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Innocent but Dead

By "Persian Cowboy"

That's the title of Bob Herbert's column in today's New York Times.There is a long and remarkable article in the current New Yorker about a man who was executed in Texas in 2004 for deliberately setting a fire that killed his three small children. Rigorous scientific analysis has since shown that there was no evidence that the fire in a one-story, wood frame house in Corsicana was the result of arson, as the authorities had alleged.In other words, it was an accident. No crime had occurred.Cameron Todd Willingham, who refused to accept a guilty plea that would have spared his life, and who insisted until his last painful breath that he was innocent, had in fact been telling the truth all along.It was inevitable that some case in which a clearly innocent person had been put to death would come to light...continue to full post

Full post as published by Texas Death Penalty Blog on September 01, 2009 (boomark / email).