Beginning July 13^th, the venerable Skeleton Key Auction website will take bids on a painting created and donated by musician Brian Hugh Warner, better known as Marilyn Manson. The proceeds will go to fund the defense effort for Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley, Jr. in their bid for a new trial. The Arkansas State Supreme Court (ASSC) gave the circuit court the green light in September 2010 to conduct evidentiary hearings that the defense attorneys hope will exonerate their clients. This is the same hearing that was denied by former Judge, and now state senator, David Burnett back in 2008.

Manson has deliberately kept a low profile in the past, even though he is a long time supporter, fearing that his presence would hurt, rather than help the cause of the West Memphis Three. Supporters have long alleged that it was out of fear and ignorance of the occult and heavy metal music (Manson’s music is in a dark sub-genre known as "industrial metal"), that two juries convicted the WM3 in 1994. So why is he coming out of the closet now?

At the 2010 Golden Gods Awards he told the crowd, "I’ve always been a big supporter of the cause, but I chose a long time ago not to be involved because I thought I would add to the problem. But now I think it’s an important time to stand up and be a part of the problem." After repeating the time-worn "Salem witch trial" and persecution for "looking like we do" rationale, Manson said that he wouldn’t compare himself to Echols, but that he wished he had Damien’s "strength", and that it was time for everyone to "get behind the West Memphis Three and fix it."

Still, while his money is no doubt appreciated, it’s hard to imagine how associating himself with "the cause" will help the defense. It might be best if Mason makes himself scarce should the occasion arise to voir dire a new jury.  Manson, the "Antichrist Superstar", has seemingly had as one of his goals, the annihilation of Christianity. At the MTV Video Music Awards (VMA) in 1997, Manson was ushered onto the stage by a full marching band playing "Hail to the Chief", with a desecrated American flag hanging in the background, and had this to say:

"My fellow Americans, we will no longer be oppressed by the fascism of Christianity. As I see you all out there . . . trying your hardest to earn your way into heaven. Well let me ask you: do you want to be in a place filled with ASSHOLES???" (He gave no hint as to other, more desirable destinations.). At this, he launched into one of his best known songs, "Beautiful People." This appearance was said to be the zenith of his career, the band giving a performance that electrified the crowd.

A lot of things have changed since 1994, but the good people of Arkansas are still decidedly Christian, and associating Echols too closely with the androgynous shock-rocker who was once dubbed a "minister in the church of Satan" by a deceased friend (Manson denies he was actually associated with the church) is something that should be avoided, one would think.

"People can look at Christ on a cross and say this is an image of murder, this has sexual imagery in it", Manson told Bill O’Reilly. "I think it’s my job as an artist to be out there pushing peoples’ buttons and making them question everything . . ." It’s hard to imagine anyone viewing a crucifix this way, although the Catholic variety, with the crucified Christ still nailed to the cross, is pretty gruesome.

All this is not to say that some of Manson’s views on religion and "sprituality" are all that outrageous. He makes the allegation that spirituality and religion have very little to do with churches, a view that an increasing number of Christians share. He also equates the hatred he invokes by Christians with that vested upon Jesus by the Jews 2000 years ago, and that, while a tad self-serving, isn’t in itself blasphemous. But the words and images he uses to express himself will not, as they say, play well in Peoria. Or Jonesboro. On his website, the latest "journal" entry is entitled, Rapeture: Christianity Manufactures Yesterdays Killers. It reads, in part, as follows:

Maybe someone else can take a stab on interpreting this, but the imagery is plain enough.

Manson has hit something of a low in his career since being dropped from longtime label Interscope after the release of The High End of Low in 2009, which sold only 142,000 copies. According to Boston.com, Manson has mounted a comeback this year, forming a collaboration between his own imprint, Hell, etc., and British indie label, Cooking Vinyl. But it’s hard to believe that his donation of the painting has anything to do with publicity; he gets plenty of that on his own. No, we have to take his actions at face value: he wants to help. And he loves symbolism, as all artists do.

Most problematic, however, is the $5,000 starting bid on the painting (which is based on Grove Pashley’s now iconic image of Echols on death row). The average WM3 supporter does not have this kind of money. Who’s going to buy it? Eddie Vedder? Johnny Depp? The auction, located at www.skeletonkeyauctions.com, will run from July 13^th through July 31^st. This, according to the auction house, represents one day for each year the WM3 have been in prison. With any luck, the painting will fetch a good price at auction and someone will wind up with conversation piece that is truly one of a kind, perhaps even of investment potential.

