The Culture War #3 - Damien Echols Of The West Memphis 3, Paradise Lost
The Culture War EP.3 - Damien Echols Of The West Memphis 3, Paradise Lost. Damien Echols was charged, arrested, and convicted of murder and sentenced to death. But as more interest in the case developed many started to believe that something was wrong. it is now widely believed that Damien and his codefendants are innocent.
Damien is seeking a new DNA test that he believes will prove who actually committed the crimes
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We're hanging out today with Damian Eccles of the West Memphis Three.
You may have seen the story in the documentary series Paradise Lost.
I think the simplest way that I can describe this is the state tried to kill a person, basically to placate angry individuals.
I'm very much against the death penalty, and so, you know, a story about the government wanting to kill someone and imprison several- a couple others because it made their jobs easier is- it's a crazy story, and it's captivated people for decades, so...
Yeah, this will be, I think this will be fascinating.
We also have Cassandra Fairbanks, because admittedly, this is a subject I am, you know, I can talk about politics, philosophy, and my views on the case, but Cassandra seems to know everything, you know, probably the second most, maybe next to you, Damian, about what actually happened.
I've actually seen you a few times online, like, defending us, and that was what made me say, like, whenever you guys asked, did I want to come on?
I was like, yeah.
Because, honestly, I don't enjoy, like, you know, talking about this stuff.
Like, in a lot of ways, it's incredibly traumatic.
So it just helps knowing you're going into a situation with somebody that actually knows the details of things and that has shown support through the years.
Yeah, one of the guys was really mentally challenged.
They said he had an IQ that hovered somewhere around the range of 70 to 72.
Uh, so he was, I mean, if you look into a lot of these like false conviction cases, one of the things you find is that a lot of them involve false confessions.
If you take someone with a really low IQ and put an incredible amount of pressure on them, they're really susceptible to finally just saying, okay, I'll admit to whatever you want me to say, just stop what you're doing.
And that was pretty much what happened in this case.
Uh, they, they picked up a mentally handicapped guy.
I think he was 17 at the time.
Uh, and did what amounted to psychological torture for, for many hours.
I can't even remember how many hours it was now.
It was, you know, this was like 30 years ago.
Uh, but he finally confessed to the crime and implicated me and someone else.
So all three of us, I ended up getting, I was sentenced to death three times.
Uh, one of the other guys was sentenced to life without parole and the mentally handicapped guy was sentenced to, uh, Life plus 40 years.
I want to jump to the end just so people can understand how you end up here, out of jail, and then we'll go back and start going through the story, but how did you end up not on death row?
I mean, if they convicted you to death three times, how do you end up sitting here?
So what happened was I was arrested in 93, convicted in 94, I got out in 2011, and a huge part of what made that possible is the way DNA testing has progressed over time.
You know, back when we were arrested in 1993, they could not do some of the testing that they can do Well, they can even do more advanced stuff now, which is what we're fighting for in court.
We're trying to get even more DNA testing done.
But in 2011, they had finally progressed enough where they were able to test things in such small amounts, small amounts that they couldn't necessarily get results from in 93.
So they test the DNA found at the crime scene.
And it ended up not matching me or the other two guys, but it ended up being a match for one of the victim's stepfathers and the guy who was providing the stepfather with an alibi.
We go through this thing with the state, you know, this is why I say, I always say the state tried to murder me, is because they knew what they were doing.
They knew.
Even after they did the DNA testing and found that it didn't match us, I sat on death row for another two years while they fought to still kill me.
They were saying, this doesn't matter.
You got a fair trial.
That's all that matters.
And the state still kept trying to push this through even after the DNA testing.
And I forgot where I was going with that.
I had a point.
But that's one of the other things, also, is I did spend a lot of time in solitary confinement, like over a decade, and it caused a lot of brain trauma that we didn't even know I had until I got out.
You know, I lost a lot of stuff like facial recognition and voice recognition.
It messed up my eyesight really bad.
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But sometimes I forget what I'm talking about right in the middle of a sentence.
That's exactly, yeah, that's where I was going with that.
Yeah, so in 2011, due to the DNA testing, the state still would not give up, so my attorneys got together with the state and they all agreed on a compromise.
This compromise was something called an Alfred plea.
I had never heard of this before, knew nothing about it whatsoever, but what it comes down to is you get to still legally maintain your innocence while accepting a guilty plea.
And the whole point of it is so that the state cannot be held responsible for what they've done.
That was the only reason that they didn't kill me, was because so many people in the outside world were paying attention to the case and they wanted that to go away.
We lived in the same trailer park together, you know.
People make jokes about that, like trailer trash, white trash, whatever, but honestly, by the time we moved into a trailer park, to us, it felt like we were moving up in the world.
I didn't know if I wanted to bring up other names or whatever, but I saw, I was watching a documentary series, I think it was like IDF or something, or whatever the channel, ID I think the channel was, and they played a clip where he said he didn't want to take the Alford plea.
He didn't want to let the state say that he was guilty.
But he said, they're trying to kill Damien, so I have to do this.
And I'm like, it's no surprise to me this story's captivated so many people because it's shocking how, even if... I just...
The amount of fault error in the story, the amount of evidence that's come out, the story itself, like almost, I guess what, almost immediately or very quickly after the trial, people were like, hey, wait a minute, something's wrong with this.
This doesn't make sense.
And how did it get this far that the state was just hell-bent On killing a person.
It feels like, I was saying this before the show, I was like, I want to make sure I get this right, it sounds like you get a bunch of really angry people, they hear this story, and it's a horrible story, you know, these three kids getting murdered, and they say, do something, but they don't care what, and the state just says, give them whatever.
And so they're like, if we, it's almost like the state would be more content with killing an innocent man as long as it makes them look like they did something.
Keep in mind, I was only 18 years old whenever all this stuff happened.
So teenagers aren't exactly the smartest people in the world.
And back then, the attorneys that I had, They told me that it was someone who's now dead.
It was another one of the stepfathers of one of the victims.
They told me, this is the guy that we believe did it.
So I took that at face value.
I thought, OK, they know.
They're older than me.
They're lawyers, whatever.
So they must know what they're talking about.
So in the beginning, I thought it was another guy.
You know, it's one of those things, this is really Very difficult to talk about in a lot of ways, but I think it was someone who was, and I don't want to say too much yet, but this is one of the reasons we're pushing so hard for this DNA testing, is I think it was someone connected to the police department.
Keep in mind, this story in a lot of ways, there's so much more to it and it's so much deeper than people think.
For example, everybody knows about the guy Jerry Driver, that he was this juvenile cop that had harassed me for years.
But he was part of, like, a very small juvenile task force that was made up of three people.
These three guys used to come through our neighborhood, you know, like I said, once again, poor white trash, nobody cares about these kids.
They used to come through our neighborhood and, you know, I don't know, like, what all you can say on here, like ratings or outliers or whatever, but they would basically come through the neighborhood, pick up young boys and say, either you give me a blowjob or you're going to jail.
And the link, like the DNA, the DNA that was found whenever we did the testing, it matched one of the stepfathers who we also now know was an informant for the police department who was working with them on a lot of drug cases.
Yeah, so the guy who accuses the other guy at first, he's the one that everyone thought did it.
He's the one my attorneys told me did it.
So I go on TV, and this is why I'm really hesitant to say names or accuse people now, is because back then I believed 100% that this guy did it, and I went on TV and accused him on TV.
Turns out, like, after they do the DNA testing and everything, it's not him either.
So, you know, I ended up, we ended up mending fences and we started, like, going out to dinner.
He ended up, like, going on, like, a promotional tour to talk about the case with us, try to get, you know, more investigation done, all of that.
But that's one of the reasons that I'm so hesitant to, like, point the finger.
You know, I don't want to destroy someone's life if they weren't responsible.
So just to before we get into this, before we get into Bojangles, the crime is three young children were found Not just dead, but I believe they were exsanguinated.
That their blood had been removed from their bodies.
That's what that was one of the things that they never could figure out just because when they found the bodies they were found in like running water so they don't know if like the blood washed away or like what the hell happened you know even it was hard to even tell Because they were found in a wooded area, so it was hard to even tell, like, what were actually wounds that were put there by the person who did the killings versus, like, animal predation because they were found in a wooded area, bit by turtles, stuff like that.
They also didn't do luminol testing for, what was it, six hours after they found the bodies, so they were out in the running water and the elements for six hours before they even, like, checked to see if there's blood anywhere.
So a lot of this stuff, keep in mind this was 30 years ago for me, but from what I remember the Bojangles thing was someone that ran, you know, I don't know if they have these everywhere or not, these Bojangles chicken and biscuit places, whatever.
So the manager of one of these places calls the police and he says there's a guy in the bathroom covered in blood and he's like getting blood all over the stall everywhere.
The police come out.
