{"id":6791,"date":"2013-05-13T23:50:13","date_gmt":"2013-05-14T04:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=6791"},"modified":"2013-07-07T19:14:22","modified_gmt":"2013-07-08T00:14:22","slug":"west-memphis-three-ringleader-damien-echols-to-sign-new-book-at-square-books-in-oxford-mississippi-on-tuesday-may-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/west-memphis-three-ringleader-damien-echols-to-sign-new-book-at-square-books-in-oxford-mississippi-on-tuesday-may-14\/","title":{"rendered":"West Memphis Three &#8220;Ringleader&#8221; Damien Echols to Sign New Book at Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi on Tuesday, May 14"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"font-size: 18px;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;\"><em>Life After Death<\/em>\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;\">by Damien Echols<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;\">In 1993, teenagers<strong> Damien Echols<\/strong>, <strong>Jason Baldwin<\/strong>, and <strong>Jessie Misskelley, Jr.<\/strong>\u2014who have come to be known as the <strong>West Memphis Three<\/strong>\u2014were arrested for the murders of three eight-year-old boys in Arkansas. The ensuing trial was marked by tampered evidence, false testimony, and public hysteria. Baldwin and Misskelley were sentenced to life in prison; while eighteen-year-old Echols, deemed the \u201cringleader,\u201d was sentenced to death. Over the next two decades, the WM3 became known worldwide as a symbol of wrongful conviction and imprisonment, with thousands of supporters and many notable celebrities who called for a new trial. In a shocking turn of events, all three men were released in August 2011. Now Echols shares his story in full\u2014from abuse by prison guards and wardens, to portraits of fellow inmates and deplorable living conditions, to the incredible reserves of patience, spirituality, and perseverance that kept him alive and sane while incarcerated for nearly two decades.\u00a0<img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/kttv.images.worldnow.com\/images\/22182298_BG1.jpg?resize=440%2C248\" width=\"440\" height=\"248\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14px; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;\">In these pages, Echols reveals himself a brilliant writer, infusing his narrative with tragedy and irony in equal measure: he describes the terrors he experienced every day and his outrage toward the American justice system, and offers a firsthand account of living on Death Row in heartbreaking, agonizing detail. <em>Life After Death<\/em> is destined to be a riveting, explosive classic of prison literature. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 14px; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;\">Damien Echols was born in 1974 and grew up in Mississippi, Tennessee, Maryland, Oregon, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. The West Memphis Three have been the subject of <em><strong>Paradise Lost<\/strong><\/em>, a three-part documentary series produced by HBO, and West of Memphis, a documentary produced by<strong> Peter Jackson<\/strong> and <strong>Fran Walsh<\/strong>. Echols is the author of a self-published memoir, <em>Almost Home<\/em>. He and his wife, L<strong>orri Davis<\/strong>, live in Massachusetts.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Life After Death\u00a0by Damien Echols &nbsp; In 1993, teenagers Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley, Jr.\u2014who have<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7305,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[1419,5,4,602],"class_list":["post-6791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","tag-damien-echols","tag-mississippi","tag-oxford","tag-square-books"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/22182298_BG1-1.jpg?fit=440%2C248&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6791\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}