Damien Wayne Echols (born Michael Wayne Hutchison; December 11, 1974) is an American writer, best known as one of the West Memphis Three, a group of teenagers convicted of a triple murder. Upon his release from death row in 2011 under an Alford plea, Echols authored several autobiographies and spiritual books. He has been featured in multiple books, documentaries, and podcasts about his spiritual works and the West Memphis Three case. Biography Early life Damien Wayne Echols was born on December 11, 1974. He lived with his mother and father until their divorce, when he was 8. The family frequently moved and Echols would attend eight schools before the age of ten. At the age of 13, he changed his birth name from Michael Wayne Hutchinson, taking a new name and the last name of his stepfather Jack Echols. The family settled in Echols's home in West Memphis, Arkansas, where Echols attended school. He was still in the ninth grade at the age of 17. Echols, with his habits of dressing in black and listening to heavy metal music, was a misfit within the local community. He also wrote dark and expressive poems. The Robin Hood Hills murders In 1993, when Echols was 18, he was arrested along with Jason Baldwin (16) and Jessie Misskelley (17) for the murder of three eight-year-olds: Steve Branch, Michael Moore and Christopher Byers. They were convicted. On death row On March 19, 1994, Judge David Burnett sentenced Echols to death by lethal injection. On December 23, 1996, the Arkansas Supreme Court denied appeals from Echols and Baldwin. In May 1998, Echols won a hearing on charges that his defense counsel had been incompetent, but Judge Burnett ruled against him in June 1999. In 2007, new DNA testing became available that was not technologically possible at the time of the crime, and produced evidence that hairs found at the crime scene did not match Misskelley, Baldwin or Echols and possibly matched the stepfather of one of the victims. Based on this, the defendants asked Burnett for a new trial. In September 2008, Burnett denied retrials for all three saying the new evidence was "inconclusive". Echols spent his time on death row at the Varner Unit Supermax. In his first years, he studied Buddhism and was doing meditation five to seven hours a day. Later, he became interested in ceremonial magick. He spent most of the