Bob Herbert on the Todd Willingham Case

"Innocent but Dead," is the title of his OpEd column in today's New York Times.

There is a long and remarkable article in the current New Yorker about a man who was executed in Texas in 2004 for deliberately setting a fire that killed his three small children. Rigorous scientific analysis has since shown that there was no evidence that the fire in a one-story, wood frame house in Corsicana was the result of arson, as the authorities had alleged.

In other words, it was an accident. No crime had occurred.

Cameron Todd Willingham, who refused to accept a guilty plea that would have spared his life, and who insisted until his last painful breath that he was innocent, had in fact been telling the truth all along.

It was inevitable that some case in which a clearly innocent person had been put to death would come to light. It was far from inevitable that this case would be the one. “I was extremely skeptical in the beginning,” said the New Yorker reporter, David Grann, who began investigating the case last December.

And:

He remained on death row for 12 years, but it was only in the weeks leading up to his execution that convincing scientific evidence of his innocence began to emerge. A renowned scientist and arson investigator, Gerald Hurst, educated at Cambridge and widely recognized as a brilliant chemist, reviewed the evidence in the Willingham case and began systematically knocking down every indication of arson.

The authorities were unmoved. Willingham was executed by lethal injection on Feb. 17, 2004.

Now comes a report on the case from another noted scientist, Craig Beyler, who was hired by a special commission, established by the state of Texas to investigate errors and misconduct in the handling of forensic evidence.

The report is devastating, the kind of disclosure that should send a tremor through one’s conscience. There was absolutely no scientific basis for determining that the fire was arson, said Beyler. No basis at all. He added that the state fire marshal who investigated the case and testified against Willingham “seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires.” He said the marshal’s approach seemed to lack “rational reasoning” and he likened it to the practices “of mystics or psychics.”

"The troubling case of Cameron Todd Willingham," is the title of an editorial from the Dallas Morning News Sunday edition.

A blistering report issued last week should be required reading for anyone who discounts the possibility that the state's death chamber has taken an innocent life.

At issue are the cases of Cameron Todd Willingham, executed in 2004 on conviction of an arson-murder in Corsicana, and Ernest Willis, released from death row the same year after he was cleared in his own arson-murder case, out of Iraan, in West Texas.

And:

We may never know if the facts as experts understand them now would have secured him a new trial. But it is a positive sign that the relatively new Forensic Science Commission has taken up the Willingham and Willis cases as one of its very first inquiries.

What level of forensic ineptitude and guesswork is tolerable when it comes to sending a person to death row?

The answer is none. That is obvious, but we ask anyway – and repeat it as necessary – because bringing an ill-founded death penalty case can have as heinous an outcome as willful capital murder itself.

David Grann's New Yorker article, an absolute must-read, is noted here.  Complete earlier coverage begins here; also available through the Todd Willingham category index.

Comments

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During the course of the trial, arson investigator Manuel Vasquez testified that, of the twelve hundred to fifteen hundred fires he had investigated, "most all of them" were arson. That statement alone should have alerted all those involved in the trial of Todd Willingham that the arson investigator was not competent. Common sense would have suggest that a large number of fires are accidental. According to the New Yorker Article, The Texas State Fire Marshals Office attributes only about 50% of its cases to the work of arsonists.