The whole thing seems to go against the grain for Manson, who makes it clear that he abhors capitalism (lots of rich people do). Consider these lines from "The Beautiful People":

This hypocrisy is nothing new in the world of show business. The instances are too numerous to list. They all hate money. They’re ashamed of their success.

So why donate a caricature of Echols instead of cash? Manson has sold well over fifty million records, 20 million more than Pearl Jam. He’s got the money. Although the Echols portrait is not his best work, some of his paintings are actually pretty good ("I will kill you all" and "Experience is the Mistress of Fools" are a couple of my favorites).

One thing is true, however. The untitled painting is of much higher quality than some others that have been auctioned to benefit the three. The twisted art of Emmeric Konrad comes to mind, with his "RIP" painting depicting the theory of the day, that John Mark Byers committed the murders ("Byers is a motherfucker", Konrad told running mate Chad Robertson, husband of wm3.org co-founder Kathy Bakken. Robertson himself is actually quite talented). In Konrad’s rendition, Mark Byers, wearing his signature striped shirt a la Revelations: Paradise Lost 2, is shown with dripping blood ringing his mouth, apparently meant to correlate with the inset image of victim Stevie Branch, depicting the "bite mark" wound on his forehead.

It still seems easier for Manson to just to write a check (it’s tax deductible), maybe one of those giant ones like Publisher’s Clearinghouse shows on their commercials, with a photo op somewhere with Manson presenting it to Dennis Riordan.

Can’t you see it?

Although not recognized as a national holiday until it was signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon in 1972, the first Father’s Day (sometimes misspelled "Fathers’ Day") was celebrated in 1908 in Fairmont, West Virginia. Grace Golden Clayton wanted to memorialize the lives of 210 miners, who were also fathers, lost in the Monongah mining disaster earlier that year. The date was chosen by Clayton as the Sunday closest to her recently deceased father’s birthday. Since the holiday was not registered by the state of West Virginia, a Spokane, Washington woman, Sonora Dodd, was credited with the invention of the holiday until Nixon’s proclamation, when the story of Grace Clayton was revived. Father’s Day is now observed annually on the third Sunday in June. Some fifty foreign nations, including Australia, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, and Canada, celebrate an International Men’s Day, which celebrates "boys and men who are fathers."

The fathers and stepfathers of Christopher Byers, Stevie Branch, and Michael Moore need to be remembered today, noting that while they lost sons, they have other children who were still very young when their brothers were taken from them, and who needed them just as much, and always will. When Father’s Day comes around, we fathers naturally reflect on what kind of fathers we are, what kind of father our dads were, and how our children have fared under our care. The fathers and stepfathers of the three victims of the West Memphis child murders feel the pain of any father who has lost a child, but it becomes most acute on those days that act as markers of their loss. Birthdays, Mother’s Day, and of course the anniversary of the day of the murders, and again on Father’s Day.

For the rest of us, we should take today to appreciate what it means to be a father, that it is a privilege and responsibility to have children entrusted to us for care and guidance. When we shirk from that responsibility, society suffers. And when we abuse or neglect those whose care we are accountable for, there is a cost. When I study crime statistics and prison overcrowding problems, I know that more often than not there is a father who could have made the difference for that son, and did not. As fathers, we can’t let that be our legacy.

Happy Fathers Day.

"Nothing Endures Like Change" ~ Diogenes Laertius

As the sun rises over West Memphis at 6:04 this morning, with the temperature predicted to rise to a very comfortable seventy degrees with fifty-eight per cent humidity, the day should feel very similar to this day in 1993 when Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore went out to play in the woods and never came back. While so much has changed over the past eighteen years, two facts remain the same: Stevie, Christopher and Michael are still dead, and Jason Baldwin, Jessie Misskelley, and Damien Echols are still in prison. The former will never change. The latter is less certain.

