The Execution of a Potentially Innocent Man Less Scandalous Than an Affair?

By Michelle Goldberg, The American Prospect. Posted November 4, 2009.

It's lucky for Gov. Rick Perry of Texas that he's not suspected of doing something truly shocking, like having an affair. Instead, it merely seems that he's helped cover up a homicide. Apparently that's not enough to make much of a national splash.

Last month, The New Yorker published a remarkable piece by David Grann about the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for a crime that all the evidence suggests he didn't commit. In 1991, Willingham's house caught on fire, burning his three daughters to death. Ill-trained investigators accused Willingham of arson. At his trial, a family therapist who had never met Willingham was called as an expert witness and suggested that Willingham's heavy metal posters indicated that he might be a satanist.

Because Willingham couldn't afford decent representation, it was many years before a friend of his managed to get qualified experts to take a look at the case. Grann described the investigation conducted by Gerald Hurst, one of the country's most acclaimed fire investigators: "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.'" If Perry read the report, which was submitted just weeks before Willingham was executed, he didn't act on it, refusing to grant a stay of execution.

Grann wasn't the first to probe the Willingham case. Ten months after Willingham was put to death, The Chicago Tribune published an important investigation by Steve Mills and Maurice Possley. Willingham, they wrote, "was prosecuted and convicted based primarily on arson theories that have since been repudiated by scientific advances. According to four fire experts consulted by the Tribune, the original investigation was flawed and it is even possible the fire was accidental."

In 2005, the Texas Legislature established a nine-member Forensic Science Commission, which immediately started looking into Willingham's case, as well as the case of Ernest Ray Willis. Willis had also been sentenced to death in an arson case that Grann described as "freakishly similar" to Willingham's, but thanks largely to a good pro-bono attorney, he was set free after 17 years in prison. The Forensic Science Commission voted unanimously to hire Craig Beyler, another well-known arson expert, to write a report. Beyler submitted it in August, and it was a profoundly damning document.

The approach of Manuel Vasquez, the state deputy fire marshal in Willingham's case, was "hardly consistent with a scientific mindset and is more characteristic of mystics or psychics," Beyler wrote. In both the Willingham and the Willis case, the "investigators had poor understandings of fire science and failed to acknowledge or apply the contemporaneous understanding of the limitations of fire indicators. Their methodologies did not comport with the scientific method or the process of elimination."

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Michelle Goldberg is a senior correspondent at The American Prospect. She is also the author of Kingdom Coming and The Means of Reproduction.

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