The first one does not even go inside.
She just went through the drive-in window and ordered chicken and biscuits.
And so they all knew that this was happening and for some reason a guy covered in blood did not raise enough red flags for them to like urgently like haul ass over there and question this guy.
And this it sounds like a lot of blood it doesn't sound like you know you could get a nosebleed or a cut and put some blood somewhere but this sounds like this guy was Really smearing a lot.
But part of it, one of the reasons for that, like that they didn't care about that stuff, that they didn't pursue it, like they said in court that they didn't consider me a suspect for, I can't remember exactly how long it was, but it was a period of like weeks after the murders.
They said, you know, we started doing this big investigation and our investigation slowly pointed us towards him, all this sort of stuff.
The person that I believe that was involved with this, that is connected to the police department, he said, and he admitted this out of his own mouth, he said the minute that they pulled the bodies out of the creek where they were found, he said the first thing he said was, Damien Echols finally did it.
He went and hurt someone.
My name was the first thing out of his mouth.
He admitted that.
I was the person that they zoomed in on from from minute one.
And that's probably why so many people are like this story So you have a guy walk into a fast-food restaurant covered in blood And that's that's that's relatively close to the area where the kids are found But keep in mind there's a lot of other people who also have very suspicious things I mean Terry Hobbs his hair was in the shoelace and and you know Fires got his teeth removed like there was Everybody did.
I do this analogy about, you know, placing bets all the time.
If you're at a roulette table, where do you put your money if you think you're gonna win?
And if someone asked me to put my money down on a bet, it's someone, as you stated, someone probably close with the police in some way said, cover this up.
We need a scapegoat.
And all these pieces sort of come together.
And I feel like, Cassandra, you probably felt this way for a long time.
They target a mentally handicapped individual to get him to confess, to target the people they're going to use as a scapegoat to cover up something they knew more about.
A guy shows up covered in blood, and then all of a sudden they lose the samples.
Keep in mind also, at the time that we were arrested, at the time these murders happened, the entire police department was under investigation by the FBI.
So what we're trying to do right now, like the DNA testing that we want to do, it's come far enough where, you know, like I said, they can do things that they couldn't even do in 2011.
One of the things they can do now is they still have the ligatures that they removed from the children, the shoestrings.
Whenever they removed them, they didn't untie them, they just cut them so that the knots are preserved.
They could do DNA testing now.
What we're asking them to do is untie those knots and DNA test the inside of those knots and you would find the skin cells of whoever tied those knots.
And they can also tell you, like, if it's more than one person's DNA, they have the technology now where they can separate that and show you, okay, it was this person and this person.
And there's also a good chance that whoever did it had that in their mouth at some point.
Because if you're trying to hold somebody down and you're trying to tie, you know, there's Probably, you know, I bite things all the time when I'm like tying it or opening a package or whatever and they've gotten tons of DNA from like duct tape and things like that because people just, you know, bite it to rip it off and don't think about it.
I mean, I've seen, you wouldn't, you know, like you said a minute ago going full conspiracy theory.
I saw a video one time on YouTube And I can't remember who this guy was or the name or anything else, but somebody put up a video proving that I was a reptilian.
They do the thing where they slow it down frame by frame and they're like, you know, in this frame you see for a split second he loses control of his human form and his teeth get jagged and all this kind of stuff.
So there are people who say that, like, the reason that I was freed was because I was connected to this, you know, Illuminati reptile conspiracy or whatever, and they were looking out for their own, and I was released because of that. - But why would you be arrested in the first place if the reptilians are controlling everything? - So you're talking sense now. - Well then here's talking sense.
Why would someone who is guilty be consistently pursuing more investigation, more DNA testing?
That to me, I mean, proof is proof and evidence is evidence, but for me, you're sitting here saying, please keep investigating, please do more, 'cause I'm innocent, And that says a lot.
they kind of went underground. - The reason why they're claiming that they won't do the DNA testing is that you don't have jurisdiction because you're no longer in prison, right? - Right. - So even the family members who think that you did it, but especially the ones who don't, 'cause I know a lot of them don't now, couldn't they request the DNA be tested?
You would think that they would want to, even if you were guilty as all get out, You would think that they would want to just put the rumors to rest, just, you know, once and for all figure it out.
If not for you, then for the families and for the community there.
Because they, you know, they might still have a killer living among them.
- Sort of, except for the common sense that, well, the state is implicated in this. - Yes. - That's, I mean, I often say, Occam's razor, in the absence of evidence, the solution that makes the least amount of assumptions tends to be correct.
If you've got party A saying, "Do not investigate.
"Stop, stop." And then you've got the accused being like, please, please investigate.
This can exonerate me and it can prove I really did it.
And then the other group says, nope, nope, nope.
It's like, I'm kind of looking in your direction at who the guilty party might be.
What they're used to doing, though, is they've kind of through the years sort of realized or seen that if we can just hold out long enough, something else will happen that will draw people's attention away, distract them, a new shiny object appears, and maybe this fades away and everybody forgets about it.
So, I know, under the Alford plea, they did that entirely so that you can't sue them, right?
But if they did find, like, the real killer and they had DNA and it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt that you did not do it and that they had the person who did, Could you, would it nullify the Alford plea in that case?
I don't know if she could or not, but I mean, she's the governor, so she could definitely, you know, look into it or apply a little pressure or even—because there's a bunch of ways that this could happen.
Like, for example, the prosecutor, the attorney general, any of these people, the judge, any of these people have the ability to say at any point, Do the DNA testing.
All of them are trying to prevent it from being done.
So she could theoretically like even ask the Attorney General, why are you fighting this case?
And that would put a little pressure.
Because that's the only thing these people care about.
That's the only reason I even talk about this stuff is because the only thing they care about is a spotlight being shined on them.
It's like the old cost-risk analysis thing businesses do, ERC Fight Club, when Edward Norton's character's on the plane and he's talking to the guy and he says, if the cost of the lawsuits Yes.
are less than the cost of the recall, we won't recall.
And also keep in mind that a lot of these people built careers for themselves off of this case.
You know, you had the judge went on to run for Senate and become a senator.
The prosecutor runs for Arkansas Supreme Court.
Like you had a lot of people who use this as the foundation of showing like we're whatever it is that the reason you should vote for us is because we handled this case.
So they were, you know, coming out looking like heroes, you know, stop the satanic cult that was running rampant in It's like some teenager who drew some goofy pictures in there.
I mean, you had like all the talk shows, everybody, everybody was talking about the Satanic Panic, which I remember very vividly because I had just discovered, you know, the Misfits, Marilyn Manson, and I'm like 12.
And I'm just like, Oh, great.
There's Columbine and Satanic Panic and all this stuff.
There's a, you ever hear of Magic the Gathering, the card game?
They had a, one of the cards in the early sets, this is like 94, was called Unholy Strength and it's a, the art is a man who's like, had tilted up and behind him is a burning pentagram and when they reissued the set they had to remove the pentagram because I guess parents were complaining about the satanic imagery of it or whatever.
So like, this is a few years later even and people are still very much No, it's offensive.
We can't show kids this evil imagery and you have to get it from the art and get it out of there.
I don't know if it's…you know, you said you were on death row for 18 years.
So I don't know if there's something you want to watch.
But it's a movie…it's a Kevin Spacey film which…you know, the context of that kind of change is now that Kevin Spacey has been accused of all these things.
But in the film he is a philosophy professor who goes to a party one night and there's this young woman who basically flunks out of the college and no longer is a student and they have sex.
She stages it as a rape, then falsely accuses him, and then flees and drops the charges.
He loses everything, and then... That's the backstory, but the story starts with him on death row.
He's giving an interview.
Another teacher he had worked with was raped and murdered.
And so I don't want to ruin the movie, but I guess I will because it's like a 20-year-old movie.
Basically what happens is he's an anti-death penalty activist, him and this woman.
His life is destroyed by this false rape accusation.
Then one day this woman is found with a bag over her head.
Her hands are cuffed behind her back.
She's got his fluids in her.
The key to the handcuffs are in her stomach, and she's dead from asphyxiation with the bag taped to her neck.
He gets accused of it, he gets sentenced to death, and then in the end, he gets put to death, and then after he dies, a video gets sent anonymously, or no, a reporter finds a video of her committing suicide, of her cuffing herself, swallowing the key, she tapes the thing around her neck, and then she cuffs herself and lays down, and then he gets put to death falsely, causing this panic and everything.
I just think it's, I don't know, I'm just reminded of that movie, I suppose, thinking about your case and, you know, being on death row for so long, innocently.
I guess there's no point to tell that story about the movie other than I think it's a really great movie, and I'm just wondering, you know, what was going through your mind when they convict you?
When you got convicted, did they immediately say that they were seeking the death penalty?