Todd and Dana Moore, now divorced, still miss Michael every day, but are certain that the right people have been put behind bars. Pam and Terry Hobbs are divorced as well, but Pam, along with a growing number of WM3 supporters, believe that Terry may have had something to do with the murders, but that in any case the WM3 did not. Mark Byers is much less equivocal than Pam Hobbs; he is 100% sure that Terry Hobbs killed his son. "I don't have any problem with saying his name", Byers told Larry King in December of 2007. "In my opinion, yes, I believe [Terry Hobbs] is the perpetrator of this crime." Both Mark and Terry have movie deals with Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky to make a third installment of the HBO Paradise Lost films. Documentarian Amy Berg (Deliver Us From Evil) also has a film in the works, and True Crime with Aphrodite Jones will run a one hour feature on the ID Channel on the eighteenth anniversary of the crime (10:00 p.m. EST). Will these shows have the impact that the first one did back in 1996? Echols and his supporters certainly hope so.

But the most dramatic change in the case since the WM3 were convicted in 1994 took place this spring, when Judge David N. Laser scheduled an evidentiary hearing to be held on December 5^th of this year. The hearing was scheduled as the result of an Arkansas State Supreme Court (ASSC) unanimous decision rendered on November 4^th, 2010, remanding the case to the Second Circuit Court. Judge Laser will hear all the new evidence collected by the defense over the last few years, as well as any older evidence that the defense chooses to present (some introduced at the criminal trial(s), some not). The evidentiary hearing will determine whether new trials will be granted to the West Memphis Three. Damien Echols had this to say after hearing the ASSC decision:

Whether or not Echols is as confident as he seems, one thing is certain: the West Memphis Three have never had so much attention focused on their case, nor have they had the resources (read money) to mount such an aggressive appeal to the courts, and that represents the most significant change to date. In the last year alone there have been TV appearances (Larry King Live, 48 Hours Mystery, True Crime with Aphrodite Jones), a concert (Voices for Justice, with Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, Patti Smith, Natalie Maines, and Fistful of Mercy with Ben Harper and Dhani Harrison), and local and national news coverage from New York, to Washington, to Los Angeles. In the eighteen-year history of this case, there has never been a more hopeful time for the convicted men and their supporters.

. . . nor a more poignant one for the families of three little second graders who, as Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel put it, will never see middle school. And that’s something that is never going to change.

Rest In Peace Stevie, Christopher, and Michael.

On April 15^th, 2011, long time death penalty abolitionist and death row reformer Marie McFadden Deans died in Charlottesville, Virginia, after losing her battle with lung cancer. Mrs. Deans was 70.

Although many people have never heard of her, Marie Deans of Virginia probably did more to improve the conditions on death row and keep more inmates out of "old sparky" than any individual in modern times. A tireless activist, Deans was drawn into "death work" when her beloved mother-in-law, Penny Deans, was murdered by an escaped convict in 1972. "Catch him", Deans said when the officer at the crime scene promised to ‘catch [the killer] and fry him’, "but don’t kill him for me." From then on she began throwing herself into advocating for the condemned, a decidedly odd reaction to the death of a loved one at the hands of a convicted felon. But that was Marie.

Professor Todd Peppers of Roanoke College wrote in an op-ed about her life that she brought "basic conditions of decency to the men who inhabited Virginia’s death row, ... refin[ed] the use of mitigation evidence in death penalty trials, [and] struggl[ed] to exonerate factually innocent men." Deans was instrumental in having accused killer Joseph Giaritano’s sentence commuted to life when outgoing Virginia governor Douglas L. Wilder found the details of the conviction troubling. She was also the key figure in having Earl Washington, Jr., who had been sentenced to death for the murder and rape of a Culpepper, Virginia woman, exonerated by DNA evidence and eventually awarded $2 million in damages.

In 1976, Deans founded the anti-death penalty group Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation to provide a forum from which death penalty abolitionists who’d lost loved ones to violence, could safely speak their minds.

Close associate Marshal Dayan said he would most remember "the passion, commitment, humor, faith, and perseverance that marked her character. I will always remember her gravelly laugh and ribald sense of humor, her sparkling eyes, and her humility. She rarely took or accepted credit."

My own encounter with Mrs. Deans was brief but to the point. On the eve of the execution of a death row convict I had been visiting for the previous two years, I received an email stating simply,

"Greg,

I just wanted you to know that I am thinking of you and Brian and feeling so sad for both of you.

Marie"

I wish I had known her better, though I doubt she’d have much time for me unless I was a criminal defense attorney willing to represent one of her clients, pro bono of course. Like most in that field, Marie worked around the clock, possibly accounting for her three divorces and strained relationship with her son, Joel McFadden. "It's hard to share your mother," he said. "She had this emotional energy for it, and she didn’t always have that for everyone else. But I admired the hell out of her for it." Besides McFadden, Deans is survived by another son, Robert Deans of Charlottesville, Virginia, and three grandchildren.

