger or follow the film on twitter @paradiselost3