“Highlights” from Dan Stidham Cross Examination

Grove, Burk and I arrive to find no news trucks, reporters or cameras there
for day one of the second round of Jason and Jessie's Rule 37 hearings. It's
like some kind of alternate Paradise Lost reality at the ol' Craighead annex
with Val Price slipping in the front doors while we're gabbing with Mark
Byers and John Fogleman presiding in a courtroom across the street.

Today was entirely devoted to Brent Davis' cross examination of Dan Stidham,
with the goal of getting him to admit that indeed Dan had adequately
represented Jessie Misskelley at his trial in early 1994.

After lunch, we watched a video from Dan's vault, one we've heard so much
about over the years -- Dr. William Wilkins and Dan were said to spend less
than 15 minutes pressuring Jessie to falsely confess to robbing the Flash
Market in West Memphis. On the tape they manage to get Jessie so agitated
that he stomps out of the room but he never confesses to the OTHER crime
that he didn't commit. Hopefully the original vhs tape will provide the
missing minutes of this highly anticipated footage.

It seemed to me that Brent's questions didn't prove his point but actually
allowed Dan to further elucidate upon why, though Greg Crow and he did the
best they could, they were too inexperienced in criminal law to represent
Jessie properly. There were plenty of examples from Michael Burt's
questioning, but under Brent Davis, Stidham managed to add these examples
stunners to the record:

Peretti was the first expert he had ever questioned on the witness stand.
Should have retained his own medical examiner to dispute Frank's sexual
abuse allegations.

Dan basically ignored Jessie Sr's alibi witnesses because Fogelman said he
had a DNA match for Jessie blood on a t-shirt so he reckoned his client was
guilty and would plead out. Later he found out it was Jessie Sr's blood, in
fact the t-shirt wasn't even admitted into evidence, but Dan still didn't
track down the alibi witnesses until days before his trial began. Dan also
withdrew his motion to test DNA.

Didn't use Dr. Wilkins to get Jessie's statement suppressed in pre-trial '94
by demonstrating that Jessie didn't have the reading comprehension to
understand his Miranda rights or what waiving them meant.

Allowed Dr. Ofshe to beg off testifying at the aforementioned January '94
suppression hearing because after hearing the officers' testimony, Ofshe
wanted to go back and prepare more.

Failed to produce mitigating testimony at Jessie's sentencing regarding his
background including having a mental handicap, coming from a broken home,
and being abandoned by his birth mother.

Things got a little heated when Brent wanted to know if failing to raise
rule 2.3 in a timely fashion was a trial strategy of Dan's because it might
be such a great avenue for appeal. Dan said he wouldn't have given the
motion to the prosecution if it was a secret. As raising rule 2.3 in a
timely fashion would have automatically caused Jessie's statement to
suppressed, and by extension getting Jessie off the hook as well Jason and
Damien for there would be no statement with which to arrest them to begin
with. It was a sorrowful error with epic repercussions, not a strategy. No
one practicing law would do something like that deliberately, c'mon.

Davis then asked Dan if he was admitting to being ineffective counsel
because he's spent the last fifteen years speaking out against the verdict
would gain him more celebrity in the unjustly convicted field. That fell
flat as one of Davis' earlier questions: was it not a victory that his
client didn't get the death sentence? Dan replied that he never considered
life plus 40 a victory, no. In fact he was absolutely devastated by the
verdict.

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