Sometimes when I talk to folks about the death penalty, they default to the stance that it should be saved for those occasions when someone really, REALLY deserves it (the worst of the worst) and only be employed when there is irrefutable scientific evidence of the person's guilt.The problem with that stance is that scientific evidence is as prone to errors in interpretation as anything else is. Check the error rate at a crime lab some time, and then extrapolate from there, and you will realize exactly how often "we know for sure" doesn't mean much more than "we think so."And if you doubt that scientific error can lead to horrifying miscarriages of justice, consider the case of Cameron Todd Willingham.The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky.Buffie Barbee, who was eleven years old and lived two houses down, was playing in her back yard when she smelled the smoke. She ran inside and told her mother, Diane, and they hurried up the street; that’s when they saw the smoldering house and Cameron Todd Willingham standing on the front porch, wearing only a pair of jeans, his chest blackened with soot, his hair and eyelids singed. He was screaming, “My babies are burning up!” His children—Karmon and Kameron, who were one-year-old twin girls, and two-year-old Amber—were trapped inside.
* * *
Todd Willingham, looking on, appeared to grow more hysterical, and a police chaplain named George Monaghan led him to the back of a fire truck and tried to calm him down. Willingham explained that his wife, Stacy, had gone out earlier that morning, and that he had been jolted from sleep by Amber screaming, “Daddy! Daddy!”
“My little girl was trying to wake me up and tell me about the fire,” he said, adding, “I couldn’t get my babies out.”
While he was talking, a fireman emerged from the house, cradling Amber. As she was given C.P.R., Willingham, who was twenty-three years old and powerfully built, ran to see her, then suddenly headed toward the babies’ room. Monaghan and another man restrained him. “We had to wrestle with him and then handcuff him, for his and our protection,” Monaghan later told police. “I received a black eye.” One of the first firemen at the scene told investigators that, at an earlier point, he had also held Willingham back. “Based on what I saw on how the fire was burning, it would have been crazy for anyone to try and go into the house,” he said.
Crazy, but not surprising. Any loving parent would react in the exact same way to being forced to witness the worst thing possible . . . the loss of one's children and one's own inability to do a damn thing about it.And that is how things would have ended, had the criminal justice system not swung into motion in one of its more atrocious acts of overzealousness. Mr. Willingham allowed arson investigators from the fire department to have access to his home, telling them that he at least hoped to find out why his little ones were taken from him. He did not anticipate what the "experts" would find.[B]oth investigators had a clear vision of what had happened. Someone had poured liquid accelerant throughout the children’s room, even under their beds, then poured some more along the adjoining hallway and out the front door, creating a “fire barrier” that prevented anyone from escaping; similarly, a prosecutor later suggested, the refrigerator in the kitchen had been moved to block the back-door exit. The house, in short, had been deliberately transformed into a death trap.* * *
The fire was now considered a triple homicide, and Todd Willingham—the only person, besides the victims, known to have been in the house at the time of the blaze—became the prime suspect.
And so the investigation went on, with Willingham as its target. Not surprisingly, after being asked enough questions the neighbors whose initial accounts of Willingham's behavior had portrayed a man shattered by the lost of his beloved children slowly transformed themselves into an account of someone who had behaved oddly, even suspiciously.
(Anyone who believes that the preconceptions of the officers asking questions does not impact the answers they receive just needs to spend a few days watching videos of police interviews. You'll be disabused on the notion quickly.)
It did not help that Willingham had grown up on the wrong side of the tracks and had something of a troubled upbringing. That sort of thing stays with you, especially when you're dealing with police officers, whose experiences create prejudices where the poor and disadvantaged are concerned.
Ultimately, the authorities concluded that Willingham was a man without a conscience whose serial crimes had climaxed, almost inexorably, in murder. John Jackson, who was then the assistant district attorney in Corsicana, was assigned to prosecute Willingham’s case. He later told the Dallas Morning News that he considered Willingham to be “an utterly sociopathic individual” who deemed his children “an impediment to his lifestyle.”
This despite the fact that everyone in the family insisted that, while Willingham had his flaws, he doted on and utterly adored his children.
And from there the case proceeded as you might expect it to, with a capital murder trial at which the star witnesses were the State's "expert witnesses" and a jailhouse informant (I trust I need not explain why the latter's testimony is inherently unreliable).
Willingham had been offered the opportunity to plead guilty in return for a life sentence, but he turned it down, insisting with every breath that he was innocent . . . that he had not killed his babies.
It took just over an hour for the jury to convict.
Years later, someone began to ask questions. And thanks to the persistence of one person, the evidence in Willingham's case finally got another real look.
One day in January, 2004, Dr. Gerald Hurst, an acclaimed scientist and fire investigator, received a file describing all the evidence of arson gathered in Willingham’s case. Gilbert had come across Hurst’s name and, along with one of Willingham’s relatives, had contacted him, seeking his help. After their pleas, Hurst had agreed to look at the case pro bono, and Reaves, Willingham’s lawyer, had sent him the relevant documents, in the hope that there were grounds for clemency.
Dr. Hurst's findings were, to say the least, not supportive of the State's case.
