In August 2011, Damien Echols was released after 18 years on Death Row.
He details his experience with the legal system as part of the “West Memphis Three” and the flawed trial that sent him to Death Row and two friends to prison for life in his book, Life After Death.
In the first half of Tuesday's Up to Date, Steve Kraske talks with Echols about composing his prison memoir, his transition back to normal life, and the documentary Johnny Depp is making about his story.
HEAR MORE: Damien Echols speaks on his memoir Friday evening at 7 at Unity Temple on The Plaza, 707 W 47th St. For more information about tickets, click here.
See Echols talk about writing his book here.
Damien Echols was born in 1974 and grew up in Mississippi, Tennessee, Maryland, Oregon, and Arkansas. At age eighteen, he was arrested along with Jason Baldwin and Jessie Miskelley and charged with the deaths of three boys, now known as the Robin Hood Hill murders, in West Memphis, Arkansas. Echols received a death sentence and spent almost eighteen years on Death Row, until he, Baldwin, and Misskelley were released in 2011. The West Memphis Three have been 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.
