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Arkansas Supreme Court Decision Allows New DNA Testing in Case of the ​“West Memphis Three,” Convicted of Killing Three Children in 1993

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On April 18, 2024, the Arkansas Supreme Court decided 4-3 to reverse a 2022 lower court decision and allow genetic testing of crime scene evidence from the 1993 killing of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis. The three men convicted in 1994 for the killings were released in 2011 after taking an Alford plea, in which they maintained their innocence but plead guilty to the crime, in exchange for 18 years’ time served and 10 years of a suspended sentence. 

Georgia: Should juror's racial bias halt execution?

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Jury box
Keith Tharpe faces the death penalty for killing his sister-in-law and kidnapping and raping his estranged wife. His lawyers have appealed the sentence because 1 of the jurors who voted for his execution may have been racially biased.

Keith Tharpe was convicted in 1991 of killing his sister-in-law and kidnapping and raping his estranged wife on Setp. 25, 1990. The wife left him and moved in with her parents. He intercepted her and her sister, Jacqueline Freeman, while they were on their way to work. He killed her sister, dragged her in a ditch and raped her and drove her to Macon to force her to withdraw money from her credit union account.

With only 100 days to prepare the case, Tharpe's defense team lost the trial. The jury unanimously sentenced him to death.

8 years later, claims of a racially bias juror surfaced. The man in question, Barney Gattie, admitted he used racial epithets and racially biased language when describing Tharpe. Now-deceased, Gattie's signed an affidavit for Tharpe's lawyers stating that. 

Two days later, he signed another affidavit for the state saying that he voted for Tharpe to receive the death penalty because he was a cold, calculated murderer, not because he was black.

Tharpe's lawyers filed new motions after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in March that courts can examine what happened in a jury room when there are showings that racial prejudice played a role in the deliberations.

U.S. District judge rejected the claims because 10 other jurors said there was no racial animus in their deliberations.

Tharpe's lawyers are now asking the 11th Circuit to consider the juror misconduct claim.

Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sept. 16, xxx, 2017


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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
Location: Georgia, USA
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