As Hurst looked through the case records, a statement by Manuel Vasquez, the state deputy fire marshal, jumped out at him. Vasquez had testified that, of the roughly twelve hundred to fifteen hundred fires he had investigated, “most all of them” were arson. This was an oddly high estimate; the Texas State Fire Marshals Office typically found arson in only fifty per cent of its cases.
Hurst was also struck by Vasquez’s claim that the Willingham blaze had “burned fast and hot” because of a liquid accelerant. The notion that a flammable or combustible liquid caused flames to reach higher temperatures had been repeated in court by arson sleuths for decades. Yet the theory was nonsense: experiments have proved that wood and gasoline-fuelled fires burn at essentially the same temperature.
Vasquez and Fogg had cited as proof of arson the fact that the front door’s aluminum threshold had melted. “The only thing that can cause that to react is an accelerant,” Vasquez said. Hurst was incredulous. A natural-wood fire can reach temperatures as high as two thousand degrees Fahrenheit—far hotter than the melting point for aluminum alloys, which ranges from a thousand to twelve hundred degrees. And, like many other investigators, Vasquez and Fogg mistakenly assumed that wood charring beneath the aluminum threshold was evidence that, as Vasquez put it, “a liquid accelerant flowed underneath and burned.” Hurst had conducted myriad experiments showing that such charring was caused simply by the aluminum conducting so much heat. In fact, when liquid accelerant is poured under a threshold a fire will extinguish, because of a lack of oxygen. (Other scientists had reached the same conclusion.) “Liquid accelerants can no more burn under an aluminum threshold than can grease burn in a skillet even with a loose-fitting lid,” Hurst declared in his report on the Willingham case.
Hurst then examined Fogg and Vasquez’s claim that the “brown stains” on Willingham’s front porch were evidence of “liquid accelerant,” which had not had time to soak into the concrete. Hurst had previously performed a test in his garage, in which he poured charcoal-lighter fluid on the concrete floor, and lit it. When the fire went out, there were no brown stains, only smudges of soot. Hurst had run the same experiment many times, with different kinds of liquid accelerants, and the result was always the same. Brown stains were common in fires; they were usually composed of rust or gunk from charred debris that had mixed with water from fire hoses.
Another crucial piece of evidence implicating Willingham was the “crazed glass” that Vasquez had attributed to the rapid heating from a fire fuelled with liquid accelerant. Yet, in November of 1991, a team of fire investigators had inspected fifty houses in the hills of Oakland, California, which had been ravaged by brush fires. In a dozen houses, the investigators discovered crazed glass, even though a liquid accelerant had not been used. Most of these houses were on the outskirts of the blaze, where firefighters had shot streams of water; as the investigators later wrote in a published study, they theorized that the fracturing had been induced by rapid cooling, rather than by sudden heating—thermal shock had caused the glass to contract so quickly that it settled disjointedly. The investigators then tested this hypothesis in a laboratory. When they heated glass, nothing happened. But each time they applied water to the heated glass the intricate patterns appeared. Hurst had seen the same phenomenon when he had blowtorched and cooled glass during his research at Cambridge. In his report, Hurst wrote that Vasquez and Fogg’s notion of crazed glass was no more than an “old wives’ tale.”
* * *
Without having visited the fire scene, Hurst says, it was impossible to pinpoint the cause of the blaze. But, based on the evidence, he had little doubt that it was an accidental fire—one caused most likely by the space heater or faulty electrical wiring. It explained why there had never been a motive for the crime. Hurst concluded that there was no evidence of arson, and that a man who had already lost his three children and spent twelve years in jail was about to be executed based on “junk science.”
So, the evidence was in. Willingham was exonerated and freed from prison with many apologies from the State and everything was all right in the long run.
That is how things turned out, right? Right?
No.
On February 13th, four days before Willingham was scheduled to be executed, he got a call from Reaves, his attorney. Reaves told him that the fifteen members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which reviews an application for clemency and had been sent Hurst’s report, had made their decision.
“What is it?” Willingham asked.
“I’m sorry,” Reaves said. “They denied your petition.”
The vote was unanimous.
Cameron Todd Willingham was executed by lethal injection on February 17, 2004.The possibility of executing an innocent man has been one of the rallying-cries of the anti-death penalty movement for years now, but judges and district attorneys have always been able to point to the "fact" that there was no solid reason to believe that any innocent person had ever actually been executed. Mr. Willingham's case is unusual in that it provides the first real evidence that the death penalty does lead to the execution of the innocent.In one other regard, this case was unusual.
Unlike many other prosecutors in the state, Jackson, who had ambitions of becoming a judge, was personally opposed to capital punishment. “I don’t think it’s effective in deterring criminals,” he told me. “I just don’t think it works.” He also considered it wasteful: because of the expense of litigation and the appeals process, it costs, on average, $2.3 million to execute a prisoner in Texas—about three times the cost of incarcerating someone for forty years. Plus, Jackson said, “What’s the recourse if you make a mistake?” Yet his boss, Batchelor, believed that, as he once put it, “certain people who commit bad enough crimes give up the right to live,” and Jackson came to agree that the heinous nature of the crime in the Willingham case—“one of the worst in terms of body count” that he had ever tried—mandated death.
As it turns out, Attorney Jackson should have trusted his first instincts.
What's the recourse, indeed?
Go to the link and read the whole thing. It's long, but it's worth it.
