Today's San Antonio Express-News carries the editorial, "AG ruling shouldn’t end Willingham case."
Gov. Rick Perry and his surrogates on the Texas Forensic Science Commission have done their best to stymie an investigation of the evidence that sent Cameron Todd Willingham to death row in 1992. The state of Texas executed Willingham in 2004 for the murder by arson of his three children.
Unfortunately, the Willingham case has became wrapped up in a larger debate about the death penalty, which in turn has implications for Perry’s political ambitions. Political considerations, however, should have no bearing on the outcome of this case.
And:
The Willingham case is not the only one in which the State Fire Marshal’s Office used flawed evidence to back up prosecutors. Yet even though the office has abandoned many of the procedures that produced that evidence, it has never acknowledged any error. It should.
Texans deserve to know whether bad evidence and the negligence or misconduct of arson investigators led to the flawed convictions of Willingham and others.
If the Texas Forensic Science Commission is unable to make a determination on this point, then a court of law or the Texas Legislature should.
Rick Casey's latest Houston Chronicle column is titled, "Law gets in way of science, again." Here's an extended excerpt from the beginning of the column.
Attorney General Greg Abbott's recent official opinion on the law governing the Texas Forensic Science Commission has been widely described as "confusing."
It says, for example, that the commission can investigate the controversial arson findings in the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, the Corsicana man who was executed in 2004 for killing his three children by arson in 1991.
But there is one caveat, the attorney general says. The commission can't look at the evidence presented to the jury, since only evidence presented after the law's passage in 2005 is to be examined.
But if the attorney general's opinion is confusing, it's partly because the law as written is confusing.
In my (unofficial) opinion, the attorney general gave a reasonable interpretation. But so did Barbara Dean, the highly respected veteran attorney in his own office assigned to act as counsel for the commission. Until this year when the commission hired a staff counsel, she attended every meeting and advised members on their powers. She never raised an objection during their years-long Willingham investigation.
Then there was the reasonable opinion of Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa, D-McAllen, who has some standing as a lawyer and the co-author of the bill establishing the commission.
He told the Corsicana Sun in 2009: "There is no statute of limitations on anything the Forensic Science Commission does."
Hinojosa was aware that the law needed refining, as new laws often do. That's why this spring he pushed revisions that would have gone a long way toward cleaning up the law.
One of the main points of tension was whether the law's sole job was to make findings as to whether staffers of certified forensic labs were negligent in handling individual cases, or whether it was to critique any illegitimate use of forensic science in Texas criminal justice cases and work to improve the practice in the state.
The AG Opinon GA 866 is available in Adobe .pdf format. Earlier coverage of the Attorney General's Opinion on the Forensic Science Commission's authority begins at the link.
All Willingham coverage is available through the Todd Willingham index.
The Beyler report prepared for the Forensic Science Commission is here in Adobe .pdf format.
David Grann's September 2009 New Yorker article is noted here. Steve Mills and Maurice Possley first reported on the case in a 2004 Chicago Tribune series on junk science. The December 9, 2004 report was titled,"Man executed on disproved forensics."
The Innocence Project has a Todd Willingham resource page which provides a concise overview of the Willingham case with links to all relevant documents.
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