Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

people, I wouldn’t be here today: Burk Sauls, Lisa Fancher, Kathy Bakken, Grove Pashley, Chad Robertson, Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky, Anna Cox, Shodo Harada Roshi, Chisan, Kobutsu, Father Charles Thessing, Father Jack Harris, Cally Salzman, Kate Tippet, Stephanie Shearer, Chris Bacorn, Terry Reed, Theresa Reed, Jen DeNike, Danny Forester, Danny Bland and Kelly Canary, Jene O’Keefe Trigg and Aaron Trigg, Steve Mark, Brent Peterson, Sam and Young Chico, Cotton and Ladybug Davis, Rachel Geiser, Amy Berg, Mara Leveritt, Betsey Wright, Don Davis, Marcel Williams, Tim Howard, Jason McGehee, Elliot Groffman, Kelly Curtis, Jill Vedder, Stephen Deuters, Nathan Holmes, and Ruth and Bill Carter. Thank you all so, so much.
    All my love and appreciation go to Capi Peck, for taking care of Lorri and me when we needed it most. Otter Firk. Also to the whole Arkansas Take Action group. Thank you.
    And love and thanks to Margaret Cho, the first person to ever take a chance on my writing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Damien Echols was born in 1974 and grew up in Mississippi, Tennessee, Maryland, Oregon, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. At age eighteen he was falsely convicted, along with Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, Jr.—afterward known as the West Memphis Three—in the case known as the Robin Hood Hill murders. Echols received the death sentence and spent eighteen years on Death Row. In 2011, together with Baldwin and Misskelley, he was released in an agreement with the state of Arkansas known as an Alford plea. The West Memphis Three are the subject of
Paradise Lost
, a three-part documentary series produced by HBO, and
West of Memphis
, a documentary produced by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh. Echols is the author of a self-published memoir titled
Almost Home
. He and his wife, Lorri Davis, live in New York City.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    David Jauss is the author of five books and the editor or coeditor of three anthologies. He has published nearly four hundred essays, short stories, and poems in magazines and anthologies and has received numerous awards for his work. He teaches creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and in the low-residency MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. A longtime supporter of the West Memphis Three, Jauss met Damien Echols in 2005; over the next six years he transcribed, edited, and archived Echols’s writings, and conducted interviews that have become the basis for the appendix in
Life After Death
. Jauss has also worked for Arkansas Take Action, a grassroots organization dedicated to the release and exoneration of the West Memphis Three.

also by Damien Echols
    almost home