"IN SHORT THERE WAS, ACCORDING TO GRANN, "NOT A SINGLE SHRED OF EVIDENCE OF ARSON", MERELY THE FOLKLORE AND OLD WIVES TALES ABOUT FIRES AND ARSON HANDED DOWN FROM ONE GENERATION OF POLICE AND INVESTIGATORS TO THE NEXT. EVEN CRAIG BEYLER, THE EMINENT FIRE SCIENTIST HIRED BY THE TEXAS STATE COMMISSION, WROTE THAT THE ORIGINAL INVESTIGATORS HAD THROWN "RATIONAL REASONING" TO THE WIND, AND RELIED ON METHODS "CHARACTERISTIC OF MYSTICS OR PSYCHICS." IN OTHER WORDS, WILLINGHAM HAD BEEN A VICTIM OF THAT SCOURGE OF AMERICAN COURTROOMS, JUNK SCIENCE."
RUPERT CORNWALL; THE INDEPENDENT;
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Background: (Wikipedia); Cameron Todd Willingham (January 9, 1968 – February 17, 2004), born in Carter County, Oklahoma, was sentenced to death by the state of Texas for murdering his three daughters—two year old Amber Louise Kuykendall, and one year old twins Karmon Diane Willingham and Kameron Marie Willingham— by setting his house on fire. The fire occurred on December 23, 1991 in Corsicana, Texas. Lighter fluid was kept on the front porch of Willingham’s house as evidenced by a melted container found there. Some of this fluid may have entered the front doorway of the house carried along by fire hose water. It was alleged this fluid was deliberately poured to start the fire and that Willingham chose this entrance way so as to impede rescue attempts. The prosecution also used other arson theories that have since been brought into question. In addition to the arson evidence, a jailhouse informant claimed Willingham confessed that he set the fire to hide his wife's physical abuse of the girls, although the girls showed no other injuries besides those caused by the fire. Neighbors also testified that Willingham did not try hard enough to save his children. They allege he "crouched down" in his front yard and watched the house burn for a period of time without attempting to enter the home or go to neighbors for help or request they call firefighters. He claimed that he tried to go back into the house but it was "too hot". As firefighters arrived, however, he rushed towards the garage and pushed his car away from the burning building, requesting firefighters do the same rather than put out the fire. After the fire, Willingham showed no emotion at the death of his children and spent the next day sorting through the debris, laughing and playing music. He expressed anger after finding his dartboard burned in the fire. Firefighters and other witnesses found him suspicious of how he reacted during and after the fire. Willingham was charged with murder on January 8, 1992. During his trial in August 1992, he was offered a life term in exchange for a guilty plea, which he turned down insisting he was innocent. After his conviction, he and his wife divorced. She later stated that she believed that Willingham was guilty. Prosecutors alleged this was part of a pattern of behavior intended to rid himself of his children. Willingham had a history of committing crimes, including burglary, grand larceny and car theft. There was also an incident when he beat his pregnant wife over the stomach with a telephone to induce a miscarriage. When asked if he had a final statement, Willingham said: "Yeah. The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man - convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do. From God's dust I came and to dust I will return - so the earth shall become my throne. I gotta go, road dog. I love you Gabby." However, his final words were directed at his ex-wife, Stacy Willingham. He turned to her and said "I hope you rot in hell, bitch" several times while attempting to extend his middle finger in an obscene gesture. His ex-wife did not show any reaction to this. He was executed by lethal injection on February 17, 2004. Subsequent to that date, persistent questions have been raised as to the accuracy of the forensic evidence used in the conviction, specifically, whether it can be proven that an accelerant (such as the lighter fluid mentioned above) was used to start the fatal fire. Fire investigator Gerald L. Hurst reviewed the case documents including the trial transcriptions and an hour-long videotape of the aftermath of the fire scene. Hurst said, "There's nothing to suggest to any reasonable arson investigator that this was an arson fire. It was just a fire."
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This Blog previously reported that Agence France-Presse has waded into the Cameron Todd Willingham debate - and helped spread it beyond America's borders - with a story by reporter Lucille Malandain which appeared earlier this week under the heading, "opponents hope Texas case will be US turning point."
Agence France-Presse (AFP) is the oldest news agency in the world, and one of the three largest with Associated Press and Reuters. It is also the largest French news agency. Currently, its CEO is Pierre Louette and editor-in-chief Nicolas Miletitch. AFP is based in Paris, with regional centres in Washington, Hong Kong, Nicosia, São Paulo, Montevideo and bureaux in 110 countries. It transmits news in French, English, Arabic, Spanish, German, and Portuguese."
The Independent, a well-respected British newspaper, has now leapt into the fray with a column by Rupert Cornwell, headed: "Will the US at last admit it executed an innocent man?" and the sub-heading: "Out of America: The case of Cameron Todd Willingham, put to death five years ago, could mark a turning point for American justice."