Like talking about that in a lot of ways is very, very difficult, just because looking back on that time, it's almost like trying to remember somebody else's memories.
Like I'm not that person anymore.
Like so much time has passed and so many different experiences that it changes you.
So what I remember from that time period is Part of you knows that you're screwed, but part of you also keeps thinking, surely at any minute somebody's going to fix this.
You know, surely somebody's going to come to their senses at any time.
Surely an adult is going to come into the room and put an end to this.
So there's part of you that knows that you're screwed, and part of you that still has this, like, clinging to hope that somehow, someway, this is going to turn out okay.
And I think a lot of people keep doing that all the way up until the point that they're executed.
One thing I hear a lot is that In so many stories that I've heard, you'll get people either, you know, people who have watched maybe televised trials or who were there and they'll say, oh, his attitude was not of someone who was innocent.
They know exactly how you're supposed to respond.
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And that's what they said about there were people saying the same thing about me.
I mean, it's it's it always reminds me in like a kind of roundabout way of that quote by Mike Tyson that everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face.
It's easy to say what you would do or what someone should do or any of that when you're not the one in that situation.
When you're not an 18-year-old teenager, barely more than a child yourself, going through the most incredibly traumatic event that you can possibly imagine outside of being murdered yourself.
You know, it's easy for people to say what they would have done in that situation, but you really do not know what you would have done in that situation until you're in it.
You are in shock.
You are in trauma.
You're doing everything you can just to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
And people deal with that in different ways.
One of the guys, the mentally handicapped guy, the entire trial, he laid there with his head on the table pretty much the entire time.
They said that shows he was guilty because he behaved that way.
I sat up.
I maintained eye contact with anybody.
I've got nothing to hide.
I'm an open book here.
They said, well, he's arrogant.
That proves he's guilty.
There is nothing that any one of us could have done in that situation that someone wouldn't have taken as saying, oh, you know, I'm reading their body language or whatever it is, and I think they're guilty.
There's nothing that we could have done that someone wouldn't have said that.
That's what I mean about like you keep thinking, surely at any time somebody is going to step in and fix this.
You keep you know, there's part of you.
Like I said, you go back and forth.
It's almost like you're on the seesaw or something where part of you, one day you get up and you're like, I'm damned.
These people are going to kill me.
These people are in a fit of bloodlust and are not going to stop until I'm six feet in the ground.
And then the next day you get up and you're like, okay, you know, And part of it, I think, honestly, is because we're raised on this diet of all these programs like Matlock and Perry Mason and all these movies where, you know, the truth always comes out in time and it manages to save people and all this kind of stuff.
Like, we've almost been programmed to believe that stuff from the time that we're watching, you know, TV as children.
So that's still in you.
You keep thinking.
You know you go from like these people are going to murder me to these people can't do this to me because I didn't do this and if I didn't do this then it's impossible for them to prove that I've done something that I haven't done.
It's, you know, it is better in a lot of ways than a lot of places in the country, but human beings are always the ones running it, and the justice system is only good as the scruples of the culture.
So if you've got, you know, you look at some of these other countries, and you can bribe cops left and right.
You get pulled over, you give them a bribe.
United States, you offer a cop a bribe, you're probably going to get arrested and he's going to be like, I'm not going down because you offered me a bribe.
I got it on camera.
You're under arrest.
You can't do it.
The issue, however, is that humans are still humans.
And if it turns out the criminals are the cops, I mean, I don't wanna get too political and get into too many current events, but there's a big story right now about police officers who killed a man after a traffic stop.
And the insinuation is these cops may have been involved in some kind of criminal activity themselves.
The assumption can't be that just because you're wearing a uniform or a badge or in government, you are somehow not human or different. - When I was on death row, we had a cop on death row, A cop in New Orleans.
I mean, I think if we would have had that level of money and prestige or power or whatever you want to call it, I don't think we would have ever been in that situation in the first place.
I think the reason we were in that situation is because they considered us throwaway.
You know, we were something that nobody was ever going to question.
Nobody's ever going to miss these guys.
Like, they're nobody.
You know, these are people who live in poverty that have no kind of political connections or anything else.
I just, it just feels like a component of the degradation of American culture.
The idea that I love about America is that there's classes in this country, of course, you know, there's rich people, there's poor people, but you could come from the gutter and work your way up to the top.
There's not supposed to be a person in this society, no one in the United States is supposed to be considered throwaway.
This is the country where you can be a white trash trailer park kid, and then one day the president walks by and you say, F you, Mr. President, and they have to respect that you have the right to do that, because you are not throwaway, that everyone in this country does matter.
That's what makes America so much better than many other countries, especially, you know, other countries that have overt class systems that you're not allowed to move through.
You know, that's one of those things we were, we had just started to talk about this and we stopped a few minutes ago, but it's really hard for me to, to say one way or the other, just because I saw, you know, like for example, the law says that you're not allowed to execute people who are mentally handicapped in any capacity, you know, whether it's low IQ or brain damage where they can't, or, or mental illness, like extreme schizophrenia, where they don't even understand, you know, what's going on really.
But they do.
They still do all the time.
Like, I'll give you one example in Arkansas.
There was a guy who, he was guilty.
He killed his in-laws.
He shot his mother-in-law and father-in-law and then shot himself in the head and gave himself a lobotomy, but he survived.
But he was so mentally like tore up after that that whenever they got ready to execute him they asked him what he wanted for his last meal and he says pecan pie.
They give him a pecan pie, he eats half of it, wraps the other half up and says he's going to save that until after the execution.
So this is a guy who had no concept of what was being done to him and they're still killing people like that.
I think it would be, you know, just the only thing I can figure is they think maybe this person is not put them in the right circumstances and they're no longer a danger to other people anymore.
I'm not saying like let them back out on the street or whatever, but say this is the kind of person that needs to be in a mental institution.
You know, that they could be prevented from ever doing something like this again in some way.
But I would also say there are men on death row and this is why I say that I'm so conflicted about all of this and I can't really say one way or the other.
There were men I knew on death row that I knew personally on death row that I knew if these men ever get a shred of a chance they will kill someone again.
I know that even that, honestly, is kind of a horseshit argument, because what I saw is men like that, that they say that, you know, lock them in a box and they're never going to do anything to everybody again.
They're in a building with thousands of people, so they're still victimizing people in there.
You may have people that, you know, are in there for whatever reasons it is.
Maybe they got caught with, like, meth or something like that.
They weren't hurting anyone, they were just, you know, mething up, whatever the hell it is.
They end up in there, you take them and put them in this situation with a person that victimizes them the entire time they're in there, and then by the time you put that person back out on the street, the argument that I always make is, you know, the number of people that will never get out of prison is a tiny, tiny amount.
Almost every single person that is in prison, almost all of them, will one day be back out on the street.
They're going to be in your churches, they're going to be in your schools, they're going to be in your grocery stores.
So it's probably not the best idea to drive them insane with torture before reintroducing them into that environment.
So if you put them in a situation with people who are going to continually victimize them, beat the hell out of them, maybe rape them, take everything they've got every day, by the time they get released back out, they are going to be a worse person not necessarily even because of their own you know choices and actions but they're going to be a worse person just because they are in a deep state of shock and trauma that that's actually a really good argument that uh has not been brought up
uh that much to me before or i would say ever that these people who have committed these very serious crimes are still surrounded by a bunch of other people and and you know what i'm hearing is if you're a guy who did hard drugs meaning victimless but yourself maybe they caught you with cocaine or something right you're now in prison with potential murderers yes They could murder you.
And in your case, for instance, I believe after everything I've heard, that this is clearly some kind of cover-up and they attempted to murder an innocent person because it made their jobs easier and I wouldn't put it past the state to do that.
And so then I think about stories like that and I say, I don't care if there are 10 guilty people.
The idea that a state would kill an innocent person, it destroys the whole system.
The argument, it goes back to Blackstone's formulation.
He said it is better that 10 guilty persons escape than one innocent person suffer.
And then Benjamin Franklin said it's better that 100 guilty persons escape than one innocent person suffer.
And then there's the more authoritarian dictatorial people.
Otto von Bismarck said it is better that 10 innocent people suffer than one guilty person escape.
But that idea doesn't work.
And the philosophy behind it is if the people of your society believe that even if they are good citizens, you will still try to kill them, then they have no reason to be good citizens in In fact, they have every reason to try and subvert the system to protect themselves.
The system has to show people that if you are innocent, we will not let you die.
We will do everything in our power to try and save you.
And that means there's going to be a lot of guilty people.
Or who we say, because there is a preponderance of evidence of innocence, we're going to try and pursue the route of innocence.
And that could get some guilty people let go.
But then the incentive is to be a good person because we will try to save you.
This is why I don't like the death penalty at all.
Because there are really nasty people, and I'll keep the politics out of it, who knowingly keep innocent people in prison, whether it's the death penalty or otherwise, because it makes them look good.
