An innocent man was executed.
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@My_nameaintearl
Banned Users Posts: 2,609 ✭✭
This man:
On the day in 2004 that her first cousin Cameron Todd Willingham was scheduled to be executed in Texas, Patricia ? had good reason to believe he was innocent.
Willingham was convicted of murder for killing his three daughters in a late-1991 house fire following a prosecution that was based almost entirely on a forensic fire analysis performed by an assistant fire chief and a state deputy fire marshal in the days after the blaze. Two weeks before Willingham’s execution date, though, ? managed to get famed arson analyst Gerald Hurst to take a fresh look at the case.
Working pro bono, Hurst reviewed the evidence and drafted a study that devastated the original findings. While Hurst’s conclusions relied on his own skills, arson forensics had become far more advanced and standardized in the previous 13 years. “A contemporary fire origin and cause analyst might well wonder how anyone could make so many critical errors in interpreting the evidence,” Hurst’s report began.
Hurst found that there was, in fact, no arson at all. ? and Willingham’s attorney rushed the report to the office of Governor Rick Perry on Feb. 13, just four days before the scheduled execution, ? says.
Little is known about why the Hurst report did not compel Perry to use his authority to delay Willingham’s execution for further review. The governor’s office has resisted legal efforts to pry loose Perry’s most sensitive deliberative documents on the Willingham execution. “The governor’s office has been a giant black hole of information,” says Walter Reaves, Willingham’s post-conviction attorney.
? ’s frantic correspondence with the governor’s staff in the days and hours before Willingham’s death, as described by ? and detailed by Perry’s office to TIME, provide a new window on those events.
In 1991 Willingham, then 24, was a poor white unemployed auto mechanic who sometimes drank too much. His young wife Stacy had been out at the Salvation Army picking up Christmas gifts for the kids on the morning of the fire. His trial lasted just two days, focusing almost exclusively on the forensics, and Willingham remained in prison until his 2004 execution. Willingham, his family and some close friends were among his only allies until the Chicago Tribune reviewed the case in the months after his death, which drew in death-penalty opponents and even more press.
Then David Grann explored the Hurst report in an extraordinary September 2009 article in the New Yorker. According to the report, what the initial investigation said were “pour patterns” of gasoline or another accelerant in the house were instead simply the scars typically left behind by a conventional, hot, racing, “post flashover” fire. Hurst also found no evidence that the fire started in multiple locations, a telltale sign of arson.
Hurst disagreed with the original investigators’ determination that charred wood under an aluminum door threshold suggested that an accelerant had burned there. “Liquid accelerants can no more burn under an aluminum threshold than can grease burn in a skillet even with a loose-fitting lid,” Hurst wrote. He also flatly dismissed the first investigators’ finding that strange patterns in the glass of Willingham’s windows, called “crazed glass,” proved the use of an accelerant.
Instead, Hurst noted that crazed glass forms when firefighters spray cold water on hot windows when extinguishing a fire. Finally, Hurst said, the early investigators misunderstood the significance of “V pattern” heat scars on walls. “Most of the conclusions reached by the fire marshal would be considered invalid in light of current knowledge,” Hurst wrote.
Since the execution, scientific opinions have accumulated in the conclusion that there was no arson at the Willingham home in 1991. After Willingham’s death, the New York–based Innocence Project commissioned a panel of five arson experts to take another look at the case. The group’s 2006 report matched Hurst’s findings that the evidence showed a conventional fire, not arson. “The artifacts examined and relied upon by the fire investigators … are the kind of artifacts routinely created by accidental fires that progress beyond flashover,” the panel’s report said.
In 2008 the Texas Forensic Science Commission, charged with guarding the integrity of Texas forensics investigations, started to probe the case. The commission hired Craig Beyler, an arson investigator with a résumé nearly as impressive as Hurst’s. Beyler’s Aug. 17, 2009, report echoed Hurst’s findings. “A finding of arson could not be sustained,” Beyler found.
But in late September 2009, just days before the commission was set to hear testimony from Beyler — and when Perry was within a few months of facing U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison in what was expected to be a heated primary — Perry dismissed the chairman of the commission, Austin defense attorney Sam Bassett, and two other commission members. That dampened the commission’s investigation.
Bassett said of Perry, “I think he was very uncomfortable with what we were doing in that investigation.”
One lingering question has been whether Perry was dismissive of the Hurst report in the hours before Willingham’s execution. ? says this is where the governor erred.
