Governor Rick Perry defends execution of Corsicana man some experts say was innocent



riday, September 18, 2009

By TODD J. GILLMAN/The Dallas Morning News
tgillman@dallasnews.com

WASHINGTON – Governor Rick Perry today strenuously defended the 
execution of a Corsicana man whose conviction for killing his 
daughters in a house fire hinged on an arson finding that top experts 
call junk science.

“I’m familiar with the latter-day supposed experts on the arson side 
of it,” Perry said, making quotation marks with his fingers to 
underscore his skepticism.

Even without proof that the fire was arson, he added, the court 
records he reviewed before the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham 
in 2004 showed “clear and compelling, overwhelming evidence that he 
was in fact the murderer of his children.”

These were the governor’s first direct comments on a case that has 
drawn withering criticism from top fire experts.

Death penalty critics view the Willingham case as a study in shoddy – 
or at least outdated – science, and they consider it the first proven 
instance in 35 years of an executed man being proven innocent after 
death.

“Governor Perry refuses to face the fact that Texas executed an 
innocent man on his watch. Literally all of the evidence that was 
used to convict Willingham has been disproven – all of it,” said 
Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit group 
affiliated with the Cardozo School of Law in New York that has 
championed the case. “He is clearly refusing to face reality.”

Three independent reviews over the last five years, involving seven 
of the nation’s top arson experts, found no evidence the fire was set 
intentionally. The most recent is a report commissioned by the Texas 
Forensic Science Commission.

The author, renowned arson expert Craig Beyler, blasts the 
investigators who handled the Willingham case, finding that they 
misread the evidence and based their conclusions on a “poor 
understanding of fire science.”

The commission says it is reviewing the Beyler report and other 
evidence and will issue a conclusion next year.

The fire took place two days before Christmas 1991, and claimed the 
lives of Willingham’s three daughters: 2-year-old Amber, and 1-year-
old twins, Karmon and Kameron.

State fire investigators and Corsicana fire officials maintained that 
burn patterns, cracked windows and other signs pointed to arson.

Willingham, 24 at the time and an unemployed auto mechanic, had only 
superficial burns. He said he’d run outside after Amber alerted him 
to the fire, looking for the others, and couldn’t reenter because the 
blaze grew so quickly.

He had a criminal record for burglary and grand larceny. He had once 
beaten his pregnant wife, and a jailhouse snitch said he’d confessed.
At trial, prosecutors told jurors that Willingham had intentionally 
left his daughters to die in a burning home.

But myriad scientists say that conclusion of arson was based on 
outdated training that, at the time of trial 15 years ago, had 
already been replaced by science-based methods that would have 
pointed to bad wiring or a space heater.

Willingham protested his innocence to the end. Strapped to a gurney 
awaiting lethal injection on Feb. 17, 2004, he asserted that “I am an 
innocent man -- convicted of a crime I did not do.”

The Board of Pardons and Paroles, appointed by the governor, had 
rejected the appeal his lawyers had filed three days earlier. Hours 
before the execution, the lawyers appealed directly to Perry.

The appeal included a report from a widely respected fire expert, 
Gerald Hurst, that cast serious doubt on the arson finding.

Hurst, a Cambridge-educated chemist who was chief scientist for the 
nation's largest explosive manufacturer, says the signs used as proof 
that an accelerant had been poured were almost certainly the result 
of “flashover” – an intense heat burst that causes an entire room to 
erupt in flame.

The effects of flashover can mimic arson.

In 2004, the Chicago Tribune asked three fire experts to evaluate the 
case. Their testing confirmed Hurst's report. The case was recently 
featured in an extensive article in The New Yorker, launching a new 
round of questions.

Perry, in Washington for a campaign fundraiser today and a speech 
tomorrow to conservative activists, said during an hour-long session 
with reporters that he does not believe the state executed an 
innocent man.

“No,” he said. “We talked about this case at length. One of the most 
serious and somber things that a governor of Texas deals with is the 
execution of an individual.… We go through a substantial amount of 
oversight.”

In 2006, the Innocence Project, using state open records law, 
obtained records from Perry’s office regarding the last-minute 
appeal. The governor’s office provided no documents that acknowledged 
the contents of the appeal or its significance, Scheck’s office said 
– a “lack of action” that indicates the governor ignored critical 
analysis.

Perry, whose authority as governor is limited to delaying an 
execution for 30 days, said he reviewed the case extensively.
“I get a document that has all of the court process. It gives you all 
of his background, all of the court machinations on the legal side of 
it, and the recommendation of both my legal side and the courts. It’s 
pretty extensive amount of information,” he said. “I have not seen 
anything that would cause me to think that the decision that was made 
by the courts of the state of Texas was not correct.”

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