Defense Offers New Evidence in a Murder Case That Shocked Arkansas
By SHAILA DEWAN NY TIMES
ATLANTA, Oct. 29 — In 1994, three teenagers in the small city of West Memphis, Ark., were convicted of killing three 8-year-old boys in what prosecutors portrayed as a satanic sacrifice involving sexual abuse and genital mutilation. So shocking were the crimes that when the teenagers were led from the courthouse after their arrest, they were met by 200 local residents yelling, “Burn in hell.”
But according to long-awaited new evidence filed by the defense in federal court on Monday, there was no DNA from the three defendants found at the scene, the mutilation was actually the work of animals and at least one person other than the defendants may have been present at the crime scene.
Supporters of the defendants hope the legal filing will provide the defense with a breakthrough. Two of the men, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, are serving life in prison, while one, Damien W. Echols, is on death row. There was no physical evidence linking the teenagers, now known as the West Memphis 3, to the crime.
“This is the first time that the evidence has ever really been tested,” said Gerald Skahan, a member of the defense team. “The first trial was pretty much a witch hunt.”
Brent Davis, the local prosecutor, did not respond to requests for comment about the new evidence and the case, but in general prosecutors and investigators have continued to express confidence in their investigation.
The story the defendants’ supporters have presented — of three misfits whose fondness for heavy-metal music made them police targets — has won the men the support of celebrities like Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Marilyn Manson and the creators of “South Park.” Many learned of the case through an HBO documentary, “Paradise Lost,” and a sequel.
The prosecution hinged on a confession riddled with factual errors and a Satanic cult expert with a mail-order degree. Mr. Echols’s own lawyer called him “weird” and “not the all-American boy.”
Many viewers who watched the sequel, in fact, concluded that the police should have been investigating John Mark Byers, the stepfather of one of the children, who made seemingly drug-addled, messianic speeches on camera, gave the filmmakers a blood-stained knife, and had a history of violence and run-ins with the police. His child, Christopher Byers, was the most badly mutilated of the three.
But there was a surprise in the new forensic report filed by Mr. Echols’s lawyers: a hair found in one of the knots binding the children belonged most likely to the stepfather of another of the victims, not to Mr. Byers.
The three victims — Christopher, Steve Branch and James Michael Moore — were last seen riding their bikes on May 5, 1993. They were found the next day in a drainage ditch in Robin Hood Hills, near West Memphis, a low-rent town across the Mississippi River from Memphis. The boys were naked and hogtied with shoelaces.
The police quickly zeroed in on Mr. Echols, then 18, who was familiar to them because he was on probation for trying to run away with his girlfriend. They also believed he was involved in cult activities.
But they could find little evidence against him until Mr. Misskelley, mildly retarded and with a history of substance abuse, came in to speak with them. At the time there was a $30,000 reward.
After hours of questioning, Mr. Misskelley, 17, gave the police a taped statement that implicated himself, Mr. Baldwin, then 16, and Mr. Echols, then 19. Despite coaching by the investigators, Mr. Misskelley was incorrect in several significant details, including the time of the crime, the way the victims were tied and the manner of death. He said the children had been sodomized, an assertion that even the state medical examiner’s testimony appears to refute.
The team of forensic experts assembled by Mr. Echols’s lawyers, which included Dr. Michael Baden, the former medical examiner of New York City, also said there was no evidence of sexual abuse. Many of the wounds sustained by the victims were caused by animals, they said, including the castration of Christopher.
As for the stray hair, the West Memphis Police Department and the stepfather it appears to belong to, Terry Hobbs, have discounted the finding, saying it could easily have been picked up at home by his stepson, Steve Branch. But Dennis P. Riordan, a lawyer for Mr. Echols, said the hair was found in the shoelaces tying Michael Moore, not Steve Branch.
Further, Mr. Riordan said, a hair was found at the scene that most likely belongs to a friend of Mr. Hobbs who was with him for part of the evening.