? ’s contact in Perry’s office at that time was Mike Schofield, then Perry’s assistant general counsel. ? has nothing but kind words to say about Schofield. “For the 10 days prior to the execution, I talked with him daily,” ? says, describing Schofield as polite, engaged and prompt in returning her calls. “He told me he would be the one to brief the governor on the morning of the execution.”
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On the day in 2004 that her first cousin Cameron Todd Willingham was scheduled to be executed in Texas, Patricia ? had good reason to believe he was innocent.
Willingham was convicted of murder for killing his three daughters in a late-1991 house fire following a prosecution that was based almost entirely on a forensic fire analysis performed by an assistant fire chief and a state deputy fire marshal in the days after the blaze. Two weeks before Willingham’s execution date, though, ? managed to get famed arson analyst Gerald Hurst to take a fresh look at the case.
Working pro bono, Hurst reviewed the evidence and drafted a study that devastated the original findings. While Hurst’s conclusions relied on his own skills, arson forensics had become far more advanced and standardized in the previous 13 years. “A contemporary fire origin and cause analyst might well wonder how anyone could make so many critical errors in interpreting the evidence,” Hurst’s report began.
Hurst found that there was, in fact, no arson at all. ? and Willingham’s attorney rushed the report to the office of Governor Rick Perry on Feb. 13, just four days before the scheduled execution, ? says.
Little is known about why the Hurst report did not compel Perry to use his authority to delay Willingham’s execution for further review. The governor’s office has resisted legal efforts to pry loose Perry’s most sensitive deliberative documents on the Willingham execution. “The governor’s office has been a giant black hole of information,” says Walter Reaves, Willingham’s post-conviction attorney.
? ’s frantic correspondence with the governor’s staff in the days and hours before Willingham’s death, as described by ? and detailed by Perry’s office to TIME, provide a new window on those events.
In 1991 Willingham, then 24, was a poor white unemployed auto mechanic who sometimes drank too much. His young wife Stacy had been out at the Salvation Army picking up Christmas gifts for the kids on the morning of the fire. His trial lasted just two days, focusing almost exclusively on the forensics, and Willingham remained in prison until his 2004 execution. Willingham, his family and some close friends were among his only allies until the Chicago Tribune reviewed the case in the months after his death, which drew in death-penalty opponents and even more press.
Then David Grann explored the Hurst report in an extraordinary September 2009 article in the New Yorker. According to the report, what the initial investigation said were “pour patterns” of gasoline or another accelerant in the house were instead simply the scars typically left behind by a conventional, hot, racing, “post flashover” fire. Hurst also found no evidence that the fire started in multiple locations, a telltale sign of arson.
Hurst disagreed with the original investigators’ determination that charred wood under an aluminum door threshold suggested that an accelerant had burned there. “Liquid accelerants can no more burn under an aluminum threshold than can grease burn in a skillet even with a loose-fitting lid,” Hurst wrote. He also flatly dismissed the first investigators’ finding that strange patterns in the glass of Willingham’s windows, called “crazed glass,” proved the use of an accelerant.
Instead, Hurst noted that crazed glass forms when firefighters spray cold water on hot windows when extinguishing a fire. Finally, Hurst said, the early investigators misunderstood the significance of “V pattern” heat scars on walls. “Most of the conclusions reached by the fire marshal would be considered invalid in light of current knowledge,” Hurst wrote.
Since the execution, scientific opinions have accumulated in the conclusion that there was no arson at the Willingham home in 1991. After Willingham’s death, the New York–based Innocence Project commissioned a panel of five arson experts to take another look at the case. The group’s 2006 report matched Hurst’s findings that the evidence showed a conventional fire, not arson. “The artifacts examined and relied upon by the fire investigators … are the kind of artifacts routinely created by accidental fires that progress beyond flashover,” the panel’s report said.
In 2008 the Texas Forensic Science Commission, charged with guarding the integrity of Texas forensics investigations, started to probe the case. The commission hired Craig Beyler, an arson investigator with a résumé nearly as impressive as Hurst’s. Beyler’s Aug. 17, 2009, report echoed Hurst’s findings. “A finding of arson could not be sustained,” Beyler found.
But in late September 2009, just days before the commission was set to hear testimony from Beyler — and when Perry was within a few months of facing U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison in what was expected to be a heated primary — Perry dismissed the chairman of the commission, Austin defense attorney Sam Bassett, and two other commission members. That dampened the commission’s investigation.
Bassett said of Perry, “I think he was very uncomfortable with what we were doing in that investigation.”
One lingering question has been whether Perry was dismissive of the Hurst report in the hours before Willingham’s execution. ? says this is where the governor erred.
