Did Texas execute an innocent man?

Texas has held its first ever state-sanctioned review of an execution, and may be forced to declare it has executed an innocent man.

Last week, I wrote a blog discussing the recent dissenting opinion of US Supreme Court Justice Scalia, in which he advocates for a point at which a conviction is deemed final, and cannot be questioned, no matter what new evidence subsequently emerges. Many of those who oppose capital punishment do so on the grounds that this point should never exist: we can never be absolutely certain, and so a conviction should never be irreversible.

The danger of Justice Scalia’s suggestion is thrown into even starker relief by Texas’ first ever state-sanctioned review of an execution. New expert evidence, and an improvement in the understanding of ‘fire forensics’, may force the Texas Forensic Science Commission to conclude that the state has executed an innocent man.

Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in February 2004. He had been convicted in 1992 of the murders of his three children, who were killed in a house fire, after state fire investigators concluded that the fire had been started deliberately.

Now, five years after Willingham’s death, it appears that the deaths may have been simply a tragic accident. Expert fire scientist Craig Beyler has told the review panel that, in his view, there is no evidence that the fire in December 1991 was the result of an arson attack.

Beyler criticised the state fire investigators for failing to examine all of the house’s electrical outlets, failing to consider other potential causes of the fire, and reaching a conclusion which contradicted the testimonies of eye-witnesses. Beyler described the State Fire Marshall as seeming to be “wholly without any realistic understanding of fires and how fire injuries are created”.

Since Willingham’s execution, nine expert fire scientists have reviewed the case, and all have concluded that the investigators at the scene relied on outdated unscientific theories which were disproved in the early 1990s. The Commission, which was created in 2005 to investigate allegations of scientific negligence or misconduct, will release a decision in early 2010.

The tragedy, of course, is that whatever decision the panel reaches, it will come six years too late to be of any use to Cameron Willingham.