The court filing also argues that jurors relied on the statement Mr. Misskelley gave the police to convict Mr. Echols and Mr. Baldwin, even though it was deemed inadmissible except in Mr. Misskelley’s trial. Several jurors have acknowledged that they knew about the confession before the trial, though they did not say so during jury selection.
The passing of time has not only allowed the defense to gather new information, but has also softened the public’s belief in the guilt of the convicted men, said Mara Leveritt, the author of “Devil’s Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three.”
“What I’ve seen in the past 14 years has been not quite a 180-degree, but maybe a 170-degree turn,” Ms. Leveritt said. “It all comes down to, ‘Where’s the evidence?’”

Apple Blasts Past the Forecasts
The iPod, iPhone, and especially the Mac fueled a record-breaking quarter. And Apple expects to beat the consensus again next quarter
by Arik Hesseldahl ( BUSINESS WEEK)
Superlatives were in short supply for anyone looking for perspective on Apple's financial results released Oct. 22. The consumer electronics company shattered records in its fiscal fourth quarter, and its forecast for the current period blew past Wall Street's most optimistic predictions. One of the only questions left for analysts in the aftermath concerns what Apple will do for an encore.
For the most recent quarter, Apple (AAPL) reported $6.2 billion in sales, a fourth-quarter record, and finished the fiscal year with sales of $24 billion, beating by $4.5 billion its previous best for annual sales. Apple also reported profit of $904 million, or $1.01 a share. In extended trading, investors propelled the stock $11.99, or 6.9%. That left Apple's share price north of $186 and brought it within spitting distance of the $200 price target set by many analysts.
Then Apple executives let loose with an even bigger surprise: Rather than give conservative guidance for this quarter—the period that includes the all-important holiday season—they reported expectations that were well ahead of the Wall Street consensus. Apple forecast fiscal first-quarter sales of $9.2 billion, compared with analysts' forecasts for sales of $8.58 billion. Apple also said it expects per-share earnings of $1.42—3¢ higher than the consensus analyst estimate.
On a conference call, analysts repeatedly probed Apple Chief Operating Officer Timothy Cook and Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer about what it meant, and despite all the good news, some were left scratching their heads at the stick-to-the-script answers they received. "I can't remember the last time they guided above the consensus," says Shaw Wu, an analyst at American Technology Research in San Francisco. "Are they being aggressive or is this another conservative forecast?" Shannon Cross of Cross Research wondered whether "they're just getting better at predicting their numbers or what, but they're certainly setting the stage for an extremely strong quarter."
The Mac Leads the Way
The quarter just ended was notable for many other things: Mac sales were in record territory. Driven by yet another record-breaking performance in higher-education sales, Apple moved nearly 2.2 million Macintosh computers to generate $3.1 billion, or almost 50% of the quarterly total. Mac sales were up by more than a half-million units from a year earlier. For the year, Apple sold more than 7 million Macs, a surge of more than 3 million units over 2006. "To me this quarter was more about the Mac than anything else," including the iPhone, introduced on the eve of the fourth period, says Charles Wolf, head of Wolf Insights in New York. He said Mac sales are benefiting from rising interest in the iPod and Apple's decision to make it easier for Macs to run Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows operating system. "Forget the phone," he says. "The iPod is still providing the halo for the Mac, and the retail stores are still bringing in 100 million people a year—60 to 70 million of which are Windows users. Now that Macs can run Windows, the biggest barrier to switching is gone."
Sales of the iPod didn't break a record, for once, but came in at 10.2 million units—up 17% from a year earlier, for $1.6 billion in sales, or 26% of revenue. And the gadget no one can seem to stop talking about—the iPhone—did its part for Apple's results as well. Apple sold 1,119,000 iPhones during the quarter, bringing its cumulative total to 1.4 million units sold in 92 days on the market.
Apple also broke records through its retail stores, selling 473,000 Macs, a 46% increase. With 197 stores operating during the quarter, Apple said it expects to open 40 more this year, including one in Shanghai.
