With such celebrity supporters as Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder and the Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines on hand to watch the proceedings, Damien Echols (36), Jason Baldwin (34) and Jessie Misskelley Jr. (36) were set free thanks to a legal maneuver called an "Alford Plea" in which the three men pleaded guilty while still maintaining their innocence as they acknowledged that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Depp
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Early life

Childhood

Depp was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, the son of John Christopher Depp, Sr., a civil engineer, and his wife, the former Betty Sue Wells, a waitress.[5] He has one brother, Daniel, who is a novelist, and two sisters, Christie (now his personal manager) and Debbie. The Depp family in the United States began with a French Huguenot immigrant, Pierre Deppe or Dieppe, who settled in Virginia around 1700,[6] part of a refugee colony situated above the falls on the James River. The actor has also surmised that he is part Native American, saying in 2011, "I guess I have some Native American [in me] somewhere down the line. My great-grandmother was quite a bit of Native American, she grew up Cherokee or maybe Creek Indian. Makes sense in terms of coming from Kentucky, which is rife with Cherokee and Creek."[7][8]
The family moved frequently during Depp's childhood, and he and his siblings lived in more than 20 different locations, settling in Miramar,[9] Florida, in 1970. In 1978, Depp's parents divorced.[9] His mother married, as her second husband, Robert Palmer (died 2000), whom Depp called "an inspiration to me".[10] He engaged in self-harm as a child, due to the stress of dealing with family problems. He has seven or eight self-inflicted scars. In a 1993 interview, he explained his self-injury by saying, "My body is a journal in a way. It's like what sailors used to do, where every tattoo meant something, a specific time in your life when you make a mark on yourself, whether you do it yourself with a knife or with a professional tattoo artist".[11]

Comments on U.S.

In 2003, Depp's comments about the United States appeared in Germany's Stern magazine: "America is dumb, is something like a dumb puppy that has big teeth — that can bite and hurt you, aggressive."[65] Although he later asserted that the magazine misquoted him and the quotation was taken out of context, Stern stood by its story, as did CNN.com in its coverage of the interview. CNN added his remark that he would like his children "to see America as a toy, a broken toy. Investigate it a little, check it out, get this feeling and then get out."[66] The July 17, 2006 edition of Newsweek reprinted the "dumb puppy" quotation, verbatim, in the context of a Letter to the Magazine. Depp has also disagreed with subsequent media reports that he says paint him as a "European wannabe", saying that he likes the anonymity of living in France and his simpler life there.[65]