Regardless of which side of the death penalty issue you stood on, you couldn’t help but admire Marie for her selflessness and tenacity when it came to the issue of death row. She hated it, but turned her aggression into action and of the over 200 cases she worked on, only two resulted in executions. In a state that executes more people than any other - excepting Texas - that’s saying quite a bit. We won’t see the likes of Marie Deans anytime soon. Rest In Peace Marie.

And so Damien Echols states his case for the first time since learning of the Arkansas State Supreme Court’s (ASSC) decision to remand the case of the West Memphis Three to the Second District court for an evidentiary hearing, something former Judge David Burnett refused to do. An evidentiary hearing is a long way from a trial, but Echols is just as unwavering on that front.

KATV (ABC, Little Rock) reporter Heather Crawford conducted her fourth interview with Echols on November 17^th to get his reaction to the unanimous decision (7-0) by the ASSC. "I suspected it would [be] sent back. I didn’t think it would be unanimous. That in itself was a huge confidence booster that every single judge on the Arkansas Supreme Court agreed that this evidence should be heard and they sent it back to be heard. That in itself felt like almost a miracle to me." Indeed, unanimous decisions are relatively rare, though the WM3 supporter community has often been characterized by unwarranted optimism. "We are ecstatic and hopeful", Lorri Davis said when she got the news. "I told Damien, this is just the beginning, and he said, no Lorri, quite frankly this is the end", though what he meant by that somewhat cryptic statement is unclear.

The bench on the ASSC seemed to be favorably disposed toward Echols from the beginning of Riordan’s argument. Associate Justice Elana Cunningham Wills had recused herself, possibly due to her having spent twenty-two years in the Attorney General’s office. Her replacement, Little Rock attorney Jeff Priebe, seemed as open to a wide interpretation of the statute in question (Arkansas code 16-112-201 to -208) as his did his fellow justices. This exchange between Priebe and Assistant Attorney General David Raupp is a case in point:

Priebe, and his six colleagues on the bench, didn’t buy Raupp’s argument. According to the sixteen page opinion issued on November 4^th, "Echols was entitled to an evidentiary hearing under this subsection [of the law] before the motion for a new trial was ruled upon", and further stated that "Echols’ petition and the files and records of the proceedings do not conclusively show that he is entitled to no relief, and the circuit court was required to hold an evidentiary hearing on the motion for a new trial." This time, and according to the statute, the high court ruled that Echols’ hearing is to include "all evidence", regardless of whether that evidence was introduced at the original trial in 1994. This point was the thrust of Dennis Riordan’s argument during his twenty minutes before the court.

The ASSC ordered that the lower court "promptly set an early hearing for the petition and response." The order will become final on November 25^th. .

Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel responded to the decision, saying that he "respects the decision" of the ASSC, adding that the State, "intends to fulfill its constitutional responsibility to defend the jury verdicts in this case." There have been many in the supporter community who have mocked this statement, but the jury system in America is sacrosanct and must be defended. The State’s high court has seen fit to allow Echols to present his side virtually unfettered by further legal obstacle. If Echols is innocent, is justice delayed justice denied? Not when you’re facing execution.

If the lower court decides that new trials (or possibly trial, singular) are justified, the high visibility of this case, combined with a changing social mores (what the USSC has termed "evolving standards of decency") and a high-powered ($$) defense team, Echols may prove hard to beat. Echols and his wife, Lorri Davis, have made the "helpful suggestion" that the hearing be skipped, and the proceedings move straight to the trial phase: it would save time and money, they say, since, should they prevail in the hearing, a jury trial would have to be held where they would present the same case again. That is very unlikely, but it shows the confidence that Echols and his supporters are gaining.

A date for the hearing will be set sometime after the ruling becomes final, and will likely take considerable time to schedule. The second quarter of 2011 is what one of the Misskelley attorneys predicts.

CORRECTION: This post stated that Judge Burnett's denial of the defense's claim that post-mortem animal predation applied to both Baldwin and Misskelley, when in fact it only applied to Jason Baldwin.  The claim may logically apply to both defendants, but legally, since Baldwin was tried with Echols, it only applies to Baldwin. 