It makes them look tough on crime.
They can use it for their records, but then you end up with innocent people staring down a death sentence.
And you know, I often say this, but you can speak to it way better than I could.
I tell people when I argue against the death penalty, I want you to imagine what it must be like to have two men with guns holding both of your arms as you're chained, walking you to die.
Imagine, think to yourself, in 10 minutes I will be dead, they will kill me, and you know you didn't do anything wrong.
What must that feel like?
And then understand that even if it's 0.1%, the idea that you, in support of the death penalty, would put a person through that, I don't have all the answers.
And I certainly think it's a really great point you make, that these people who commit these crimes, they're still with other people.
And some of these people are not violent offenders.
Someone may have done heroin too much and they're a victim, but now they're in this prison where they could be around someone who would hurt them in that way.
And that's a tough question, man, I don't have the answers for.
But even if somebody did do a violent crime, there's a million reasons why people would fly off the handle and do a violent crime and not actually be a danger to other people.
But then there's people who, you know, are categorically, like, damaged who want to torture people, who want to hurt people, who want to rape people.
And so I think there's levels of these things and I don't believe that You know, just anybody should be given the death penalty.
I think that there has to be like an extremely high burden of proof.
I mean, I'm one of the few people I keep getting yelled at on Twitter because I keep saying Alex Murdaugh.
I didn't think there was enough evidence to convict him.
But in some cases, like the woman who killed Sandra Cantu, for example, the little girl in California.
The fact that she didn't get the death penalty, like, blew my mind because she, you know, tortured her sexually and stuffed her in a suitcase and she was somebody that this little girl trusted.
And, you know, there's like a level, like, I think California, I think that's the one law that they have right is that they only give the death penalty if there's, like, an extreme circumstance on top of the murder.
Like, if there was torture, if it was sexual, if it was a serial killer or something like that.
Would you support the death penalty if you got the DNA evidence done and they found out who it was and, you know, that led to finding more evidence and just absolutely proving who actually killed those little boys?
Even in that situation, I can't say solidly yes or no.
I think I would really have to look at it and, you know, maybe it was one of the victims Family members who was cracked out of their mind at the time and didn't that's not necessarily like a serial killer or something or maybe it's a cop maybe it's someone that the public has entrusted you know
Put a huge amount of faith and trust in to uphold society and and this person has used that position to murder someone and almost to murder three children and then almost murder me on top of it.
It would be really hard for me in that situation.
To not want someone to seek the death penalty.
But, you know, something you asked a while ago, something you said, you said, what would it feel like, like, if you know you didn't do this and you've got people leading you to your execution?
I'll tell you exactly what it feels like.
It makes you lose all faith and all hope in humanity.
You look at everything, you look at the system, you look at the media, you know, because the media in the very beginning before they, the evidence started to come out in our favor and all that, the media was cheering it on, like, Like you said, you had Oprah Winfrey and all these people doing all these episodes of shows on satanic panic, making people howl for my blood.
It makes you realize all of this stuff is flawed.
Either it's flawed because humans are flawed or it's flawed because someone is making money off of it and has a vested interest in promoting a certain image or whatever it is.
It makes you Look at humanity as being absolutely lost and damned and you just see every human institution as dirty.
And I think it's not so much that it's exposing you to the darkest element of humanity in how these machines, how they operate.
I was just talking about this the other day over something substantially less, uh, let's call it weighted.
A story that's particularly irrelevant to the average person but really pissed me off.
Schemers.
These people who seek personal gain and they don't care what damage it will bring.
And it can scale up from the simplest lying To the press or lying to the public to get money, all the way up to being willing to kill an innocent person if it protects you.
But just to use all of the pop culture references I can, because I love to, it reminds me of the Joker in The Dark Knight when he's, have you seen The Dark Knight?
When he's sitting over Harvey Dent and he says, nobody cares when it all goes according to plan, as long as it all goes according to plan, even if that plan is horrifying.
Like if you tell someone that a truckload of soldiers will be blown up or a gangbang will get shot, nobody cares.
But if you say the mayor's gonna die, then everyone goes insane.
And that's it.
If the media's in on it, if the culture is all cheering for it, if the people are marching out in the streets with pitchforks, then everyone is content to see an innocent person be killed.
Because that's what the human system has decided.
And everybody profiting off of it.
And so many of these people probably know it's not true.
Many of these people know that they're lying.
But it doesn't matter.
Because the angry mob's not throwing the pitchforks at them.
In fact, the angry mob is giving them money.
And that money, that gets them cheeseburgers.
That gets them a new car.
You look at the Covington kid's story, which is, again, substantially less heavy.
This young kid is standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
And a man walks up to him, banging a drum in his face.
What does every media outlet do?
They accuse the kid of being racist because that's what makes them the money.
They don't care if it's true.
They're not going to check the evidence.
All they know is, "Hey, look, we're going to side with the audience on this one.
This is what they said, so this is what we go for." And it gets scary when you realize it can result in someone dying.
But what's scary also is when you start to realize in that situation, like in the early days, I had the media do stuff to me, say stuff about me that wasn't like completely and absolutely an outright blatant lie, but was close enough to it to pretty much qualify.
I mean, they do, like, check him on it after, but it's, like, startling to hear him say it.
And so I always kind of wondered if they were actually on your side in the first one or if the outpouring of support from people after it was just so huge that they realized that they need to look into it more.
It wasn't necessarily that I trusted them to be honest.
It was that I knew I was telling the truth I knew I didn't have anything to hide so it's not like there's gonna be any gotcha moments or anything like that and So I went into it thinking, number one, I don't have anything to hide.
They could, they've got all sorts of tricks. - Well now I feel the same, but keep in mind, I was an 18 year old kid with no experience with any of that stuff.
No knowledge of how the world works or, you know. - Thank goodness though. - Yeah, exactly.
But you know, when I grew up, like when I was 18 years old, like I did not know what was going on in the world.
You could tell them a direct quote that is true, and they know that if they quote you, it will make you look innocent.
So instead, they will contextualize and paraphrase.
So a simple example would be you saying something like, hey, what's your favorite pizza topping?
You can say, oh, I love pepperoni pizza.
And then instead of quoting you, they'll say, his tone was sarcasm and he went on to describe his quote, love for pizza.
And then it presents it as though you actually don't like it.
They can, they can manipulate what you say and get away with it.
Yes.
I suppose, however, the scariest thing is there's probably a lot of people in your position or have been throughout the years since who don't have HBO coming and doing a documentary.
They estimate right now, a lot of people who work in this industry, like the legal industry, work on death penalty cases, all that, they estimate that as many as one out of every ten people executed are innocent.
The safety of an individual is partly the responsibility of the individual.
And I agree with that argument to an extent.
You know, if you've got a murderer in there and you're like, well, we can't be sure, there's not enough evidence, there's a preponderance of evidence, but we're not going to kill him, well, then that could still mean life in prison.
The challenge then is like, we all pay for that.
We have to pay a lot of money to keep people locked up.
And then you still have the circumstance where an innocent person gets life in prison, which is still bad.
So I just... I wish this world had very easy answers.
It just doesn't.
But my view is, for me personally, I would rather have 10 serial killers walking onto my property wielding powerful weapons than to be sitting defenseless in a box with a guard outside saying, we will kill you tomorrow.
Because at least with those 10 people, I have an opportunity and the right to defend myself.
I view it as peaceful slavery versus dangerous freedom and recognizing that I don't want to empower the state to kill innocent people.
But that also means I probably will be faced with a very dangerous circumstance from a dangerous individual who probably should have been stopped and wasn't.
But that responsibility to a certain degree will be on me and not the state.
If they found out somebody did it, say it was like the Bojangles guy and he was some truck driver who was a serial killer and he gets linked to a whole bunch of other murders across the country, I would want that person to be executed if they proved it.
But again, I wouldn't trust them necessarily to prove it at this point because they've already shown... Exactly.
Say that they come on the news and they tell you something that seems to show with 100% proof that this person is guilty, once again you're back to, well, how do I know they're telling me the truth?
Like to give an example what you were saying about how they take things out of context and all that.
This is what I mean whenever I say that they did things to me that came right up to the line of lying but didn't.
At one point I'm sitting in jail waiting to go to trial and the news is on TV and I see this report come on saying that the police had went back into the place where I lived Because the people who had moved in there after we did had told the police that they had found a stick in the closet that had something red on the end of it and it had hair stuck to it.
And the way the media is describing it, it sounds like they found like a club or a baseball bat with hair and blood on the end of it.
So I'm thinking like, what the hell?
When I'm watching this on the news, I'm like, I know there was nothing like that in my house.
Did they set me up?
Did the cops go back and put something there?
unidentified
When I can make a phone call, I call home and ask what's going on.
