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Up in Smoke

By Steve Hall

That's the title of an editorial in today's Houston Chronicle on the Todd Willingham case.  LINKCameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004 for starting a house fire in Corsicana 13 years earlier that killed his three young daughters. From the time of his arrest until a lethal injection ended his life on a prison gurney in Huntsville, Willingham maintained his innocence, refusing to enter a guilty plea at trial in exchange for a life sentence. At the time of his state-inflicted death, it appeared Willingham's fate was to be remembered as a monster who burned his children alive for no conceivable motive. With the release of a report by renowned arson expert Craig Beyler, commissioned by the Texas Forensic Science Commission, history may hold him in a very different light: the first person executed since capital punishment resumed in the United States in 1974 who was posthumously proven innocent...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on September 02, 2009 (boomark / email).