Dark Spell
For many who’ve heard of the West Memphis Three–especially through Devil’s Knot and/or the feature film based on that book–the story of their trials ended when the court handed down their sentences. For the teenagers, though, that moment marked the start of yet another story, one more dangerous than the first.
Jason Baldwin was sixteen, the youngest of the three teenagers when he heard himself sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
Dark Spell is the account of what it was like to be taken in handcuffs and shackles into Arkansas’s adult prison system, where inmates and guards alike saw him as a Satanic child killer. Many of those who sent him there did not expect him to survive. Prison officials shared the same, realistic fear. More than once, death hovered perilously near. But Jason survived, day by day and year by year, in one of the harshest environments on American soil.
This would be a hard story to bear, save that it is brightened and transformed by Jason’s insight and upbeat persona. I’ve always appreciated what Colin Firth,* who met Jason while filming Devil’s Knot, said about him and the “decency of doubt.”
Dark Spell illuminates the many ways America’s justice system, once having gone wrong, can fight to sustain that wrong. It celebrates the countless ordinary heroes who rose up, using art and new technology, to challenge trials they perceived as mockeries of justice.
At its heart, Dark Spell walks readers into prison with an innocent teenager and reveals how he managed to forge a life of honor by not abandoning his personal integrity, demanding education, and discovering that there’s peace to be found in kicking Hacky Sack.