With his ruling today against Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley in their motions for new trials, Judge David Burnett is officially finished with the case of the West Memphis Three. After almost sixteen years, two trials, countless hearings and appeals, and an HBO documentary that he said was "one-sided", the book is closed on what to many is a most bewildering conflict of interest.

When Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley were convicted in early 1994 for the May 5^th, 1993 murders of eight-year-olds Steven Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore, most of the public expected Judge Burnett’s role in the case to be over. Not so. Not only did he preside over the immediate post-conviction hearings, including one for prosecutorial misconduct (ruled in favor of the prosecution), but over the years has overseen every appeal for relief made by each defendant. This was true even after Burnett retired in January of 2009. He agreed to stay on the case as a "special" judge, reasoning that it would place an impossible burden on a new judge to pick up the appeals at that time. Maybe so. But given Burnett’s statement in the December 26^th Jonesboro Sun, the public has a right to wonder just what his motives really were. "I can tell you one thing", Burnett said. "I’m tired of this case." Burnett also said that it was a mistake to allow the HBO crew into the courtroom to film the trials in 1994 (Paradise Lost.) A mistake perhaps, but it was his to make. It was apparently okay with co-prosecutor John Fogleman. During jury selection at the Echols trial, Fogleman said, "Because of the high interest in the area, the state, the nation, we felt like it would be appropriate to have cameras in the courtroom to record the proceedings, rather than have ’em outside the courtroom and hundreds of ‘em just hovering around everyone who goes in and out." Perhaps it was only because the local media didn't question the verdicts that Burnett has a problem with the documentary.

Although Judge Burnett - or should we start calling him Senator - later apologized for his remarks in the Sun, he didn’t retract them, and it probably would have made little difference to those who believe that the idea of a judge making rulings on his own rulings is preposterous.

Burnett’s decision not only denies Baldwin and Misskelley’s claim of ineffective assistance of counsel, but also the defense’s theory that post-mortem animal predation - not knives - caused most of the wounds to the victims.

Appeals for Baldwin and Misskelley are surely forthcoming. Meanwhile, Damien Echols still awaits a ruling from the Arkansas Supreme Court (ASC) on his own motion for a new trial. In October of 2007, Echols filed a second motion for a new trial in federal court, claiming that there was new evidence that would prove his innocence. The federal court ruled that Echols had not exhausted his state remedies, and the case was sent back to circuit court. Burnett promptly refused to even hold an evidentiary hearing. The ASC has not given a date on which it expects a decision.

Jozef De Veuster, better known to Catholics by the religious name he chose - Damien - was canonized on Sunday by Pope Benedict XVL. The ceremony, which conferred upon De Veuster the title of "saint", took place in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, 120 years after the priest’s death from leprosy in 1889.

Born in Belgium in 1840, De Veuester’s ministry, assigned at his request, was in Hawaii on the island of Molokai where he tended to the needs of some 600-800 lepers who were quarantined there. The government provided food and clothing assistance for those infected with the loathsome disease, but little else. Father Damien not only administered the "consolations of religion" to those in the colony, but also provided what little medical attention he could, treating their ulcers, even building coffins and digging their graves. He was a builder of roads, schools, a church and a hospital. He was considered tough, even headstrong, by his peers, but was, and is, venerated on the little-visited Hawaiian island. Of the newly canonized saint, the Pontiff said yesterday:

Saint Damien chose to be among those considered the most "repugnant" of outcasts, eventually giving his life in caring for them.

"I WANT TO GO WHERE THE MONSTERS GO"

When as a teenager Michael Wayne Hutchinson took the surname of his adoptive father, he also changed his first name to Damien, allegedly after the leper priest he came to admire during a fleeting but intense interest in Catholicism. Knowing the loneliness and separateness that characterized the life of Damien Echols, it isn’t hard to see how he could have come to admire, and eventually take the name of, the Patron Saint of Molokai who sacrificed his life for the ultimate misfits. Over the years, many have asserted that Echols’s choice of a name was something more sinister, possibly deriving from a character in Richard Donner’s 1976 film The Omen. In it, five-year-old Damien Thorn (Harvey Stephens), the heir apparent to a British family’s diplomatic and financial dynasty, is depicted as the coming antichrist, or Great Beast, of the apocalyptic biblical book of Revelation. The antichrist of the bible has "the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666." (Revelation 13:18) The arrival of the antichrist foretells the return of Jesus on earth and the ensuing battle of Armageddon. In the film, when told by the enigmatic Carl Bugenhagen that the boy must bear "the mark" somewhere on his body, Damien’s father, Robert Thorn, searches for the mark, and eventually finds it in the form of a birthmark on the young Thorn’s scalp. Armed with the seven daggers of Meggado, all Thorn has to do is kill his son.