"A year or two ago, Antonin Scalia wrote an opinion on the constitutionality of America's death penalty in the pithy language that makes him simultaneously the most maddeningly conservative, yet the most quotable and entertaining, of the nine current justices of the United States Supreme Court," the September 13, 2009, the column begins.
"Long had he scoured the records, but he was aware of "not a single case – not one – in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit," it continues.
"If such a miscarriage of justice had occurred in recent years, Scalia went on, "we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops". Well, it's time to get the ladder out.
In February 2004, Cameron Todd Willingham was put to death by the state of Texas for the arson/murder of his three young daughters. They had been trapped in their home when it went up in flames two days before Christmas in 1991. A fortnight later, Willingham, an unemployed car mechanic, was arrested and charged with having deliberately set the fire. His trial had the all too familiar shortcomings when a defendant is poor: lousy, state-appointed defence lawyers, dubious but unchallenged evidence peddled by a couple of supposed forensic experts, and the testimony of a jail snitch who claimed Willingham had confessed to the crime in an unguarded moment while awaiting trial. Proceedings lasted only two days, and the jury took just an hour to find him guilty.
After many unavailing appeals – the last of them to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles which did not even bother to consider a report by the country's leading fire investigator concluding that in all probability the fire was accidental – Willingham was executed by lethal injection in the infamous prison at Huntsville. To the very end, strapped to the gurney in the death chamber, he protested his innocence: "I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do."
Ever since, the case has been a focus of death penalty opponents here. As long ago as December 2004, The Chicago Tribune carried a long article casting doubt on the fire investigators' evidence at the 1992 trial. CNN later did a piece to the same effect, while three separate outside reports – including one commissioned by the state of Texas – reached similar conclusions.
This month however came the most devastating blow of all: 16,000 words of measured prose in The New Yorker magazine that took a wrecking ball to the entire case against Willingham. The snitch, it turns out, was a drug-sodden petty criminal who later recanted his evidence. "The statute of limitations on perjury has run on perjury, hasn't it?", he asked David Grann, the magazine's reporter.
Nor, he notes, was any credible motive for the crime ever established. Willingham was no saint. He drank, he had affairs, and was prone to violence. At the trial prosecutors suggested he had killed his children "because they got in the way of his beer". His wife, Stacy, said that nothing unusual had happened before the fire, however, and that while her husband had treated her badly on occasion, he had never abused the children: "They were spoiled rotten." Nor was a big insurance payout on the cards.
But Grann's fiercest demolition job was on the scientific evidence for arson, without which Willingham, for all his personal failings, was guilty of no crime whatsoever. Retracing the tragic affair with various experts, including Gerald Hurst whose January 2004 report was ignored by the Texas Pardons Board, the author demonstrated that not one of the 20 alleged signs of arson cited at the trial stood up to serious scientific scrutiny.
In short there was, according to Grann, "not a single shred of evidence of arson", merely the folklore and old wives tales about fires and arson handed down from one generation of police and investigators to the next. Even Craig Beyler, the eminent fire scientist hired by the Texas state commission, wrote that the original investigators had thrown "rational reasoning" to the wind, and relied on methods "characteristic of mystics or psychics." In other words, Willingham had been a victim of that scourge of American courtrooms, junk science.
Oddly, but somehow fittingly, this new interest in what seems ever more certainly a terrible miscarriage of American justice coincides with the 25th anniversary of the discovery by the British scientist Sir Alec Jeffreys of DNA fingerprinting – the technique which has established the guilt or innocence of countless criminals, including not a few on the death rows of the US. Clearly, DNA testing could not have settled the argument over Willingham's guilt, and the doubts about his conviction, while grave, do not have the black-or-white irrefutability of DNA evidence. But they're starting to come close.
The commission's final report on the Willingham case is due next year. Thus it may just be that Texas, the state most addicted to capital punishment, will be the one that finally proves Justice Scalia wrong, and admits that it had indeed carried out "the execution of a legally and factually innocent person".
In another section of the opinion in which he asserted such events never happened, Scalia also took a swipe at the Popes, foreign civil rights advocates, handwringing European liberals and do-gooders (not to mention tedious articles like this one in overseas newspapers) who might venture to disagree. "There exists in some parts of the world sanctimonious criticism of America's death penalty, as somehow unworthy of a civilised society.... Most of the countries to which these finger-waggers belong had the death penalty themselves until recently – and indeed, many of them would still have it if the democratic will prevailed."
But, as even thoroughly American institutions like The New Yorker and The Chicago Tribune have made clear, if the state killing of Cameron Todd Willingham is not unworthy of a civilised society, then what is?"
This column can be found at:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/rupert-cornwell/rupert-cornwell-will-the-us-at-last-admit-it-executed-an-innocent-man-1786630.html
Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com;
