Columnist Bob Herbert has a must-read piece in today’s edition of the New York Times about what happened when justice failed and an innocent man was put on death row in Texas.
Referencing an article appearing in this week’s New Yorker (which can be read here), Herbert reports that on December 21, 1991, Cameron Todd Willingham was at his home in Corsicana, Texas, asleep. His two-year-old daughter and twin one-year-old daughters were in another room. He awoke when he heard the cries of his oldest child, and he quickly found that their room was being engulfed by fire.
Herbert tells us what happened next:
Willingham said he tried to rescue the kids but was driven back by smoke and flames. At one point his hair caught fire. As the heat intensified, the windows of the children’s room exploded and flames leapt out. Willingham, who was 23 at the time, had to be restrained and eventually handcuffed as he tried again to get into the room.
There was no reason to believe at first that the fire was anything other than a horrible accident. But fire investigators, moving slowly through the ruined house, began seeing things (not unlike someone viewing a Rorschach pattern) that they interpreted as evidence of arson.
Even though investigators couldn’t determine any motive for Willingham to kill his own children, nevertheless he was arrested and charged with capital murder. Willingham declined a plea deal that would have spared his life and maintained his innocence for the twelve years that he sat on death row. He was executed on February 17th, 2004.
Herbert points out that in the weeks leading up to Willingham’s execution, a leading chemist and fire expert named Gerald Hurst reviewed the arson investigator’s case against Willingham and knocked down key pieces of evidence. This didn’t persuade the state to spare Willingham’s life. Nevertheless, as part of an official review of the state of Texas’s mishandling of forensic evidence, another fire expert named Craig Beylor reviewed the Willingham case and recently released a report on the evidence that sent Willingham to his death.
Herbert writes:
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.”
It looks like Willingham was completely innocent of murder and the house fire that claimed the lives of his daughters was a tragic accident. His execution by the state of Texas is irreversible. And it was the scientifically unsound testimony of an incompetent fire investigator (along with a jailhouse informant who was later shown to be unreliable) that put Willingham in the death chamber.