My mom tells me it was a Sherwin-Williams paint stick that you used to mix paint with, and the hair, and it was paint, red paint, and the hair stuck to it.
We had two Pomeranians.
The hair stuck to it was Pomeranian hair.
unidentified
Dog-headed paint, and they said a stick with red A red substance and hair stuck to it.
Man, I wish there was an easy way to solve the problems.
I do.
But when the media lies, gets a mob of people to call for blood, then the state goes, well, look, it's easier to kill the guy than it is to argue with an angry mob, so just do it.
I've been telling people over the past few years, as we've seen increasing political tensions in this country, when people come to protest at your house and they're screaming and yelling, the cop's going to look at 100 people who are ready to throw bricks And so we can't deal with that.
But we can arrest this one guy who's sitting on his couch watching, you know, reruns of murder she wrote.
That's easy.
And that's what they will do.
And it's not unique to this time.
It's what governments have always looked at.
It's the cost risk analysis.
Try to stop a mob of 50 angry armed people, arrest one man, and then everyone shuts up.
That's a very difficult question for me to answer just because of the connotations and preconceived ideas and stuff that people have whenever they think of the word religion.
But I believe one of, if not the most important thing in my life, is deliberately cultivating a connection to divinity.
Yeah, maybe religious is the wrong word because I wouldn't describe myself as religious, but I would say that I believe in something greater and I believe in some kind of universal order or whatever you want to call it.
I think there's something more to all this.
There's this song, I love the pop culture references, you guys know that, there's a song called Judith by the band A Perfect Circle.
I don't know if you guys have ever heard it, but it's just so good.
And the singer, Maynard, is basically, his mom had a stroke and became paralyzed, so he writes this song about how Even though he's the one who did this to you, you keep praising his name and you never stop to question why.
And I look at that and I'm almost like, he didn't understand.
You know, when his mother was very religious, has a stroke, but keeps praying and believing in something.
And I think that song is actually quite beautiful in the anger of a son who saw his mom hurt and doesn't understand why she would still have faith in Jesus.
And I'm not saying people should have faith in Jesus or anything like that.
I just think the world is the way it is, it's this machine that churns and calculates, but there is something divine that you can, I don't know if pray is the right word, or meditate to as some more hippie type individuals, new age Ian types, Ian's my friend, he's very spiritual or whatever, or hippie, might believe, but I think there's a potential for intervention of some sort to save you from the circumstances that, you know,
And the question, I suppose, is how do we find more people who are in a similar situation and then give them the level of media attention that saves them?
But it's one of those, like going back for just a second to what you said about religion or whatever, and going back to what Cassandra was just saying about, you know, like it's my life or whatever.
I think a lot of people, whenever they think of me, they think I am almost synonymous with this case.
Like, this case is me.
This case is, like, the apex or the, you know, the focal point or the crux or whatever it is of my life situation.
It was what formed me or whatever.
And honestly, For me, it's not like that at all for me this this case was almost This is something that I will never be able to make people out here understand, but it was almost in a very real way insignificant to My development, you know this this will sound crazy because so many people have played such a huge role in
In the development of who I am and how I view the world and everybody else but like when you're talking about like spirituality like the reason I'm hesitant to say is because it's another one of those things that most people have like preconceived ideas about or anything else but the practice that That allowed me to survive when I was in there and that shapes the way that I understand divinity and all of this stuff is ceremonial magic.
Western Hermeticism.
And I always say that the two biggest people that I don't know in real life that played a huge role in shaping who I am would be Aleister Crowley and Joel Osteen.
Well, you know, I credit Joel Osteen.
It's like ceremonial magic is one of the things that saved my life, but so is listening to the messages of Joel Osteen.
I went from one day when I was in there feeling like, I can't do this.
I can't get up another day.
They're going to come in the cell and find me dead tomorrow.
And it's a Sunday.
You only get three TV channels in prison.
I turn on all three of them and they're all three televangelists.
unidentified
So I figured I may as well just watch one, so I just randomly left it on the one that Joel Osteen was on.
I haven't reached out to him, but one time, you know, I live in New Orleans, so you have hurricanes there all the time, and you have to flee like crazy, and one of the times when we were running from a hurricane, we evacuated to Houston, and we thought, while we're here, why not go to his church?
So we went there, and for me, it was one of those incredibly surreal moments, you know, seeing this guy on a TV screen save my life when I was in prison.
Oh, that was my point!
So the point of what I was getting to was Like, one of the reasons that I say that this isn't, like, the culmination of who I am, like, I'm not synonymous with the case, is because when I was in prison, one of the things Joel Osteen says that I took away from his stuff is he says, whatever you're going through, it's not happening to you, it's happening for you.
And when I look back in hindsight now, I see that everything I went through, don't get me wrong, it wasn't pleasant, it wasn't easy, I wouldn't choose to do it, but I see how it made me the person that I am now.
And one of the things that it did, was provided me with a kind of life that I didn't have to think about getting up every day and going to a nine-to-five job.
I was locked in a cell for a decade in solitary confinement where the only thing that I had to focus on was my spiritual practice.
Not belief, not faith, not hope, but an actual practice.
That forced me to build a world Like, I reached a point, if you're familiar with Timothy Leary, when he was doing all the LSD experiments, at one time he ends up in prison and Ram Dass goes to visit him and Ram Dass tells him, we've come up with a plan to break you out of here.
And Timothy Leary says, you can't do that.
I've got too much work to do.
That's how I had almost started to feel in prison by the very end.
I had been so, like, 100% dedicated and focused on these practices and, like, the way they were changing me and my experiences that I no longer thought about the fact that I was even in prison anymore.
That that Joel Osteen statement that that's a good one.
It's happening for you.
Yes, I think You know My life was shaped by a lot of very difficult circumstances nowhere near as difficult as yours But all the bad things that I went through all the hardships made me stronger and more capable and able to do the work that I do So that is that's a good one You know, I wouldn't call it perfect.
Some people go through things and the end result is just bad in the long run I agree, but I think it's about your state of mind, and for you, it sounds like you're in this hell, but he was able to say something so simple to you that made you try and focus on what you could build from it or what you could do to have a better state of mind.
Like, you know, most of the men that were there, when I was on death row, I think there were like, give or take, 30 people on death row total.
And I would say almost every single one of those people was in a living hell.
And I wasn't.
So that, to me, that's kind of the, like the testimony of what's possible with, you know, the right mindset and being focused on what you're doing, knowing what you came into this world to do and applying yourself to it will get you through so much hardship that it's insane because you don't focus on the hardship, you focus on what it is that you're passionate about, what it is that you're doing. - Do you ever feel like, did you ever feel like you were being punished for something divinely?
I mean, you mentioned you felt like it was divine intervention to get out, but I wonder if... I don't think I ever felt like I was being punished, but I did.
It was hard to get away from the feeling sometimes that this is happening for a reason, that this isn't just... And maybe it wasn't, maybe it was just me feeling that way or whatever it was, but oftentimes I did have the feeling like, you know, This is for a reason that, you know, maybe this isn't correct.
Like you said, people go through horrible things all the time.
A lot of times people are destroyed by it.
But I always had the feeling that whatever you want to call it, God, the universe, the source that everything came from and to which everything will one day return, whatever it is, I always had this feeling that it wouldn't be allowing this to happen unless it were for a reason of some sort.
But, you know, I think people should... There are a lot of people who say that things happen for a reason, but then you also have to consider that sometimes the reasons may be beyond our understanding.
You know, people think that getting out of prison, getting off death row, that that's like the finish line and you hit that and you live happily ever after.
And we had not given one single second of thought to what comes after this.
Like the entirety of everything we're doing, we're focused on the finish line of getting me off of death row.
So when that happens, you realize it's not like the credits roll, you know, it's not like this is the end of the story.
When I walked off of death row, I did not have a single penny to my name.
I had nowhere to go.
I didn't have so much as a suit of clothes to change into.
So we had to hit the ground running.
I am in a state of shock and trauma.
I go from not only 20 years in prison, 10 of those, almost 10 of those being in solitary confinement, to literally overnight being on the streets of Manhattan.
It completely and absolutely destroyed me.
I had a severe nervous breakdown.
When people are thinking I'm supposed to be celebrating and happy, I am breaking down and thinking life out here is harder than life in prison was.
It destroyed me to the point that I have almost no memory of the first two years that I was out of prison.
If you add up everything that I could remember altogether, it would equal a few hours.
I would, you know, a lot of it was like the brain trauma, stuff like that, but I would reintroduce myself to the same person over and over and over again.
You know, people that I had dinner with the night before, I would reintroduce myself to them the next day, not even being able to remember that.
You know, I think I've come a long, long way in the past...
I've been out 11 years now.
And, you know, a lot of it I don't think there's anything that's going to completely fix everything automatically.
A lot, a lot better.