What to Do With All That Cash?
Even record-shattering quarters can leave questions unanswered for investors. Apple is finishing the year with more than $15 billion in cash and short-term investments, or more than $17 per share. That's going to cause some to wonder whether Apple ought to pay a dividend or buy back more stock. And the high share price may spark rumors of a split. "Sure, the pressure is going to continue to build for a dividend, but then, management has been taking money out and investing it in the business," Cross says.
That pile of cash will also make for a powerful hedge against supply constraints on the crucial components used in devices including the iPod, says AmTech's Wu. With flash-memory chips used so widely in iPods and the iPhone family and the likelihood that they'll soon be in mainstream personal computers, Apple could use its cash pile, as it has in the past, to negotiate supply contracts with companies like Samsung, Hynix, Micron Technology (MU), Toshiba, and others. "We don't exactly know what their next big component need is going to be," he says. "I think that's one reason they keep so much cash on hand. But it's also a very fiscally conservative company. Management remembers the bad times, when there wasn't enough cash around."
Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com .

Joey Bishop
OBIT By John Rodgers
LOS ANGELES — The Rat Pack once was the coolest group of entertainers on the planet _ Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr. Oh, yeah, and a stone-faced comedian named Joey Bishop.
Although not as widely appreciated, it was Bishop with his deadpan delivery, dead-on timing and bottomless pit of jokes, who was "the hub of the big wheel," according to Rat Pack leader Sinatra himself.
Bishop, who also starred on two TV shows throughout most of the 1960s, died Wednesday at age 89. He turned out to be the Rat Pack's last man standing, having outlived Sinatra, Martin, Davis and Lawford.
"People would go see Frank and Dean and Sammy and everybody would think these guys were going to chew him up on stage but that was never the case," fellow comedian Sandy Hackett said Thursday from Las Vegas, where he was to portray Bishop that night in the long-running stage revue "The Rat Pack is Back."
The Rat Packers were a show business sensation by the early 1960s, when they appeared together at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in shows that combined music and comedy in a seemingly chaotic manner.
"In reality, he wrote almost all the jokes they all did," Hackett said. "He'd come up with something funny and they'd go, `That was great, Joey,' and then the next night one of them would use it and he'd have to come up with another joke."
With his clever asides, Bishop was asked by Sinatra to be the master of ceremonies at President Kennedy's inaugural gala, where the Rat Pack performed. When the president arrived, he turned to him and said, "I told you I'd get you a good seat."
The Rat Packers, who worked together whenever they were free of their individual commitments, also appeared in the films "Ocean's Eleven" and "Sergeants 3."
"They were the ultimate in cool," said film historian Leonard Maltin. "I think guys admired and envied them, women wanted to be with them, and I think Joey Bishop's deadpan style of comedy suited that group well. He was a combination straight man and comedian."
Recent years have brought renewed attention to the Rat Pack. The group was depicted in a popular 1998 HBO movie and "Ocean's Eleven" was remade in 2003 with George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the lead roles.
Before the renaissance, Bishop defended his fellow performers' rowdy reputations in a 1998 interview.
"Are we remembered as being drunk and chasing broads?" he asked. "I never saw Frank, Dean, Sammy or Peter drunk during performances. That was only a gag. And do you believe these guys had to chase broads? They had to chase 'em away."
Away from the Rat Pack, Bishop starred in two TV programs, both called "The Joey Bishop Show."
In the first, a sitcom that aired from 1961 to 1965, he played a TV talk show host. In the second, he really was one.
The latter program, which aired on ABC, was started in 1967 as a late-night challenge to Johnny Carson's immensely popular "Tonight" show. Like Carson, Bishop sat behind a desk and bantered with a sidekick-announcer, a young Regis Philbin in his first prominent TV role.
