By BARTHOLOMEW SULLIVAN
Scripps Howard News Service

JONESBORO -- A Texas defense lawyer for death-row inmate Damien Wayne Echols put the Arkansas legal system on trial Tuesday, arguing that his client's first lawyers sold out to film producers in order to finance Echols's defense in connection with the brutal killings of three 8-year-old boys.

In a hearing before Circuit Judge David Burnett, who presided over the March 1994 trial of Echols and co-defendant Charles Jason Baldwin in the slayings of the West Memphis, Ark., boys, a new legal team sought to win a new trial by disparaging the job done by Echols's first set of lawyers. A third defendant, Jessie Misskelley Jr., was convicted in a separate trial.

Houston lawyer Edward Mallett's first line of attack was to ask Burnett to take himself out of the hearing and let an independent judge hear the case. Burnett denied the motion, saying he was the best qualified to decide whether the lawyers had provided ineffective assistance during the trial.

After the hearing, Mallett expressed dismay at the system of indigent legal defense that could not provide the kinds of resources often available to prosecutors. Mallett argued that Echols's lawyers --Val Price and Scott Davidson --were forced to accept the film producers' money in order to hire expert witnesses, but in doing so compromised Echols's legal rights.

''The system in Arkansas for representing poor people is terrible,'' he said. He said Burnett should have recused himself because ''some people think that the judge who heard the trial isn't the best person to judge whether the lawyers he appointed and paid were adequately paid and ... did the work that the defendants were entitled to.''

Tuesday's hearing occurred five years to the day after second-graders Christopher Byers, Steve Branch and Michael Moore disappeared while riding their bikes near their homes and were later found hogtied and mutilated in a creek. It occurred four years from the date Burnett originally selected for Echols's execution.

The highly publicized case, with its allegations of a satanic motivation and ritual killing, attracted about 30 people supporting efforts to win a new trial for Echols, 23. Many who gathered before the hearing on the lawn of the Craighead County Courthouse sported black ''Free the West Memphis Three'' T-shirts or adhesive badges bearing an abbreviated version of the same message.

''We saw 'Paradise Lost' and we were so shocked by what we saw that we were compelled to do something,'' said Kathy Blakken, 37, of Los Angeles, referring to a documentary film about the case. ''There really wasn't any physical evidence. They were really convicted because of satanic panic.''

Blakken, who helped start a defense fund that placed full-page ads in Little Rock's alternative newspaper last month, said the movement is separate from the film's promotion efforts.

The same New York documentary film crew that made ''Paradise Lost'' was on hand Tuesday for what it said was work on a sequel --tentatively titled ''Paradise Lost Revisited.'' The original documentary first appeared on cable television's Home Box Office, then in cinemas, in 1996.

In one of the more bizarre events during Tuesday's hearing, film producer Bruce Sinofsky was called to the witness stand and questioned about a radio microphone secreted on John Mark Byers, the stepfather of murder victim Christopher Byers.

Sinofsky, who had been ordered outside the courtroom because he will be called as a witness about the film crew's contract with defense lawyers, admitted he had monitored proceedings in the courtroom, where news reporters had had their tape recorders confiscated by a bailiff.

Byers, who insists the convicted defendants in the case are guilty, said the mix-up with the microphone was not intentional.

Price and Davidson had suggested at Echols's trial that Byers himself had some role in the disappearance of his stepson. On Tuesday, Byers walked among news crews from Court TV and reporters from Little Rock and Memphis, Tenn., repeating what he'd said during the trial here four years ago: ''If they want to worship the devil, I hope they meet him soon.''

Of the proceedings, Byers said Echols is having his rights protected to the waste of taxpayer dollars. Echols in particular, he said, has already received ''plenty of adequate defense.''

''I think when you're guilty, you're guilty -- and they're guilty,'' he said of the efforts to win a new trial.

Prosecutor Brent Davis said the proceeding was typical of efforts to win another avenue for appeal now that Echols's conviction has been upheld by both the Arkansas and U.S. Supreme Courts.

Of the argument Mallet makes that Price and Davidson somehow compromised their client's interests by accepting money from the film crew in exchange for exclusive pretrial interviews, Davis said it didn't make sense.

Echols lawyer Alvin Schay contends that by accepting the money and not objecting to cameras in the courtroom, Price and Davidson had a conflict of interest that harmed Echols's rights.

Davis said he saw it differently.

''The only impact we can see is that there's now a Free the West Memphis Three defense fund that's been established nationwide,'' Davis said. ''The HBO movie itself was slanted in a beneficial fashion toward the defendants. I don't think they can establish anything detrimental whatsoever.''

Only a handful of defense motions were heard Tuesday. The hearing resumes June 9 in Jonesboro.

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(Bartholomew Sullivan writes for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn.)

Copyright 1997 The Log Cabin Democrat