You know, all in all, and once again, it's like that thing, you know, about it didn't happen to me, it happened for me.
It's like, yeah, I could look at that, like, you know, even the memory issues and the nervous breakdowns and all that as, you know, something horrific, but it led me to where I am now, which is a relatively happy person.
I think I'm probably happier than You know, honestly, this might sound weird or whatever, but I'm probably happier than 90% of the people that I come in contact with.
You know, I often say, there's a lot of people who are born into this world with a silver spoon.
Everything's very, very good.
They have access to the best food.
They have a car whenever they need it.
And then when they become adults, and now they're on their own, they lose all that, and it feels painful.
But if you come from the bottom, and then later on in life, you got a $600 car that can drive a little bit, and you're getting a cheeseburger every day, you're like, wow, this is great!
Really, we wanted to get out of Arkansas as soon as possible.
So the minute that I got out of prison, my very first stop, I had to go to the DMV.
Straight from prison to the DMV to get an ID to even be able to fly.
We stayed that night in a hotel.
We went out of Arkansas across the state line over into Memphis and of course everybody who had supported us for years, you know, like a lot of people like Eddie Vedder were there at this hotel, did like a rooftop party.
One of the things he did before I got to the hotel was called room service and had them bring everything on the menu to the room so that whenever I got there everything that the hotel served was in the room.
I mean, it's a movie, I know, but people need to understand.
And you can probably speak to this well better than way better than I could as someone who just sees it in movies.
You build your entire body.
You know, if you were in for 18 years, every seven years, every cell in your body has been replaced.
So you're a new person.
That means everything that makes up who you are, your worldview, your consumption of information and food, the people you interact with, is incarceration.
And then you come out into this world, not only it's being somewhere entirely different, where everything's different, the technology is different.
I remember hearing one guy told me how he went to jail, I think.
There's a post online, actually.
A guy goes to prison in the mid-2000s, only for a few years for some low-level felony.
When he gets out, everyone's got cell phones connected to the internet.
Same for me.
And that, because that jump happened from like 2007, 2008, all of a sudden everybody had smartphones, touch screens that can go online.
So he goes from this world where there's no internet, when he gets out, everyone's got access to everything and it tripped him up.
That was one of the things, like, that I could not understand about the world.
You know, I used to have panic attacks for things like using a debit card.
You know how when you go to the grocery store, the thing everybody takes for granted now?
You put your card in the little machine, put your number in, and that pays for groceries?
To me, that was like alien spaceship level technology.
I didn't know how to use that.
I can remember going to the bank one time to try to deposit a check and when I get up to the window, I wait in line.
When it's finally my turn, I get up to the window and I have a panic attack and turn around and had to leave without doing it just because all this stuff was completely and absolutely... I had never used an ATM machine.
I had never used a cell phone.
I had never seen the internet.
You know, I'd seen on TV, like, the development of things like computers, but, like, when I went in prison, a computer was a glorified typewriter for rich people.
Like, you would put something into it, and it would take 30 minutes for that printer to, you know, gradually print something.
I feel like they don't, I mean, that's got to be a key component of prison reform right there is people need to be able to, when they leave, re-enter society easily.
Otherwise, I feel like that's probably a component of recidivism.
Well, keep in mind, like, even talking about recidivism, I mean, there's so many rabbit holes you could go down here, but, like, with recidivism, you know, politicians give lip service to doing away with recidivism, decreasing rates of recidivism, all this sort of stuff, but keep in mind, they make money off of every single person in prison.
They do things that they know increases your chance of recidivism.
You know, for example, they know that the more contacts and connections you have in the outside world with family, with friends, with community, the less likely that you are to come back to prison.
So they deliberately do everything they can to limit that because they want you to come back to prison.
They want to make money off of you.
I was in there first.
Have you heard the story out of Michigan where this judge was selling kids to a private juvenile facility?
one single shred of anything that could be even remotely considered rehabilitation.
I mean, look, we can—I can praise the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and all of these things, but if we don't have a—if we don't have scruples and a strong moral foundation as a people in this country, these things are meaningless.
It's just a piece of paper.
There was a judge who—you'd get some 15-year-old kid who pushed someone in their school, no real harm, but he would say, that's assault, so you're going to juvie for four months.
The kid would go to juvie once in.
The juvenile facility would try to keep him there and say, oh, oh, you committed a crime now.
You had people, they had to shut the private prison in Arkansas down at one point because you had guys that had been in there for years and never even been issued a pair of shoes because they didn't want to cut into the profit margins.
And then you have this industry lobbying to make more things illegal, to make it easier for them to get, I don't know what you'd call it, but- Slave labor.
Yeah.
That's what it is.
Right.
It's the craziest thing.
I mean, for the private prisons, there's an argument about government prisons being not so well run because there's no incentive to run it better.
But with private prisons, there's an incentive to maximize profit, which means the more people in prison, the more prisons the government has to pay for, and now you've got the worst of both worlds.
A government that doesn't care with unlimited funding stolen from the public to fund people being unjustly locked up.
This is a scary reality, but you bring up a good point about slave labor.
I think it was Kanye West, yay, he tweeted something like, repeal the 13th amendment or whatever, which was what abolished slavery, but that's not what he meant.
The 13th Amendment legalizes slavery in the context of the prison system.
And he was saying we should not have slavery at all.
And he's right.
He's completely right about it.
Now as for the things he said later on in his life, you know, we won't get into that.
But I do think that people need to realize We've seen these instances in California.
This one shocks people.
Prisoners are used to fight wildfires.
You have people who are in prison and they are told, you want to go outside?
Go fight a wildfire.
Like their chance of seeing fresh air and freedom is to risk their lives for like a dollar an hour.
That's slave labor.
I don't think it should be allowed.
I think if we're going to lock someone up, it is us taking the responsibility To rehabilitate, which means our prisons should be focused on education, reform, modern technology like job training kind of things, and as you mentioned, connecting them with other people and families as much as possible.
So, I think we need a dramatic and drastic overhaul of the entire prison system in this country.
unidentified
Well, what you're describing would be a true Department of Correction.
We call it the Department of Correction, meaning to fix, to remedy, to fix something that's broken and send it back in a way that's going to make society better.
But what we actually have is more like a Department of Punishment.
And I've talked to people, and many people who've come on my show on Tim Castellarone have said that, but isn't retribution something, it's not a bad thing, is it?
And it's like, I think retribution is more emotional satisfaction, which can be important if you have an angry mob who is justly angry, not unjustly angry, and we want there to be a sense of justice so that you know bad people are punished and innocent people are saved.
So that can be.
The problem is, if we're mechanizing it, if it is just this logic system, a machine that just turns people in, turns people out, I mean, that's not doing anything for anybody.
Retribution in that instance is going to give people emotional satisfaction, but then damage other people, increase the problem, only make it worse.
We got to figure out how we can make people feel like they're satisfied, but also truly rehabilitate.
Yeah, otherwise, it just, the system doesn't work.
It's a scary thought right now.
That for those that have been on the receiving end of the unjust legal system, it's a scary thought that at any moment And it's not like it happens to everybody, it is rare to a certain degree, but they could just lie and give you a ticket.
Not to talk about politics, but, I mean, there were people, there were grandmothers who were at the Capitol on January 6th who literally just walked onto the lawn and are, you know, have been arrested.
There was a woman who was not there, and the police raided her home in Alaska.
There's a story.
I just saw this two weeks ago.
I'm sitting in my bed, I wake up, and I get sent a funny video from Seamus Coghlan, our friend who runs this show, Freedom Tunes.
After I watch this funny little cartoon, I get recommended a video.
Nineteen-year-old College football player, driving home from a friend's house, gets pulled over.
The first thing the cop does is say, how many drinks have you had?
And he's like, none.
And he was like, get out of the car.
And he's like, okay.
He gives this kid a field sobriety test.
Kid passes.
But no matter what the kid does, the cop says, why are you failing?
Why are you failing?
He says something like, take 10 steps and count them out.
And he goes, okay.
So then the kid starts doing the steps.
And he goes, why aren't you counting?
And he goes, huh?
It's like, why are you acting so weird?
He's like, I don't understand what you want me to do.
And so the kid passed the field sobriety test, but didn't do things like say the number out loud of steps, which is nitpicking.
He then says, the kid goes, dude, do you want to blow me?
Like, I'll blow right now.
And he meant breathalyzer, but it is kind of, you know, suggestive.
And then the cop immediately turns it into something dark.
The kid blows the breathalyzer, zero, zero, zero.
On the body camera footage, you can see the cop showing all zeros.
And then he goes, why are your eyes bloodshot?
And he's like, what dude?
He's like, you accuse me of drinking alcohol.
And then when I blow zeros, cause I know I blew zeros.
Now you're saying I'm smoking weed.
He's like, I don't smoke.
