Hollywood Knows Best

By my count there have been four documentaries made about the West Memphis Three. All seek to convince the kind of people who watch documentaries that Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley are innocent of the triple homicide for which they were twice convicted.
The first film, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, by directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, alleged that the WM3 were singled out by a hick, superstitious justice system because the crime appeared ritualistic in nature and Echols and his sidekicks had a fondness for the occult.
The sequel, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, hoped to pin the murders of the three prepubescent boys on one of the victim’s stepfathers. The film did a fairly convincing job of it. Mark Byers was not only hounded and smeared by the filmmakers, for years he was unable to leave his home without townsfolk attacking him verbally and physically.
Fortunately for Byers another filmmaker has come along to clear his name.
In West of Memphis, by director Amy Berg, a new suspect has emerged. He is Terry Hobbs, the stepfather of yet another victim. The evidence against Hobbs is spotty at best: a bit of hair found on the shoelace used to hogtie one of the victims, a neighbor’s allegation that Hobbs was the last person to see the three boys alive (an accusation he denies), and some old criminal records which show Hobbs to have been a wife-beater. Of course if all West Memphis wife-beaters were suspects that would put half the adult male population under suspicion. The Arkansas police do not consider Hobbs a suspect. But what do those rubes know?
Besides these rash accusations, we see the filmmakers’ repeated attempts to trick Hobbs into admitting his guilt. Ty Burr of the Boston Globe concludes:

There are moments where the filmmakers overstep the bounds of documentary ethics and start creating drama rather than capturing it. A scene where Hobbs’s alibi, David Jacoby, tries to get his former friend to confess ove...