Willingham capital case haunts Texas governor as state launches inquiry



Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co. uk, Thursday 1 October 2009 19.01 BST

The scene in Corsicana, Texas, on the morning of 23 December 1991,
was one of pure horror. According to eyewitnesses, Cameron Willingham
stood in front of his wood-framed home as it was engulfed in flames
pleading for someone to call 911 and screaming: "My babies are
burning up!"

When fire fighters arrived, they found him dressed only in trousers
and with hair on his chest, eyelids and head singed. They had to
handcuff him to a truck to prevent him from trying to break into the
three-bedroom bungalow to rescue the infants. One officer received a
black eye in the scuffling.

All three of his children - Amber aged two, and one-year-old twins
Karmon and Kameron - died. When Willingham gave permission for
authorities to search his home after the event he told them: "I'd
just like to know why my babies were taken from me."

That desire set in train a series of events that were to lead, 13
years later, to his own death at the hands of the state of Texas.
Local fire investigators inspected the charred house to determine the
cause of the blaze, and ended up concluding that Willingham, an
unemployed car mechanic, had started it with lighter fuel in a
deliberate act of arson.

He was convicted of homicide in 1992, at the end of a two-day trial
in which only one defence witness was presented, and sentenced to death.

Despite serious doubts from experts raised before his death, and
despite his steadfast insistence of his innocence - he rejected a
plea bargain in which he would have been given life in jail in return
for pleading guilty - Willingham was administered the lethal
injection in 2004 upon the final go-ahead of the governor of Texas,
Rick Perry.

Now the spectre of Cameron Willingham has come back to haunt Governor
Perry. Doubts about the execution have multiplied to such an extent
that the Texan legislature ordered the state's Forensic Science
Commission to carry out an official inquiry.

Its 51-page report, written by a nationally-recognis ed expert on fire
safety, Craig Beyler, tore apart the original case against Willingham
on virtually every count. It found that the key evidence upon which
the conviction was based had no basis in modern fire science and that
"a finding of arson could not be sustained".

The report was particularly critical of one of the fire inspectors,
who has since died, saying his findings were "nothing more than a
collection of personal beliefs" and more "characteristic of mystics
or psychics".

Pressure over the case reached boiling point this week, prompted in
part by a 16,000-word analysis of the case by David Grann in the New
Yorker magazine. The Texas Forensic Science Commission invited Beyler
to present his report in person today/ on Friday.

But on Wednesday night, Governor Perry announced his decision to
remove the head of the commission and two of its key members and
replace them with a new board. The first act of the incoming chairman
was to cancel Friday's meeting, and with it postpone any discussion
of the Beyler report.

Texas is legendary for its enthusiastic approach to the death
penalty. It has executed 441 prisoners since capital punishment was
revived in the US in 1976, more than any other state by a large margin.

Yet even by the standards of Texan justice, Perry's move has
astounded death row opponents. The Innocence Project, a New York-
based group that has been at the centre of attempts to prove
Willingham's innocence, likened the action to Richard Nixon's
dismissal of the Watergate prosecutor in the so-called "Saturday
night massacre".

Beyler told the Guardian that he could only speculate on what had
happened.
"None of us understand what's going on here," he said.

Sam Bassett, the removed head of the panel, told Associated Press:
"We should not fail to investigate important forensic issues in cases
simply because there might be political ramifications. "

Perry's spokesperson denied any connection between the change of
personnel at the top of the commission and Friday's meeting. "This is
business as usual," he said, insisting the governor had followed
routine appointments procedures.

In 2006, Justice Antonin Scalia of the US supreme court, said that in
the modern judicial system there had not been "a single case - not
one - in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he
did not commit". Yet all of the key grounds upon which Willingham was
put to death have been cast in serious doubt.

A month before he died, a report compiled by another recognised fire
expert, Gerald Hurst, was presented to the governor's office and the
Board of Pardons which had the power to stop the execution. It found
that not "a single item of physical evidence ... supports a finding
of arson". The Innocence Project looked into what had happened to the
report, and concluded that both Perry and the board had simply
ignored its scientific evidence.

In his findings, Beyler says that the specific burn patterns on the
floors and skirting board of the house upon which the initial fire
inspectors had largely based their opinion were based on assumptions
that had been overruled by modern scientific experiments. He said
these assumptions had no basis in good investigative work even back
in 1991, and suggested the fire could have been the result of natural
causes, pointing to a space heater in the children's room.

An important piece of evidence at Willingham's trial came from a
prison inmate, Johnny Webb, who told the jury that Willingham had
confessed to him while in jail that he had set his house on fire with
lighter fluid. Webb temporarily retracted that testimony before the
trial - a fact that was not brought to the attention of Willingham's
lawyer.

When the New Yorker tracked down Webb recently, he asked the
reporter: "The statute of limitations has run out on perjury, hasn't
it?"

A further area of concern was the lacklustre way in which the defence
was conducted. Willingham's lawyer at the 1992 trial, David Martin,
told the New Yorker that he believed his client was guilty. "Shit,
it's incredible that anyone's even thinking about it," he said.

As Willingham lay on the gurney awaiting lethal injection, his last
words were: "I am an innocent man convicted of a crime I did not
commit." Shortly before he died he wrote to his wife that "some day,
somehow the truth will be known and my name cleared."

http://www.guardian .co.uk/world/ 2009/oct/ 01/cameron- willingham-
governor-perry- texas