And then he's like, when was the last time you smoked?
And the kid thinks, and he goes, I don't know.
And he goes, why'd you hesitate?
And he's like, dude, I'm on the college football team.
I get drug tested every Friday.
If I smoke, they'll kick me off the team.
And he goes, yeah, well, it's Saturday, so you could have smoked today.
And he was like, dude, it stays in your system.
What is going on?
And the cop goes, you're under arrest for driving under the influence.
And this kid was like, I didn't do anything, man.
Doesn't matter.
Cop said it.
Cop did it.
Kid got lucky enough that his family had the ability to fight back.
But this stuff happens all the time.
I think for a lot of people, you've got this protest movement, you know, defund the police and abolish the police and all that stuff.
A lot of people who are more conservative, they live in areas where they don't see this as often because if you're in a sparsely populated area, your interaction with the cops is probably way less.
And there's very few cops.
You know, so out here, we know the cops out here.
I know some of the ranking officers in our department because there's not that many of them.
I see them outside and they're like, hey Tim, how's it going?
Hey, how's it going?
Well, of course, the guy who knows you is much less likely to falsely accuse you, but you move to a big city or a bigger city where you've got a thousand cops.
They don't know you.
They don't care.
And they're not going to deal with it.
Some of these cops could be bad people.
And then what happens is you get a cop who says, I may have made a mistake arresting this guy.
I don't want to lose my job.
Hey, get my back.
And then his buddy cop says, you got it.
And there you go.
In your case.
unidentified
Sometimes it's even more vindictive than that, though.
Like whenever like towards the end of my case, I can't remember exactly how long it was before I got out.
But the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that there was going to be another hearing and that finally we were going to be able to present all the evidence that we had accumulated up until that point.
Within 10 minutes of that being announced on the news, there were like 30 guards in my prison cell destroying everything I owned, looking for any possible way that they could to throw me in the hole.
One of the huge things that saved my life when I was in prison was doing interviews, keeping the spotlight on Arkansas, like talking about this case.
And I was doing them non-stop, constantly.
And every single time I did that, the way the prison looked at it, which is like an arm of law enforcement, they looked at it as, I'm not bringing attention to this case, I'm bringing attention to them, to the system.
Every single one that I did, I knew I was going to get some sort of punishment for.
They were going to do something to retaliate against me in some sort of way.
They come into my cell one day, this was earlier, you know, I'd been there, Probably less than two years by this point.
I do an interview with the local news.
Next thing I know, the guards are at my door and one of them goes into my cell.
He pulls a knife out of his boot and says, what are you doing with this?
I was like, what could I say?
It's like, I just watched you pull that out of your boot.
They beat me to the point that I thought I was going to die at one point.
I was pissing blood.
The only thing that saved my life was a lot of times the sewage system would overflow and you'd find yourself like standing in ankle deep raw sewage.
Well, the guards aren't going to clean it up.
What they do is bring in inmates from the other part of the prison to clean it up.
It was them.
They bring those inmates in to clean up the sewage water.
They saw what was being done to me.
They went to a deacon from the Catholic Church and said, they're killing this guy back there.
The deacon goes to the warden and he says, I know what you're doing to this guy.
And if, if it doesn't stop, I'm going to start telling people.
That was the only reason they didn't beat me to death back in the hole, is because they did not want word of what was happening inside the system, inside those walls, inside that prison being leaked out into the outside world.
This kind of stuff, oh man, it's kind of depressing, you know?
I don't want to be black-pilled, as it were, but I definitely think we want to believe in the goodness of humanity.
We don't want to lose hope, like you were saying, and feel like everything's rotten, but I do kind of feel like there's a yin-yang of the universe, of the world.
There's the light side and the dark side.
So many of us are either stuck looking at one or the other, I think for the people who live in this world and think everything's great, you know, we need prisons and all this stuff.
We need to realize there are deep problems and we need to root them out.
We can't ignore it.
But you get a lot of people saying things like abolish prisons or abolish police and things like that.
And it's like, well, we don't want to go extreme.
We want bad people to be held accountable.
We want good people to be rewarded.
I do think the system is broken.
I think we need ridiculous reforms that I don't know how we get because our political system is broken.
No one's going to agree because Everybody's pointing the finger at each other as an ideological enemy.
So how do you actually get the votes to make some change like this happen?
Perhaps the state level, state level thing.
Maybe you said Sarah Huckabee Sanders is now the governor.
Maybe we can put some pressure on her and get you the DNA tests you want and say like, let's make the first step towards real justice and fixing these systems.
Basically, what I do is I've written eight books since I've been out, and a great deal of it is about, like we were talking about earlier, the spiritual practices, the things I focus on that changed my life, allowed me to survive in prison.
Like, when people think of that, they just see it as, like, two people brutalizing each other.
They don't realize, like, it forces you to form, like, all these new neural pathways.
You know, you have to...
Like, recognize all of these different combinations, and you have to have, like, you know, split-second reaction times and things like that.
So that's one of the things I've become really excited about, because due to all the things we're talking about, like the prison beatings, eating garbage for 18 years, the psychological and emotional torture, I mean, it destroyed me in a lot of ways.
It destroyed me physically, mentally, and that's one of the things that's kind of helping stitch me back together.
You know, helping me to form these neural pathways, helping me regain physical health, so I'd spend Laurie and I both spend a lot of time doing that.
And honestly, I don't put a lot of thought into the future.
I think that's one of the things that also probably contributes to happiness.
I think if you put too much time thinking about the future and trying to plan for things that you don't have any control over, you're going to be very, very anxious.
So the only thing I do is put one foot in front of the other And after all this time, I have the belief and expectation that whatever I'm supposed to do next will come next.
If you're in a dark place, if you're anxious or depressed, just think about one good thing you have right now and enjoy it for right now.
You know, just take the time to recognize that because I feel For a lot of people, you know, I mentioned earlier that a young person might be born with a silver spoon, and then as they get older and become an adult and become more responsible for their own income and everything, they start going down in their access, they get upset, they start feeling, oh no, I'm losing things, and it's like, just take time to recognize what you have.
You know, take stock of that and center yourself.
Because I think that also plays a role in what you were saying earlier about it's not being done to you, it's being done for you.
So maybe if you're in some dark place, maybe even if you're in the happiest place you've ever been, if you're the happiest you've ever been, stop, take a moment, pause, recognize, you know, I got these good things.
How about that?
And let the future be the future.
I think you got to balance worrying about the future and planning for it, but also enjoying what you have.
One of the things also I think that really kind of helps me is, you know, we live in New Orleans and the entire culture of New Orleans is about enjoying your life.
I mean, that's what life there is built on.
And it could be in a bunch of different ways.
It could be through, you know, enjoying the music or You know, people who come there to get obliterated or whatever, which I don't necessarily recommend.
But every aspect of life there, and it's one of the reasons I love it so much, is because all of the turmoil that's going on in the world doesn't saturate there as much, because people are there because they want to enjoy their lives.
I knew it was this big festival, this big party, but I didn't know that it meant Fat Tuesday.
And then it was only later, because they have these buns in Sweden called semla.
that they eat on Fat Tuesday.
It's a cardamom bun with whipped cream or whatever.
And then someone mentioned, "Yeah, it's Fat Tuesday.
That's why we do it." And I was like, "Oh, Fat Tuesday." Like, "Yeah." And then someone mentioned, like, "That's what Mardi Gras is." And I was like, "Is that what they're doing?" It's like, you party and you eat and dance.
unidentified
I'm like, "Oh, now I get it." - Yes, yeah. - I've never been though.
That sounds pretty fun. - It's one of those things that it's kind of mind-boggling.
Like, People know about Mardi Gras, but they don't know how massive and all-pervasive it is in New Orleans.
It encompasses and saturates everything.
People can't imagine the size of the parades and the magnitude of this stuff down there.
And when you're down there, it's completely mind-blowing when you're seeing this stuff and you're realizing To the rest of the world, it's just Tuesday.
And most people think it's like one day too, but it actually starts on January the 6th, like the 12th day of Christmas, so it goes all the way up from January 6th to Mardi Gras Day, so you're talking about a period of roughly two months of non-stop celebration and partying.
But something happened there, like during the lockdowns or whatever.
It's like the the energy of the place changed.
It is not the same place anymore.
It just felt Like all of the joy and everything else had been sucked out of it and everybody's walking around, you know, angry and frowned up or whatever it was and we just started to look across the world looking for a place where life was more normal, where it was more like what it was pre-pandemic, when people were focused on things other than like politics or whatever the latest thing is or whatever it was.
And that's what New Orleans is.
It almost feels like the rest of the world does not saturate in there.
That's a very, very, I would say very hard question, but it's actually an impossible question, you know, just because I have no idea whatsoever.
You know, they considered us throwaway.
