POST: "Playing with fire," by Liliana Segura, published by "The Intercept" on February 24, 2015; "Liliana Segura is a journalist and editor with a longtime focus on
prisons, prisoners, and the failings and excesses of the U.S. criminal
justice system—from wrongful convictions to the death penalty. She covered these and other issues most recently as an editor at
The Nation, where she edited a number of award-winning stories. Previously she was a senior editor at
AlterNet, where she was in charge of civil liberties coverage during the early days of Obama’s presidency. She has appeared on CNN International, MSNBC,
DemocracyNow! and several other news outlets. Her writing has been reprinted in numerous places, from prison publications to
The Best American Legal Writing to, most recently, the collection
Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You.
Liliana is on the board of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty and
the Applied Research Center, a U.S. racial justice think tank. She lives
in Brooklyn."
GIST:
"The first person exonerated
for arson murder, according to the National Registry of Wrongful
Convictions, was Ray Girdler Jr. in Arizona, in December 1991 — two
months before the Hopewell fire. Girdler had been convicted of burning
his wife and child to death in their trailer park home in 1981. He swore
he was innocent, but his behavior the night of the fire had been
bizarre. As firefighters battled the blaze, Girdler had gone to his
neighbor and asked for a beer, which he drank on the couch with no sign
of emotion. Yet 10 years later, the
Los Angeles Times reported,
“Advances in fire science have wrought a stunning turnabout, providing
explanations for the fire that suddenly seem to justify Girdler’s
version of events.” Today, 23 years after the fire in Hopewell, Claude Garrett, too,
maintains his innocence — and there are a number of people who are
convinced he is telling the truth. Chief among them is a veteran
Tennessee fire investigator who insists the conviction was a miscarriage
of justice — “and there are others besides Claude in jail for things
they did not intentionally do.” Indeed, the same advances in fire
analysis that exonerated Girdler more than 20 years ago in Arizona have
continued to expose fires once believed to be intentional or
“incendiary” as most likely accidental. Numerous people have been freed
from prison after spending years behind bars for arson crimes that were
never crimes at all. Garrett’s case contains hallmarks of such wrongful
convictions — pervasive myths that guided arson investigations for
decades, which still haunt the criminal justice system. In the summer of 1992, seismic changes were taking place in the field of arson investigation. Most
famous among wrongful arson convictions is the Texas case of Cameron
Todd Willingham, who was convicted of killing his three young daughters
in a fire and put to death in 2004. In
The New Yorker,
investigative journalist David Grann described in dramatic detail how,
days before Willingham’s execution, a renowned fire scientist named
Gerald Hurst rushed to show the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles that
the fire in his case had almost certainly been an accident. With
evidence of prosecutorial misconduct
emerging after Willingham’s death, today it is perhaps the most widely
accepted example of a wrongful execution in the modern death penalty
era. Garrett’s case has a number of striking parallels with Willingham’s.
The house fires took place just two months apart, in working-class
neighborhoods. Like Garrett, Willingham drank too much and had an
explosive temper. Like Garrett, Willingham, too, was described as
hysterical the morning of the fire by witnesses who would later change
their minds, saying “things were not as they seemed.” And, like Garrett,
Willingham’s claims of innocence were undermined by his criminal record
and bad reputation. In Willingham’s case, prosecutors pointed to his
tattoos and heavy metal posters as proof that he had morbid — even
satanic — tendencies.
Most significantly, as both men awaited trial in the summer of 1992,
seismic changes were taking place in the field of arson investigation.
Based on new research into fire behavior, experts were questioning
longstanding techniques for determining the origin and cause of a fire.
Classic arson “indicators” were revealed to be no such thing. The
investigators in both Willingham’s and Garrett’s cases relied on
longstanding fallacies that were just beginning to be exposed. Among the most prevalent false indicators were “burn patterns” like
the ones found in the homes of both Willingham and Garrett. For decades,
fire investigators called such marks “pour” patterns, based on the
belief that a liquid accelerant had been spilled wherever they appeared,
in order “to create a very hot and fast burning fire,” as Kenneth
Porter would observe. But this scenario was a myth. It was rooted in
ignorance of a phenomenon now known as “flashover” — the point at which
radiant heat building up in a room causes a space and its contents to
combust. Or as some fire experts put it, the moment “a fire in a room
becomes a room on fire.” As researchers would discover, fires that reach
flashover (or “post-flashover” fires) often leave such so-called pour
marks behind. Similarly, the V-pattern once believed to reveal a fire’s
point of origin was also found to be a false indicator — and a common
feature of post-flashover fires.
The entire post can be found at:
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/24/junkscienceclaudegarrett/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
Dear Reader. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog. We are following this case.
I
have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses
several thousand posts. The search box is located near the bottom of
the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this
powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and
myself get more out of the site.
The
Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible
years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr.
Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of
Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic"
section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It
can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-charles-smith-award-presented-to_28.html
I look forward to hearing from readers at:
hlevy15@gmail.com.
Harold Levy; Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog;
