Director Peter Jackson believes that a US teenager would be dead now if not for a 1996 documentary.
Director Peter Jackson believes that a US teenager would be dead now if not for a 1996 documentary. The man who helmed the Lord of the Rings trilogy was speaking at the Sundance Film Festival premiere of West of Memphis. Amy Berg, Jackson’s colleague on the documentary, stated that former Death Row inmate, Damien Echols and two other men might still be in prison if not for the independent investigation launched by the New Zealand filmmaker and his wife, Fran Walsh.
Jackson, Walsh and Berg said West of Memphis amounts to the fair trial Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley - known as 'The West Memphis Three' - never got as Arkansas teenagers when they were convicted in 1994.
"We went into this case believing that they didn't do it, and the facts and the evidence we came out with at the end completely supported that," Jackson said. "So is the documentary sort of providing the prosecution's point of view? No, it's not. We're not interested in that. They had their go back in 1994... The documentary, it's the case against the state, really."
The case in which 8-year-old cub scouts Michael Moore, Steve Branch and Christopher Byers were brutally slain in 1993, shocked the rural Arkansas community.