? ’s contact in Perry’s office at that time was Mike Schofield, then Perry’s assistant general counsel. ? has nothing but kind words to say about Schofield. “For the 10 days prior to the execution, I talked with him daily,” ? says, describing Schofield as polite, engaged and prompt in returning her calls. “He told me he would be the one to brief the governor on the morning of the execution.”
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? , who took notes on her interactions with the governor’s office, talked to Schofield on Feb. 16, the day before that briefing. She says she was convinced that Schofield understood the import of Hurst’s findings. “Mike Schofield told me he had the Hurst report in his possession,” she says of that talk. “I know that for a fact.” Schofield said he had discussed the Hurst report with other attorneys serving the governor, ? says.
Schofield did not respond to efforts to contact him through his associates and Perry’s office.
The next day, Feb. 17, ? went to work as usual. She waited anxiously for the phone to ring with news of a last-minute stay. The call never came.
? talked to Schofield again the next day, after Willingham was dead. “He did give his condolences to myself and the rest of the family,” she recalls. She asked about the briefing with Perry. “I asked him, ‘Did you take the Hurst report?’ He told me he absolutely did,” ? says. “He said the governor felt like, in light of the time that had passed since the conviction, a stay in the execution would only delay an event that would ultimately happen anyway.”
The closest Perry has come to explaining his decision to proceed with Willingham’s execution was covered in a Sept. 18, 2009, Dallas Morning News story. In the article, Perry seems to dismiss the advances in arson forensics since 1992 and belittle the qualifications of experts who had studied the Willingham case more recently.
“I’m familiar with the latter-day supposed experts on the arson side of it,” Perry said. The newspaper reported that Perry formed quotation marks with his fingers to emphasize his skepticism.
Lucy Nashed, Perry’s deputy press secretary, confirms that Perry’s office did obtain a copy of Hurst’s report, but not until the day of the execution, and that Perry’s staff had to retrieve a copy from the Texas attorney general late that afternoon. “It was only through the efforts of Governor Perry and his staff that the report was obtained at all by our office,” Nashed says.
Regardless of when it arrived, Nashed confirms that Perry was aware of the Hurst report and its contents. “As with any execution, the governor was previously briefed on all of the facts of the case. He was briefed on this report once our office obtained it late that afternoon,” she says.
“After the document — which was four pages — was requested, obtained and reviewed, Governor Perry shared the opinion of the state and federal judiciary that the report was not enough to merit a stay of execution,” she says.
Nashed is referring to the frantic efforts by Willingham’s post-conviction attorney, Reaves, to get various courts to look at Hurst’s report prior to Perry’s last-minute review. The courts, however, were barred from reviewing anything that wasn’t classified as new evidence, rather than new science applied to old evidence, so the courts rejected Hurst’s findings on a technicality. “The stuff I put in that report had never been reviewed before,” Hurst says. “The courts are not technical. They don’t know what is new. We just know a hell of a lot more about post-flashover fires than they did then.”
As part of his last-minute review, the governor can examine whatever he wants, according to attorneys familiar with Texas law. Still, Nashed says Perry’s decision was “similar” to that of the courts and that Hurst’s findings were “no more than an opinion that offered no new facts.”
At the Republican presidential debate on Sept. 7, NBC’s Brian Williams brought up the subject of executions in Texas, noting that Perry had presided over the execution of 234 people as governor. “Have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those might have been innocent?” Williams asked.
Perry didn’t hesitate. “No, sir. I’ve never struggled with that at all,” he said, reiterating his faith in the judicial and appeals process in Texas. Then he stared hard at Williams and added in a Texas drawl, “But in the state of Texas, if you come into our state and you ? one of our children, you ? a police officer, you’re involved with another crime and you ? one of our citizens, you will face the ultimate justice in the state of Texas, and that is, you will be executed.” The audience broke into a round of applause.
? says she does not know for sure why Perry did not delay Willingham’s execution, but she has an opinion. “I can tell you why he did not pick up the phone,” she says. “It was his lack of integrity and his political aspirations.”
http://swampland.time.com/2011/09/27/the-controversial-willingham-case-what-rick-perry-knew-and-when/ -
i should have went and protested that.
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Another win for Texas
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So this ain't a Troy Davis thread ?
(Leaves in disgust.) -
*bait post/thread to see if the people who opposed troy davis death would feel the same way about an innocent white man??????*
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After reading that mountain of ? words, there was hardly enough evidence to conclude beyond a shadow of a doubt that dude was innocent. Maybe enough to get him off death row.
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mryounggun wrote: »After reading that mountain of ? words, there was hardly enough evidence to conclude beyond a shadow of a doubt that dude was innocent. Maybe enough to get him off death row.
