JONESBORO — Damien Wayne Echols, 19, of West Memphis was sentenced Saturday to die for his part in the brutal May 5, 1993, slayings of three 8-year-old West Memphis boys.
His co-defendant, Charles Jason Baldwin, 16, of Marion was sentenced to life without possibility of parole.
The same eight-woman, four-man jury that found the two teen-agers guilty Friday of three counts each of capital murder decided their punishment Saturday after deliberating about 2/4 hours.
Circuit Judge David Burnett sentenced Echols to die by injection May 5, a year to the day after Michael Moore, Steve Branch and Christopher Byers were killed. Police found their nude, beaten bodies the next day submerged in a drainage ditch in a wooded West Memphis area called Robin Hood Hill.
The judge declined to tell reporters if he had noted the significance of the date.
"The law says I must impose a sentence date that falls at least 30 days after the passing of sentence," Burnett told reporters. "That is the date I chose." He would not elaborate.
The Craighead County circuit courtroom was packed with about 250 spectators as the verdicts were read. There was dead silence in the room when Baldwin's life sentence was read; some of Echols' relatives and friends began to cry when his death sentence was read.
The defendants showed no emotion when Burnett read the verdicts and when he formally pronounced sentence upon them.
The judge asked each defendant if he had anything to say before sentence was formally passed. Echols said, "No, sir." Baldwin said, "Only that I'm innocent."
"The jury has found differently," Burnett responded.
Before retiring at 2:04 p.m. Saturday to determine the fates of the two teen-agers, the jury heard evidence where Echols was quoted as saying he obtained "power" by drinking the blood of his sexual partners and other people and the practice made him "feel like a god."
Those statements were in reports from mental health centers in West Memphis and Portland, Ore., where Echols had lived in recent years with his birth father, Eddie Joe Hutchison.
Ironically, the defense had brought the documents to court to help bolster their contention that Echols was not mentally stable, a fact that could be construed by the jury as a mitigating circumstance when determining his punishment. Dr. James Moneypenny, a Little Rock psychologist, read selected parts of the reports and testified he believed Echols was suffering from severe mental and emotional pressures at the time of the crimes but could respond to treatment.
Scott Davidson of Jonesboro, a defense attorney, did not ask Moneypenny to read directly from the reports.
During a recess, however, Deputy Prosecuting Attorney John Fogleman of Marion leafed through the reports and found the incriminating passages. Upon cross-examination, he asked Moneypenny to read selected parts of the reports.
One passage said Echols thought an inordinate amount about death, and that he said when he died, he wanted to "go where the monsters go."
Another part noted that Echols' parents "are concerned that he is also into devil worship and satanism."
The state contended throughout the trial that the killings of the three youngsters had the trappings of a cult ritual. Prosecutors introduced evidence seized from Echols' bedroom that they said was related to satanism.
Echols insisted on the witness stand that he was not a satanist but a Wiccan, someone who believes in "white magic."
But Fogleman's discovery of the medical reports Saturday enabled prosecutors for the first time to link Echols to satanism through his own words.
Asked about the discovery later, Fogleman grinned and said, "At last the state got a break in this case."
Baldwin's attorneys, Paul Ford and Robin Wadley of Jonesboro, presented no evidence in the sentencing phase of the trial, but Ford made an impassioned plea to the jury to spare his client's life.
He noted that the jurors could take certain mitigating circumstances into account in sentencing, and he asked them to consider Baldwin's age, his good record heretofore and the fact that Baldwin was a passive young man in the thrall of the more dynamic Echols.
In summing up the state's case for the death penalty, Fogleman seemed almost to be agreeing with Ford. He urged the jury to consider each offense and each defendant separately and to mete out the punishment each defendant deserved.
Davidson cried as he pleaded for Echols' life. He read from the eighth chapter of the New Testament book of John, where Jesus refuses to condemn the woman taken in adultery but instead invited anyone free of sin to cast the first stone at the accused woman.
"Each of you has a stone in your hand," he said to the jury. "You can lay it down. I plead with you and beg you: Keep his (Echols') life."
Davis had the last word to the jury, and he asked the jurors to remember the photographs of the victims' battered bodies.
"Look at the photographs of Michael Moore," he said quietly. "Look at the photographs of Stevie Branch. See what they did to Chris Byers."
All the victims had been beaten savagely on the head. Two had been mutilated with a knife or knives, and one boy was sexually mutilated.
The jury indicated on forms read in open court that they considered Baldwin's youth and his good record as mitigating circumstances, and those tended to weigh in their decision to give him life without parole.
They also indicated mental and emotional stress were "probable" mitigating factors in Echols' case but decided they did not outweigh the brutality of his crime.
After the sentencing, Burnett required everyone to stay in the courtroom until the jurors had been escorted by police officers to their cars. He also kept spectators in their seats while Baldwin and Echols were taken from the courtroom.
Family members offered encouragement to the two as they walked up the courtroom's center aisle. Echols answered by saying, "I'll be home soon." Baldwin said nothing.
Craighead County officers said Echols would be taken immediately to the state Correction Department's death row at the Tucker Maximum Security Unit. Baldwin, they said, would be kept in the Craighead County jail until Monday, when he would be taken to the department's diagnostic center at Pine Bluff to begin serving his life sentence.
Echols and Baldwin have 30 days to file notices of appeal.