Life After Death

Damien Echols – 2012

This is Damien Echols’ memoir leading up to his rescue from death row after 18 years behind bars for a murder he had nothing to do with.  He and two others were known as the West Memphis Three, but Echols was the star because of his belligerent attitude and Goth-tinged appearance, and he was portrayed by prosecutors and the media as the ring-leader of a backwoods child-killing, Satan-worshipping cult.  Despite the fact that zero forensic evidence could place any of the three teenagers at the scene of the crime; the judge in the case continually refused to re-open it, content to let them be executed, presumably because that would finally shut them up.  In his book, Echols spends a little time discussing his thoughts on the case, but for the most part it’s a very intimate reflection on what the brutality of our institutions can inflict on the human spirit; and how anyone with a penchant for sensitivity, creativity or spirituality is particularly vulnerable.  He describes incomprehensible poverty as a young child, and an early interest in art and music, before getting to the Kafkaesque turn of events that landed him in the cross-hairs of a witch-hunt led by bloodthirsty parole officers and district attorneys.  The meat of the book covers Echols’ time in maximum security prison, often in solitary confinement, where he was endlessly victimized by guards and wardens who resented his meager fame and meted out their own little punishments.  Echols’ interest in Buddhism and other spiritual disciplines, combined with correspondence with the woman he eventually married, gave him the tranquility to endure.  Echols is a good writer, but not a mature one yet, and this was a collateral tragedy that struck me about his case, that he was robbed of his entire young adulthood together with the life experience and possibly a higher education that those years should have given him.