More on Willingham

A week ago, I posted about an article that appeared recently in The New Yorker detailing the conviction, appeals, and eventual execution of Cameron Todd Willingham for allegedly starting a fire that killed his three small children. I still believe that this is an important piece of reporting that needs to be read and shared.

On August 28, John Jackson, who was one of the prosecutors in the Willingham case and who is now a federal judge, published an op-ed piece in the Corsica Daily Sun, which is the local newpaper in Corsica Texas, where the Willingham fire occurred. Jackson, obviously, takes the opportunity to defend himself:

The Willingham trial has become a sort of cause celebre by anti-death penalty proponents because it seems to be an example of outmoded scientific techniques which led to a miscarriage of justice. In fact, the trial testimony...contains overwhelming evidence of guilt completely independent of the undeniably flawed forensic report.

Jackson goes on to list seven points that are supposed to prove that justice was served in the case.

The author of the New Yorker article, David Grann, defends himself by offering a point-by-point rebuttal of Jackson's claims. Both Jackson's letter and Grann's response are worth reading...neither is very long.

One of my favorite pieces in this back-and-forth is when Jackson reminds his readers that Willingham refused to take a lie detector test which could prove his innocence:

Consistent with typical Navarro County death penalty practice, Willingham was offered the opportunity to eliminate himself as a suspect by polygraph examination. Such opportunity was rejected in the most vulgar and insulting manner...

Grann responds:

I do not know if this is true, though it may be. After Willingham was charged with murder, he stopped coöperating with authorities. (On death row, Willingham wrote to several legal organizations asking them if they could give him a polygraph so that he could prove his innocence.) But even if he refused to take a polygraph after he was arrested, polygraphs are notoriously unreliable, and are not admissible in a court of law. As a result, defense attorneys routinely do not let their clients take polygraphs. Ernest Willis, who I discuss in my piece, was also convicted of committing arson, in a case that was eerily similar to Willingham’s. He had taken a polygraph, and the results were interpreted by police and the prosecutor as a sign that he was guilty. Evidence later emerged, however, that he had not set the fire, and he was exonerated and released, after seventeen years on death row. The idea that a lie-detector test (or the refusal to take one) could be considered evidence cuts to the core of the problems in the Willingham case: a reliance on unreliable and unsound scientific techniques. (emphasis mine)

I would add one piece to Grann's rebuttal. Jackson states in the conclusion to his column that:

The Willingham case was charged as a multiple child murder, and not an arson-murder to achieve capital status. I am convinced that in the absence of any arson testimony, the outcome of the trial would have been unchanged, a fact that did not escape the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

His argument here is that, even if Willingham didn't set the fire, he would still be eligible for the death penalty because the "crime" involved the "murder" of multiple children. The point that he is blatantly missing is that, if there was no fire, then the deaths of multiple children would not have occurred. I'm assuming that Judge Jackson is intelligent enough to see how flawed his logic is and am left thinking that he's simply hoping that his readers won't notice. The emperor is naked.

At some point, the people involved in the prosecution of this case are going to run out of excuses to hide behind and admit that they most likely executed an innocent man. And when that happens, we as a society will have to come to finally look at capital punishment as the barbaric practice that it really is.

Until then, I'm thankful people like Andrew Sullivan for spreading the word about stories like this.