That's all people wanted in the Davis case. They said seven witnesses recanted, but it was actually only one. And that was enough for many people to say he shouldn't be executed.
I'm against the death penalty, period. It doesn't matter to me whether a person is white or black. -
@My_nameaintearl wrote: »That's all people wanted in the Davis case. They said seven witnesses recanted, but it was actually only one. And that was enough for many people to say he shouldn't be executed.
I'm against the death penalty, period. It doesn't matter to me whether a person is white or black.
I'm not sure what your point is. Not trying to be funny, but what was your point? -
@My_nameaintearl wrote: »T
I'm against the death penalty, period. It doesn't matter to me whether a person is white or black.
of course you are, thats why you went and dug up this story as opposed to posting the one on T. Davis. -
@My_nameaintearl wrote: »That's all people wanted in the Davis case. They said seven witnesses recanted, but it was actually only one. And that was enough for many people to say he shouldn't be executed.
I'm against the death penalty, period. It doesn't matter to me whether a person is white or black.
Are you also against abortion ? -
*bait post/thread to see if the people who opposed troy davis death would feel the same way about an innocent white man??????*
excellent observation
and you are correct -
Johnny Green VI wrote: »His point is that people had an outcry over Davis because of misinformation that was presented by the Defense. The media only really gave you one side of the story so it made it look like he was innocent when in fact he likely wasn't.
Not saying that there wasn't, but how we know there wasn't an outcry for this bastard when he was executed. Did you - or anyone else in this thread - follow the ? back in 2004? Also, the outcry for TD was mainly because- ? it. That's a whole other thread. Lol. -
Johnny Green VI wrote: »His point is that people had an outcry over Davis because of misinformation that was presented by the Defense. The media only really gave you one side of the story so it made it look like he was innocent when in fact he likely wasn't.
So was he / wasn't he ?
The whole point is that if anyone can provide any type of reasonable doubt, then there should be a problem. -
Hyde Parke wrote: »of course you are, thats why you went and dug up this story as opposed to posting the one on T. Davis.
I posted more facts in the Davis threads than anybody else. I was posting about Davis in 2007 when he actually had a chance.
Nobody else had ? to say until the day of the execution when Big Boi was tweeting "jesus gon save dis man rite hea" -
@My_nameaintearl wrote: »I posted more facts in the Davis threads than anybody else. I was posting about Davis in 2007 when he actually had a chance.
Nobody else had ? to say until the day of the execution when Big Boi was tweeting "jesus gon save dis man rite hea"
you aint the only one that followed the case for some years.
Yeah, there will always be some bandwagon ignorant ? , which seems to be the ones you like catering too. Posting up one whiteboy who got executed is nil in comparison all the black men not only in prison, but are innocent who get sentenced to death like its nothing. For every one whiteboy you post, there is 10 black ones to cancel that ? out. I do agree with you on one thing tho, and that is i dont support the death penalty either. -
Lauce.
But yeh, this is old news. -
Hyde Parke wrote: »For every one whiteboy you post, there is 10 black ones to cancel that ? out.
Actually there are 441 blacks executed for every 712 whites executed. This is before considering Latinos, Asians, and "Other."
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/
That link might not work from the IC. DeathPenaltyInfo dot Org has the database, tho.
(i had to edit this post because i ? up the math twice) -
@My_nameaintearl wrote: »Actually there are 441 blacks executed for every 489 whites executed. This is before considering Latinos, Asians, and "Other."
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/views-executions?exec_name_1=&race[]=Black&race[]=White&sex=All&sex_1=All&federal=All&foreigner=All&juvenile=All&volunteer=All
That link might not work from the IC. DeathPenaltyInfo dot Org has the database, tho.
nice try kid, being that blacks make up only 12% of the population (50% of prison population) vs 72% of whites, their number would appear to be higher,obviously -
You said that for every white man executed, there are ten blacks to cancel it out.
Turns out, that number is way, waaaaay off. -
LOL. Damn.
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@My_nameaintearl wrote: »You said that for every white man executed, there are ten blacks to cancel it out.
Turns out, that number is way, waaaaay off.
are you paying attn? again blacks make up what percentage of the population vs white? what percentage of blacks are in prison? not way of, you need to do a little more research son -
read about this case years ago...and yeah he wasnt the first man to be put to death on little to no evidence in TX and wont be the last....
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since you are picking and choosing what best fits your agenda, gone and copy and paste the section on death penalty black and white: who lives, who dies, who decides? I ll wait
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the white man is the devil .... of course he will execute even himself
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smh smh smh smh smh
