EXHIBIT 13
Case 4:09-cv-00008-BSM Document 38-6 Filed 08/21/2009 Page 1 of 162
Damien Echols Legal Defense Team Press
Conference - November 1,2007
[SLIDE: Echols v. Norris and Case No. displayed]
DENNIS RIORDAN, Lead Counsel:
...Gerald Skahan of Memphis, Tennessee, and our local counsel here in Little
Rock, Deborah SaIlings. We represent petitioner Damien Echols in the case of
Echols versus Norris. Echols versus Norris is a federal habeas corpus petition
proceeding in the Eastern District of Arkansas, here in Little Rock, arising out of
the 1994 trial -- trials, really -- of three teenagers -- Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin
and Jessie Misskelley, who were tried and convicted for the murders of three eightÂ
year-old boys, Steve Branch, Chris Byers and James Michael Moore in 1993.
A federal habeas corpus petition is a proceeding sanctioned by the laws of the
United States and the Constitution of the United States which gives a state
prisoner, someone deprived of their liberty, and especially a state prisoner who has
been sentenced to death -- as Damien Echols has -- the opportunity, after state
proceedings are completed, to go into federal court and file the petition
complaining that their state trial did not accord with the Bill ofRights, the federal
Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution, which guarantees things like the
right to counsel, the right to confront witnesses against you, the right to present a
defense and the right to twelve impartial jurors.
To some people, these sound like technicalities. But since 1789, the founders of
this country recognized that the only way to tell the difference between a guilty
person and an innocent person with any reliability is to give them a fair trial. The
case in front of the District COUli, therefore, is primarily not about guilt or
innocence. It's about whether the proceeding in Mr. Echols' case was fair. But due
to a, quirk perhaps we call it, an exception in federal habeas corpus law, there are
cases in which the threshold question for the court