I was a kid with no prospects.
You know, everybody in my family, I don't believe anyone has ever lived over the age of like 65, and by that point they had already had multiple heart attacks, limbs cut off, whatever it is.
Nobody ever escaped.
Like a life of poverty.
You know, if we saw things on TV like people going to college or whatever, that wasn't reality.
You know, that was as real to us as fairy tales.
I would like to think that I would have found a way out of that world, but, you know, the reality of it is I have no idea.
In some ways, it was like I never cared about the world, to be honest.
You know, I never went through those things that people go through where they think, you know, I want to be a doctor or I want to be a cop or whatever it is.
Like, I never thought about things like having a career or having a family or any of that sort of stuff.
It wasn't something that I focused on.
And I don't know.
I don't know what my point to that even is other than just that I didn't fit in.
For me, like I was always doing things like I dropped out of school when I was in ninth grade, never even went to high school, but I'd even honestly quit caring a couple of years before that.
I don't think I learned anything from school other than how to read and write.
Once I could read and write, I pretty much educated myself from that point on.
I used to skip school and go spend all day at the library just reading.
I ask because I wonder if, again to go back to the it's not being done to you, it's being done for you, I wonder if after all of this you are now more powerful in terms of a positive influence to help the world than you would have been otherwise.
I'm not trying to, I mean maybe it sounds disrespectful or something, I'm not trying to make it seem like it was better it happened.
You know, maybe if this didn't happen, you'd just be a local guy living your life, but maybe now you can save some people and make the world a better place.
Like I said, I wouldn't have necessarily wanted to go through this, but when I look back and see what it has done to me and what it has given to me, I consider this entire situation to be 100% a blessing in my life.
You know, I would have never met Lori otherwise.
I wouldn't live where I do.
I wouldn't have the life that I have.
I wouldn't be sitting here talking to y'all right now.
Like, this situation, yes, it took from me tremendously.
But it's like that scripture that says, I'll give you beauty for ashes.
It doesn't say there won't be ashes.
It says you will get ashes, but I will give you beauty for those ashes.
And what happened to me is I was given beauty for those ashes, and more beauty than I had ashes.
And from that point on, I even think right now, you know, I'm just some dude who heard your story.
I've had, you know, Cassandra and Taylor, of course, being like, you've got to talk to this guy.
And even where we are right now, everything you're saying I think is so important for people to hear.
For one, prison reform is so important.
The positivity, that Joel Osteen thing, from his sermon on TV to you, to everyone watching now, it's not being done to you, it's being done for you.
I know it's not so simple.
Some people might still be upset in their circumstances, and they have every right to be.
But I just think that Forged through fire and now more powerful and more beneficial to humanity as a whole.
Maybe that is, it can be looked at as one way as although it was a dark moment in your life or for any person to go through, it may have made you into an instrument of something more powerful and good for humans as a whole, you know?
I mean, I wouldn't obviously wish what happened to you on anybody, but I can see if the message is going to save people or help people, then there is something good coming from all of it.
But even then, honestly, if it were just up to me and I didn't have to keep pursuing this DNA testing and all this, I probably would have just... Like I said, talking about this stuff, it's not really a pleasant thing for me.
I don't think about this stuff on a daily basis.
You know, it's not like I spend a great deal of time thinking about the time that I was in prison, or thinking about what the cops did to me, or, like, the prosecutor, the attorney general, the judge, all that.
I don't think about that stuff, honestly.
So, going back and revisiting this stuff, it's not necessarily a pleasant thing for me, and I wouldn't be doing it if not for, like, still needing to get this testing done, still wanting to get this testing done.
So I see, even now, how it's like this need for this keeps pushing me forward.
And like you said, hopefully something will happen.
Maybe they'll pass some sort of new legislation saying if a person is asking for DNA testing to be done and they're willing to pay for it, then there should be legislation in place saying, okay, well, there's no reason not to do it then.
Hopefully it will lead to helping other people.
But if it were just, you know, if it wasn't for all that, I would just probably fade away and try to enjoy my life to the best of my ability.
You know it's what like Jesse for example only had an IQ of 70 to 72 to begin with so he he went back to the exact same trailer park that he came from before we were arrested and the last I heard Was he was taking care of his father who had like Alzheimer's like they're living together in a trailer somewhere in the middle of nowhere so you're not really talking about somebody that's you know mentally or emotionally or any other way equipped to go into a you know a fight like this.
Jason, he's doing his own thing.
He works for an organization with some other people that that's what they do full-time is like look at other... Is it the Innocence Project?
Proclaim Innocence or Proclaim Justice or something like that.
I mean, it's not like we're, you know, all in contact with each other or any of that.
You know, it's like who really stays in contact with people they knew when they were 16 years old?
Other than Lori, obviously, have you stayed close to anybody else that you met who, you know, were part of the Free the West Memphis 3 campaign or anything like that?
Took every penny we had when I had six months left to live.
We had to start all over again from scratch.
So it's not just Like, a one-side issue.
Like, it's definitely in the defense, too.
Like, there is deep, deep corruption there, just as much as there is in the other side.
But towards the end, we were fortunate enough to meet an attorney who actually did have a heart and a soul and, like, really dedicated himself to bringing about justice in this case.
and we still talk to him probably weekly.
But honestly, there's not a lot of people from back then that I'd stay in contact with.
And for one reason, for another reason, it's like I was saying a while ago, I'm not the same person anymore.
Do you ever have issues with people like Googling you and then just assuming that you're guilty or do they see the good stuff first?
Or have you had any issues with like, I don't know, a publisher, well I guess a publisher wouldn't be a good example, but you know, somebody that you meet in town, like your local deli guy or a bartender or whatever.
People who would attack you, like, not to your face or whatever, but just online, but in real life, no.
The only thing I can think of that comes close to that is, for example, when West of Memphis, another one of the documentaries about the case came out, and we were going to have to promote it, I needed to get into Canada to go to a screening to promote it, and Canada was like, no, you're not coming in.
You have Have you been able to travel outside the United States?
so you're not coming into Canada.
So then it's like it doesn't matter that, you know, what the situation is or anything else.
France, you know, most of these countries have been, you know, like embraced, just welcomed us with open arms and embraced us because they understand the story and everything else.
So waiting to see if they'll take a dismissal or go on with testing just for those, because I don't think anyone would be able to hear what you were saying.
So if people wanted to help, if they hear this and they're like, man, get that DNA testing, who should they be tweeting at or emailing or writing to express support?
Or what can they do?
unidentified
I would say the governor, the attorney general of Arkansas.
We're waiting for them to actually say, okay, you can do the testing because we don't want to accept money or anything from anyone if that's not in place where we know it's going to happen.
So once we do have that in place, then we'll announce it and people can give to it, donate to it if they want to.
It's just my name, Damian Echols, but what I do on there, once again, it ties back into ceremonial magic, the things that I was doing that allowed me to survive when I was in prison.
What it really is, I don't know how much of the stuff you even care about or are interested in or anything.
Essentially, like, what ceremonial magic is, you know, most people hear those words, hear that phrase, and they think, you know, they have all kinds of preconceived ideas and connotations, and they think it's just another weird-ass religion or whatever it is, and actually what it is, is a system that allows you to have direct experience of things as opposed to believing or have faith.
So say, for example, like in religion, you know, most of the time in religion you hear this phrase, God created the world.
And the way it's said and the way it's looked at or understood is almost like you have an artist creating an art piece, like a painter creating a painting or a sculptor creating a sculpture.
And at the end of that process, the artist is here and the piece they've created is there and they're two separate things.
And that's the way they look at this phrase, God created the world.
What it's looked at more in ceremonial magic is the word God.
First off, it would be shorthand for generate, order, and destroy, which are the three principles that the source of creation does.
It generates form, puts them in an order to achieve maximum evolution, and then once it's done that, it destroys them in order to start over with new forms.
So when we say that God created the world in ceremonial magic, what we're saying is that you have this infinite source of intelligence and energy that lies outside the boundaries of time and space.
Because the only way anything is infinite, eternal, unchanging, is if it does not exist within time and space.
So when we say God created the world, what we're saying is this infinite source of intelligence and energy pours itself into the dimensions of time and space and became us.
became the world.
So we are literally God incarnate, just like Jesus was, but we don't experience reality that way.
We experience reality as if we're all these distinct individuals.
I'm separate from you, and we're all separate from anything else.
Part of the point of doing the ritual work consistently of magic is that it allows you to, over time, Experience the reality behind your persona of like what you truly are, like this divine energy instead of what you think you are, which is this individual.
I just, I'm like, it's the cliche Joe Rogan podcast.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, after everything you're saying and like so much of this actually overlaps with a lot of conversations I've had with people about DMT and stuff.
I'm like, all right, we're throwing it out there.
But other than that, Damian, thanks for hanging out.