"It was the thrill of my life to be chosen by Joey as the announcer," Philbin said Thursday. "It was my introduction to the highly competitive late-night show world. It was also an introduction to a show business I had never known, the Rat Pack era, the amazing talents of those performers who I probably never would have befriended without Joey."
The show was canceled after 2 1/2 years, and Bishop went on to become a popular substitute host for Carson, filling in 205 times.
He also played character roles in such movies as "The Naked and the Dead" ("I played both roles," he once joked), "Onion-head," "Johnny Cool," "Texas Across the River," "Who's Minding the Mint?" "Valley of the Dolls" and "The Delta Force."
His comedic schooling came from vaudeville, burlesque and night clubs.
While in his teens, he formed a music and comedy act with two other boys. They called themselves the Bishop Brothers.
When his partners got drafted, Joseph Abraham Gottlieb, now known as Joey Bishop, went to work on his own. He was appearing in New York's Latin Quarter in 1945 when Sinatra saw him and hired him as his opening act.
While most members of the Sinatra entourage treated the great man gingerly, Bishop had no inhibitions.
"He spoke to me backstage," he would say. "He told me 'Get out of the way.'"
Born in New York's borough of the Bronx, Bishop was the youngest of five children of two immigrants from eastern Europe.
When he was 3 months old the family moved to South Philadelphia, where he attended public schools before dropping out shortly before graduation. He recalled being an indifferent student, once remarking, "In kindergarten, I flunked sand pile."
Bishop is survived by son Larry Bishop; grandchildren Scott and Kirk Bishop; and longtime companion Nora Garabotti. Sylvia, his wife of 58 years, died in 1999.
___
Associated Press writer Bob Thomas contributed to this report.

Thompson makes it through his first debate.

By John Dickerson (SLATE)
If Fred Thompson is lazy, he sure didn't act it preparing for his first debate. Over two weeks, the former Tennessee senator and his aides held more than half a dozen question-and-answer sessions. Bush's first economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, was involved, as were Vice President Cheney's daughter Liz Cheney and GOP veteran Mary Matalin. There were also two full-blown rehearsals in which Liz Cheney's husband played John McCain, Rep. Adam Putnam stood in for Mitt Romney, and former New York Sen. Al D'Amato played Rudy Giuliani. To add verisimilitude to his character, D'Amato pretended to take a phone call in the middle of one session.
The preparation paid off. Thompson didn't win the night—Rudy Giuliani did—but he got through gaffe-free and at times seemed informed and in command. He came off as genuinely unaffected instead of irritatingly folksy. This may seem like a limited achievement, and it was, but Thompson has had such tough going recently that even a limited success is a win for him. Nervous staffers can now feel a little better about their boss, and disaffected GOP voters anxious to believe that Thompson is the candidate they've been looking for were given enough material to extend their dream.
The low expectations that Thompson cleared were a little phony. In retrospect, it shouldn't surprise us that an actor trained in memorizing short snippets of dialogue was able to perform in a setting where candidates are cut off if they speak in anything but short snippets of dialogue. But for those who watch debates like car races—only for the crashes—Thompson's first appearance had offered promise. He'd put together such a string of gaffes and lackluster performances on the campaign trail recently, it seemed possible he might slip and say something crazy like taxes should be raised or that the war in Iraq had been well managed.
During his first answer, Thompson ran into trouble when he paused to think, and it seemed like he might never return. The dead air was longer than some of his lines of movie dialogue. He got more comfortable over the two hours, though, and by the end of the debate, he was relaxed enough to answer the pop-quiz question about the prime minister of Canada, a piece of trivia that would have been devastating had he botched it.
Thompson offered plenty of the usual bromides, supporting free trade and tax cuts, but he showed that at least in some cases, he could think outside the party orthodoxy. As other Republican candidates strive to show how muscular they would be in office and continue Bush's policy of treating Congress like a nuisance, Thompson was more measured. He argued that if any president were to go to war again, he should seek Congress' permission to do so. He also offered specifics about how he'd solve the long-term solvency problems of Medicare and Social Security, which included hints of honesty about some of the choices that need to be made.