Damien Echols was plagued with chronic depression - or more accurately "dysthymia syndrome", as it was diagnosed - throughout his youth. His home environment, dominated by a man Damien once described as "the most hateful individual I’ve ever known", was characterized by extreme poverty, emotional instability, religious extremism, and the sexual abuse of his sister by Jack Echols. His mother was unable, or unwilling, to stop what was happening to her children. Damien became increasingly antisocial as he grew older, and began to develop what he describes as a defense mechanism for protecting himself against others he deemed threatening. Dark goth clothes including his signature black trench coat, fingernails filed to points, and an open obsession with heavy metal music were enough to convince many in West Memphis that Damien Echols was someone best left alone. These things, along with Echols’s assertion that he was involved in "witchcraft" - not, he insisted, black witchcraft or Satanism - convinced many that the choice of Echols’s new name may have sprung from a more malevolent motive than the mimicry of a future saint. Echols described to his therapist his disassociation with society, his interest in witchcraft, and a near obsession with death and the afterlife. He also told tales of blood drinking, which he claimed gave him power and made him "feel like a god." His poetry, which his therapist encouraged him to bring to their sessions, was often brimming with death and anger:

So the question is, from where did Damien Echols actually draw his new name? Was he attempting to honor the father-figure saint who might serve to protect him from evil, like some sort of personal gargoyle? Or did he wish to embody the evil and power of a bloodthirsty demon, bent on becoming someone who "influenced the world", someone who would be remembered, perhaps as the West Memphis Boogeyman?

As cynical as anyone following the case of the West Memphis Three might be, last week’s ruling by the Arkansas Supreme Court remanding their cases once again to the circuit court was sure to elicit a massive groan by supporters. Although it should only take Judge David Burnett of the 2^nd district a matter of weeks to turn the case around (he is listed as a "special" judge, and as such has no regular caseload), any additional delay in this case is wholly unacceptable. Damien Echols has been on death row for 15.6 years - 12.8 is the average span between sentencing and execution - and with conditions being what they are, years of uncertainty for an inmate and the families of the victims is unconscionable. Our current president has decided that repeatedly holding the heads of foreign-born enemy combatants under water is torture. What must he think of inmates, U.S. citizens, spending years - or decades - sequestered in tiny, airless cells for 23 hours a day. The incidents of suicide and attempted suicide by death row inmates is 113 per 100,000, about 6 times the rate among U.S. males in the general prison population ("Suicide on Death Row", David Lester and Christine Tartaro, Journal of Forensic Sciences.) Our corrections system is based upon justice, not vengeance. At least that’s what it says in the text books. Guilty or innocent, in the words of Barack Obama, "The United States does not torture people."

But to the issue at hand: why did the high court remand the case? The October 1 opinion reads, in part, "Although the record in Baldwin v. State . . . reflects that Baldwin Exhibit Nos. 1-71 and 75-77 were filed under seal, we are unable to determine whether these exhibits were also filed under seal in Echols v. State . . . and Misskelley v. State. Likewise, the records in each case do not indicate whether any of the pleadings were filed under seal . . . [as such] we remand the above-captioned cases to the trial court to settle the record concerning which portions of the respective records are under seal."

Is this for real? If the court received a record that was sealed, it should remain sealed. Why is this even a question? The lone dissenter, Justice Paul Danielson, agreed, writing that " . . .such an inquiry at this point is a simple one. Either the records, or portions thereof, were filed under seal . . . or they were not." Danielson said the decision to send the records back to Burnett means, in essence, that the higher court is " providing the circuit court with a second opportunity to seal portions of those records." On this issue the circuit court should not have another bite at the apple, particularly in a case where Judge Burnett has had the opportunity to eat the entire apple, core and all, although in fairness, he surely wishes it would go away as well. Could it possibly be - say it ain’t so - that the higher court is dodging the difficult decision of whether or not to grant new trials to the three men? Of course, on the positive side, and there is one, Damien Echols is still alive.

Let’s hope it stays that way.