David Ranta
What do a beautiful college girl from Seattle, three poor and marginalized teen boys from the rural South and a printer from New York with a drug problem all have in common?
Not much, it would seem, except the single most important fact in each of their lives.
Amanda Knox, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, Jessie Miskelley, Jr., and David Ranta were all charged, tried and convicted of murder in, respectively, Perugia, Italy; West Memphis, Arkansas; and Brooklyn, New York. Despite not a shred of sound evidence against any of them, all were convicted on confessions and all were innocent. Of the three, Ms. Knox was perhaps the luckiest in that she only had four years of her life taken from her in a dismal Italian prison. By the time the West Memphis Three were released (though not exonerated), they had spent more than half their lives in prison, Damien on death row.
The sole other significant difference in the three cases is that with Mr. Ranta, who was released March 21 after serving 23 years in prison, the prosecutor himself championed the cause of truth and justice, whereas in the Amanda Knox and West Memphis Three cases, prosecutors ran from the truth as if it would bite them in the ass, which it should have.
And now we learn that Mr. Ranta suffered a serious heart attack on his second day of freedom and was rushed to a hospital. We can only wish him well and pray for his speedy recovery, lest he become an ultimate martyr for a miscarriage of justice that occurs rarely, but still too often, regardless of who you are or where you are from.
