Well ... it did seem inevitable that the most death-penalty crazed state in the country would execute innocent people more or less by accident, and that eventually someone might figure that out.
Faulty evidence masquerading as science sent two men to death row for arson in Texas and led to the execution of one of them, a panel of private fire investigators concluded in a report released Tuesday in Austin.
The report, prepared for the Innocence Project, a legal clinic dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions, was presented to a new state panel, the Texas Forensic Science Commission, created by the Legislature last year to oversee the integrity of crime laboratories. Barry C. Scheck, a co-director of the Innocence Project, said the report offered "important evidence of serious scientific negligence or misconduct in the investigations, reports and testimony of Texas state fire marshals" and called into question not just the two cases but also many others based on similar arson analyses. The nine-member forensic panel, late to start up and as yet unfinanced, "will review it and investigate," said its chairwoman, Debbie Lynn Benningfield, a fingerprint expert and retired deputy administrator of the Houston Police Department's latent laboratory section.
The report examined prosecution arson testimony in the trials of two men: Ernest R. Willis, convicted of killing two women in a house fire in 1986 in Iraan, and Cameron T. Willingham, convicted of burning his home in Corsicana in 1992, killing his three young daughters. Mr. Willingham was executed by lethal injection on Feb. 17, 2004, after Gov. Rick Perry rejected a plea for a last-minute stay, once the courts and the State Board of Pardons and Paroles had declined to intervene. Mr. Willis was exonerated and pardoned on Oct. 6, 2004, and collected almost $430,000 for 17 years of wrongful imprisonment.
The report says that prosecution witnesses in both cases interpreted fire indicators like cracked glass and burn marks as evidence that the fires had been set, when more up-to-date technology shows that the indicators could just as well have signified an accidental fire. In one case, the signs were accepted as proof of guilt, the report said; in the other, they were discarded as misleading. "These two outcomes are mutually exclusive," Mr. Scheck said. "Willis cannot be found 'actually innocent' and Willingham executed based on the same scientific evidence." [...]
Innocence Project Submits Two Arson Cases to Texas Commission and Requests System-Wide Review
innocenceproject.org
Press Release and Supporting Documents
Saying that expert arson analysis shows an innocent man was executed - and that other people in Texas may have been wrongly convicted of arson based on erroneous forensic analysis - the Innocence Project today formally submitted two arson cases to the Texas Forensic Science Commission, along with a request that the panel order a review of arson convictions across the state.
Today's filing marks the first time in the nation that scientific evidence showing an innocent person was executed has been submitted to a government entity that is legally obligated to investigate cases, reach conclusions, and direct system-wide reviews to determine the extent of the problem.
The two cases the Innocence Project submitted today are the convictions of Ernest Willis and Cameron Todd Willingham. Willis was convicted of arson murder and sentenced to death in 1987, and he served 17 years in prison before he was exonerated. Willingham was convicted of arson murder in 1992 and was executed in February 2004. Among the documents submitted to the commission today is a 48-page report from an independent five-member panel of some of the nation's leading arson investigators, who reviewed more than 1,000 pages of evidence, testimony, and official documents in the two cases.
In the report, the arson experts - with a combined 138 years of experience in the field - say that neither of the fires which Willingham and Willis were convicted of setting were arson. The expert report notes that the evidence and forensic analysis in the Willingham and Willis cases "were the same," and that "each and every one" of the forensic interpretations that state experts made in both men's trials have been proven scientifically invalid. "While any case of wrongful conviction, acknowledged or not, is worthy of review, the disparity of the outcomes in these two cases warrants a closer inspection," the report says.
[...] "Both offices gave us everything they have that involves the Hurst report, and it isn't much," Scheck said. "The documents show that they received the report, but neither office has any record of anyone acknowledging it, taking note of its significance, responding to it, or calling any attention to it within the government. The only reasonable conclusion is that the Governor's Office and the Board of Pardons and Paroles ignored scientific evidence and went through with the execution, while the same evidence from the same expert allowed Ernest Willis to walk out of the same prison facility eight months later." [...]
For all that it's logically inconsistent that one person could be exonerated and another convicted on the basis of the same type of evidence, it's worth noting that they were in fact both convicted at trial, and it's likely only the fact that things took longer in Willis' case that saved his life.
And for all that Texas has created this commission to try to improve their forensic facilities -- after the really spectacular and repeated failures of the Houston Police Department Crime Laboratory -- the question may come down to how much Texas really cares about that, and how much they plan to do about it. They're struggling, for example, to pass legislation to replace school funding, the previous property-tax-based plan having been declared unconstitutional by the Texas state courts. The current legislative session has only 15 more days left to run. One wonders if perhaps the Innocence Project tried to fire up this flare while there was still time to remind the legislature that something needed to be done about funding the commission. And one wonders if the legislature has the political will, or even cares, about funding a commission whose job, after all, will essentially be to go over court records, convictions and other data and basically say, "Wow, did you people screw the pooch on this one. Throw out that conviction and start over."
Given Texas' history in these matters, it seems ... unlikely, somehow.
Posted by iain at May 03, 2006 11:53 AM
