The New Yorker: Trial by Fire

[mrfrapp]

Trial by Fire

Did Texas execute an innocent man?

by David Grann

The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky.

Buffie Barbee, who was eleven years old and lived two houses down, was playing in her back yard when she smelled the smoke. She ran inside and told her mother, Diane, and they hurried up the street; that’s when they saw the smoldering house and Cameron Todd Willingham standing on the front porch, wearing only a pair of jeans, his chest blackened with soot, his hair and eyelids singed. He was screaming, “My babies are burning up!” His children—Karmon and Kameron, who were one-year-old twin girls, and two-year-old Amber—were trapped inside.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann?currentPage=all

I've not come across this case before but this New Yorker story, published today, is an astonishing account of it. Well worth your time.

[Merlot]

1. Yes, a very good story...except for the ending.

Innocent man put to death by mob mentality and exonerated by science and investigation.

[mrfrapp]

2. Mob Justice

I agree, it's a textbook example of mob justice. The provable fact that witnesses changed their testimony once somebody in authority had decided it was arson, is both astonishing and terrifying. I can't criticise those witnesses but there is definitely a lesson in there somewhere.

That part of the article that really shook me appeared right at the end of piece.

Several guards strapped Willingham down with leather belts, snapping buckles across his arms and legs and chest. A medical team then inserted intravenous tubes into his arms. Each official had a separate role in the process, so that no one person felt responsible for taking a life.

Well, perhaps that's the problem. Nobody will ever feel responsible for this injustice. I'm not referring to the people who carried out the dirty-deed at the very end of this man's life, I'm talking about the lawyers, the judges and the politicians. All those people could have corrected a wrong but chose not to and instead hid behind the bureaucracy.


The article surprised me when it claimed that there isn't another concrete example of an innocent man being put to death in the USA. I find this especially hard to fathom because as a Brit I know of at least two such cases in English Law, either of which would eventually convince the British public to abolish the death penalty. They're too involved to go into here but I'm thinking of the cases of Derek Bentley and Timothy Evans. To this day, the verdict in each of those cases are a stain on justice because they have not been overturned.

I sincerely hope that Todd Willingham's death will not similarly be in vain.