Speaking of the Innocence Project, I read this and it stuck in my craw. It is a reminder of how important it is to have journalists researching, questioning and challenging rather than just quoting and straight reporting. In a month-old New Yorker, there is Todd Willingham’s story: he wakes one night to find the entire house on fire, tries to get into his kids’ room and fails, stumbling out just before the fire reaches what’s called flashover. Witnesses report his attempts to get back into the house. Later, they change their testimony in light of arson investigators’ conclusion that he set fire to the house in order to kill his children. He is convicted and executed, but not before a concerned pen pal does some leg work and consults a munitions expert turned arson consultant who, days before the execution, submits a report to the state of Texas claiming that the arson investigators were full of shit and he is an innocent man. No dice. Willingham is treated like a child killer in prison, his ex-wife refuses to bury him next to the kids. What a nightmare.
It turns out until the mid ’90s we didn’t really know anything scientific and confirmed by experiment about fires. Read on. (Hurst is the expert, Vasquez and Fogg are the arson investigators.)
In most states, in order to be certified, investigators had to take a forty-hour course on fire investigation, and pass a written exam. Often, the bulk of an investigator’s training came on the job, learning from “old-timers” in the field, who passed down a body of wisdom about the telltale signs of arson, even though a study in 1977 warned that there was nothing in “the scientific literature to substantiate their validity.” After Hurst had reviewed Fogg and Vasquez’s list of more than twenty arson indicators, he believed that only one had any potential validity.
In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.”
The commission is reviewing his findings, and plans to release its own report next year. Some legal scholars believe that the commission may narrowly assess the reliability of the scientific evidence. There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”
The article is really worth checking out.
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