Arielle Edelman

Blog Post #1

The other night I watched a documentary film called Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. The film, made in the late nineties, is about the now famous West Memphis Three— Damien Echols, 18, Jesse Misskelley Jr., 17, and Jason Baldwin, 16, who were wrongfully convicted of murdering three young boys from their neighborhood in May of 1993. The film largely explores the way in which the cultural context of the case affected its outcome and exacerbated condemnation of the boys by townspeople. I would argue that the West Memphis Three case in a lot of ways mirrors the way in which authority-induced hysteria demonizes groups and justifies blame.

Paradise Lost mainly argues that Echols, Misskelley and Baldwin were social outcasts (they wore black, listened to Metallica, and read about Wicca) in their low-income conservative Christian community and thus were used as a scapegoat by a desperate police force struggling to find a perpetrator. This plays into several ideas presented by multiple authors we’ve read, but seems particularly aligned with the Staub reading regarding how stress and “difficult life conditions” often create a climate in which already disliked groups become hated and targeted groups. In the case of the West Memphis Three, the boys were obviously not persecuted for their ethnicity, but similar to cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass killings, their aggressors were mobilized by a powerful ideology (fundamentalist Christianity) that easily defined them as “others”. The case also bears similarities to ideas extracted from the Milgram experiment. For jurors in the courtroom and townspeople alike, the sensationalizing of the crime and extreme demonization of the suspects allowed them to overlook major gaps in the prosecution’s case and perpetuate wrongful accusations, all while feeling justified in doing so.