Entertainment

Johnny Depp’s TV pitch for ‘innocent’ teens

If it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes one to convict one.

Now and then, it requires a movie star to save one.

Think back 17 long years. Do you remember how every talk show was obsessed with the same hot topic — teenage Satanism? Heavy metal, it was suggested, led to Satanism which naturally led to ritualistic murder.

Even though the FBI never had evidence of even one so-called Satanic murder, the national TV talk show atmosphere became very 17th-century Salem witch trials.

Ritual homicide was a theory just looking for a reality.

That “proof” came in 1993 with the brutal murders of three little boys at a creek in Arkansas and the hasty conviction of three teenage boys for the killings.

Why? Because one of the boys wore black, had crazy “metal” hair and looked like what the juvenile officer in their town thought a teen Satanist would look like.

Now Dixie Chick Natalie Maines, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and Johnny Depp, among thousands of less-famous people around the country, are standing up for the three convicts — Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley — whom they believe were railroaded.

Depp is so passionate about the case that he makes a rare TV appearance on “48 Hours” in a story called “A Cry for Innocence.” He tells reporter Erin Moriarty: “They were easy targets.”

No blood, no mud, no murder weapon, no DNA were ever found.

“There was need for swift justice . . . to placate the understandably angry and frightened community,” the star says.

Depp, from a small town in Kentucky, says he can relate to the three young men.

“I didn’t dress like everybody else,” he says. “I can remember kind of being looked upon as a freak.”

The boys, now 35 years old, have spent their entire adult lives in prison, with one of them, Echols, on death row.

Among those who were not questioned at the time is the stepfather of one of the murdered children who was seen with the three boys right before they were murdered.

But, hey, the expert witness at the trial — a guy with a mail order Ph.D — said that the murderers probably drank the children’s blood.

Shocking that the jury didn’t just take the suspects out and burn them at the stake.