Just because Thompson did well for the evening doesn't mean he's cleared the hurdles that face his campaign. The recent gaffes weren't just some clever strategy to lower expectations. He's also created more work for himself by doing well. Romney and Giuliani had been carrying on a fight over the last few days over tax policy, largely ignoring Thompson—a spat they continued in a mildly heated exchange on stage. Though he's second to Romney in Iowa polls and threatening Giuliani's lead in South Carolina and Florida, both of Thompson's rivals assumed he would fall from his own stumbles. After the first debate, they can't do that any more

For The Thrill of it All!
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian man accused of murdering 49 people asked a court on Tuesday to add another eleven victims to his tally, and told a jury when he first strangled a man it was like falling in love for the first time.
Supermarket worker Alexander Pichushkin, 33, has been branded the 'chessboard murderer' by Russian newspapers because he hoped to put a coin on every square of a 64-place chessboard for each murder.
"A first killing is like your first love. You never forget it," he said from a cage in the courtroom, after explaining how he started killing at age 18 with the murder of a classmate.
Pichushkin said he had suggested to his classmate that they kill someone, but when his friend refused, "I sent him to heaven." He then smirked at the jury.
"The closer a person is to you, and the better you know them, the more pleasurable it is to kill them," he said.
"In all the cases I killed for only one reason. I killed in order to live, because when you kill, you want to live."
Often aggressive in court, Pichushkin gesticulated to show the jury how he strangled his victims and the marks his victims had left on his hands as they struggled.
Prosecutors have charged Pichushkin with 49 murders and three attempted murders, but he asked the court to take into account another 11 murders.
"I thought it would not be fair to forget about the other 11 people," Pichushkin told the court.
Prosecutors say he lured most of his victims to secluded parts of Moscow's Bitsevsky Park, where he plied them with vodka and then smashed their skulls with a hammer.
Other victims were strangled, drowned in a sewage pit or thrown off balconies. He said police interviewed him at the time of his first murder but let him go due to a lack of evidence.
"You should not credit the police with catching me. I gave myself up," he told the court.
If convicted, Pichushkin could be Russia's most prolific serial killer.
Andrei Chikatilo, the "Rostov Ripper", was convicted in 1992 and executed in 1994 for raping, butchering and in some cases eating as many as 52 people.
Pichushkin's trial is expected to be lengthy, with testimony scheduled from at least 41 relatives of the alleged victims and another 98 witnesses.

With Him or Against Him
The black-and-white world of Clarence Thomas has nothing to do with race.

By Dahlia (From Slate)
Clarence Thomas' new autobiography, My Grandfather's Son, paints a stark picture of an America in which nothing but race matters. In his telling, virtually everyone who has ever wronged him has done so because of his race. Not surprisingly, in the eyes of many o Thomas' defenders, anyone who objects to this book must also do so because of his race. But the prism of Black vs. White in America is the wrong one through which to view this book. The real black/white problem Justice Thomas reveals is his own binary worldview. Everything is good or bad; everyone is either angel or devil. You might say the justice has produced the world's longest Santa Claus list: everything in America classified as either naughty or nice.
This memoir is a painstaking accounting of the people who have supported Thomas (painted in heroic terms) and those who have tried to destroy him (bigots, idiots, or both). It's a directory of journalists he likes and dislikes, judges he admires and mistrusts. It's a detailed ledger of Thomas' many shamings (by lighter-skinned schoolchildren, or law school interviewers) and of his equal number of academic and professional triumphs. Perhaps to symbolize all this, Thomas tots up the trophies he carries with him (a warm letter from a Missouri judge he's carried "from job to job, like an heirloom") against the symbols of his persecution (his diploma from Yale Law School, onto which he stuck a "fifteen-cent price sticker" because it bore the "taint of racial preference"). There is not an inch of gray area in the justice's personal landscape.
