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

looking at her. In the last three or four months of the pregnancy, she grew at an alarming rate. By July, her body was still the same size it had always been, but her stomach had become huge and tight.
    On August 4, I was taken to a pretrial hearing with Jason and Jessie, where all three of us pleaded not guilty. Judge David Burnett, who had been assigned to the case after the first hearing with Rainey, presided. He was a Craighead County judge, his demeanor administrative and assuming—in his eyes, we were already convicted. He was just going through the formalities and paperwork of a trial. He did at this point “sever” Jessie’s trial from mine and Jason’s—Jessie’s lawyers were effective in arguing that the publicity surrounding all of us would damage his own case. In the back room, seated just a few feet from Jessie and Jason, it was impossible to speak. The three of us were shell-shocked. Jessie never lifted his head; he sat staring at his feet. Jason appeared angry, and if we managed to make eye contact, he shook his head at me in sheer bewilderment and disbelief.
    I wouldn’t get to be there for the birth of my son. That was one more thing taken from me. A guard stuck her head in the door on the morning of September 9 and told me that I was now a father. So much for a celebration.
    We had a boy. Domini gave him my first name, only spelled differently—Damian. I gave him the middle name of Seth, which is what everyone calls him. We gave him a third name, Azariah, just to be certain he’d never have an inferiority complex. I wasn’t there to sign the papers, so he has Domini’s last name. She brought him to see me for twenty minutes every week, but I couldn’t touch him. The only time I was permitted to touch or hold him was during the trial, a few months later; while the cameras were running, the court allowed me to hold my son for the sake of the film.
    My father or grandmother would bring me five paperback books from a local secondhand bookstore every week, and I’d usually have read them all by their next visit. I had always loved reading, but at that point those books became my only way to forget about the nightmare of my life. I would hide in them and go someplace else for hours at a time. The other guys were amazed by how much and how quickly I could read. It was a trend that has continued to this day. I’ve read a few thousand books over the time I’ve been locked up. Without books, I would have gone insane long ago.
    Five months passed in this way. I was still being given antidepressants, and there were the momentary distractions but they lasted only a short period of time—the unknown threat of an upcoming trial hung over me daily. In an October hearing, it was decided that Jason, only sixteen when he was arrested, would be tried as an adult. Despite the evidence that Ron and Glori told me they had uncovered, their findings often only underscored the thought that I would likely be given the death sentence. They told me that I would surely be convicted of murder, and that they were working toward the possibility of winning a case later on down the line by appeal. But first I would be convicted of murder.
    Christmas Day came and went—it may as well have been the Fourth of July, such was the vacuum I lived in. Everything I’d known was gone, absent completely. Between this time and February 1994, I rarely saw or heard from Ron in person, though I was told he was investigating the case, and coming up with useful information on an almost daily basis. He reviewed the West Memphis police records and discovered inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and unreliable information and leads in the reports and offered them to my defense lawyers. Unfortunately, my lawyers (I was assigned a lawyer named Val Price in addition to Davidson) didn’t use or follow up on any of the information he found or leads he offered. They didn’t even call the witnesses who could have testified to my whereabouts on the night of the murders, witnesses Ron had tracked down and interviewed. In order for the information to be used, my lawyers needed to get a sworn affidavit from those witnesses, the extra “mile” that they never bothered to go for me. They never attempted to prove my alibi.
    Glori did come to see me nearly every single weekend, and she always brought pizza. It seemed to me at the time that she really cared about the case, because she and Ron both went to tremendous lengths, visiting me on off-hours