That's the title of Michael Hall's web extra column for Texas Monthly. It's subtitled, "Even someone who supports the death penalty, as you do, can and should be up in arms over the Cameron Willingham case."
Hey Senator Hutchison, would your campaign have any interest in painting your opponent, Governor Rick Perry, as a corrupt, cold-hearted political hack who will do anything to cover his ass when he looks like he did something really bad? I figured you might, so I drafted this memorandum to help you express your outrage at Perry’s latest actions. You know, how he fired three members of the Texas Forensic Science Commission on the eve of a meeting at which the commission would have heard an expert say, in so many words, that Texas, under the governor’s watch, had executed an innocent man. Even someone who supports the death penalty, as you do, can and should be up in arms over this. Here’s how.
First, just to recap: Cameron Todd Willingham was accused of setting a fire in Corsicana in 1991 that killed his three children. He was convicted on the testimony of two arson experts who said they found evidence the fire had been intentionally set. Willingham protested his innocence for years and finally found an ally in January 2004, when Gerald Hurst, an Austin fire investigator, analyzed the original arson report. Hurst was alarmed at the lack of hard science and scientific reasoning; his conclusion was that there had been no arson. The fire had been an accident. Hurst wrote up a report and faxed it to the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which unanimously turned Willingham down. Governor Perry did too, denying a stay of execution. On February 17, 2004, Willingham was executed.
Later that year the Chicago Tribune asked three other fire experts—John Lentini, John DeHaan, and Kendall Ryland—to analyze the evidence. They agreed with Hurst that there had been no arson. In 2006 the Innocence Project hired Lentini and three additional experts—Douglas Carpenter, Daniel Churchward, and David Smith—to look at the case. They concluded that “the evidence used to convict [Willingham] was invalid.” Willingham’s conviction and execution were, the report concluded, “a serious miscarriage of justice.”
And:
He got his Ph.D. in Engineering at Harvard, his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Cornell, his M.Sc. in Fire Safety Engineering from the University of Edinburgh, and his B.S. in Fire Protection Engineering from the University of Maryland. Since 1990 he has been the technical director at Hughes Associates, a world-renowned Baltimore engineering company that specializes in fires—how they get started, how they spread, how they react to different materials, how to fight them, how to protect against them. He’s the chair of the International Association for Fire Safety Science. He’s a member of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers Technical Steering Committee and the National Fire Protection Association’s Toxicity Technical Advisory Committee. He’s taught graduate courses in Combustion, Fire Dynamics, and Fire Chemistry. He’s won awards from the Institution of Fire Engineers, and the Society of Fire Protection Engineers. I would say that’s pretty impressive.
What about the other seven “latter-day supposed experts”? Glad you asked. Here’s where you could really drive the point home. Hurst got his Ph.D. in chemistry from Cambridge and has been investigating fires since 1994; Carpenter has been a fire-protection engineer and investigator since 1996; Churchward is a fire investigator who has worked as a deputy, firefighter, and insurance-company investigator since 1972; Lentini has been a certified fire investigator and chemist since 1978; Smith, a former detective, has been a certified fire investigator since 1971; DeHaan, Ph.D., has been an arson criminologist since 1987 and an independent forensic consultant since 1998; and Ryland is a Louisiana fire chief and former college professor.
Concluding:
Let’s review: The governor appointed a previous political appointee of his to head a commission that was looking into whether the governor himself had overseen the execution of an innocent man, and the appointee canceled a meeting where it was to hear testimony from an expert who would have said that, yes, the executed man had committed no crime. Again, you don’t have to be against the death penalty to think that something is terribly wrong here. Unless you’re Rick Perry. Which you’re not. Right?
Earlier coverage begins with the preceding post. As I've pointed out before, Texas Monthly writer Michael Hall and I are not related.
Comments