It's not hard to have great compassion for Thomas. He is brutally open about the hardship of his early life in the Jim Crow South, his abandonment by his parents, and the tough love of the grandfather who raised him and "control[led] every aspect of our lives." You can't help but wince at the slights and humiliations—whether real or perceived—that dogged him throughout his schooling, or to feel for his personal struggles with financial hardship, a ruined first marriage, and alcohol.
Nor is it difficult to understand how a man both deeply sensitive and deeply intelligent would have had difficulty reconciling the sheer contradiction of his grandfather's teachings: That hard work and self-reliance are the keys to success, but also that college and law school education are worthless endeavors, turning Thomas into an "educated fool." The message? Try and try but know you'll fail. Which helps illuminate why it is that almost everything Thomas has achieved in his life—from law school to the Supreme Court—he has promptly devalued and disdained. As he put it upon learning of his confirmation, "Whoop-de-damn-do."
Yet even when Thomas does see good in the world, he can't help but question the motives behind it. Whites who were kind to him were "condescending." Institutions that attempted to help him (like Yale) were "tricking" and "hurting" him. Everyone is a "rattlesnake" or a "water moccasin." Their approaches may be different, but they'll strike one way or another. Thomas expresses astonishment, upon meeting his second wife, Virginia, that anyone still "thought it was possible to make the world a better place." Having set himself up to hate his oppressors and mistrust his supporters, Thomas is left all alone, leading to repeated scenes in this book of an isolated Thomas, curled up and sobbing.
Thomas' tendency to see everything as black or white is perhaps most in evident in his discussions of his grandfather, for whom the book is named. There can be no doubt that Myers Anderson was an amazing man: strong, self reliant, acidly funny, and devoted to his family. But Thomas is also deeply scarred by his grandfather's cruelty—from tossing the young man out when he dropped out of seminary, to skipping his college and law-school graduations and wedding on some unspecified principle. Anderson may have saved him from a life of ruin, but the man hugged his grandson once in his lifetime. So Thomas alternates between raging at his grandfather and lionizing him as the "one hero in my life."
Perhaps it's unfair to wish Thomas might have decoupled the personal from the political in his life. His confirmation hearing was indeed humiliating, for everyone involved. But Thomas was hardly the first justice to endure humiliating questions around a confirmation hearing. Hugo Black had to answer for his involvement with the KKK, and William Rehnquist had to answer for being a Republican poll watcher in Arizona. Nor was Thomas the first justice to face discrimination. Sandra Day O'Connor couldn't parlay her degree into a job, either. But Thomas cannot seem to avoid linking unrelated personal events to political ones. His grandfather's death occurs while he is addressing a "roomful of angry white women in Chicago." Liberal opposition to him was "a high-tech lynching for uppity black folks" and not legitimate political concern over ideology.
And maybe because he can see no shades of gray, in the end, Thomas careens back and forth in this book between seeing himself as a victim or a self-actualized hero. There is precious little in between.
The problem with black-and-white portraits is also that they produce cartoons where there might have been nuance. Thomas can caricature Anita Hill as a "mediocre" self-entitled shrew, and Sen. Howell Heflin, D-Ala., as a "slave owner sitting on the porch of a plantation house." These portraits have all the subtlety of the worst a.m. radio. But then it appears that Thomas is either too angry or too hurt to for subtlety.
But though its author sees only in black-and-white, a careful reading of My Grandfather's Son reveals many gray areas. Clarence Thomas is more complicated than you might have believed, and readers must grapple with the contradictions between Thomas' personal warmth and public rage; the ambiguity with which he views his greatest achievements; the complexity of his love for his emotionally withholding grandfather; and his ambivalence about life in the public eye. For this reason alone the book deserves a careful and nuanced reading. The enduring travesty may well be that Justice Thomas can't think about the rest of us with that same degree of subtlety and care.Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.