Strictly speaking, you can’t prove that Cameron Todd Willingham was innocent. All we can say is that there’s absolutely no plausible evidence that he set his house on fire and burned his three kids to death.
But the fire investigation team put a case together that would persuade a jury, and everyone around Willingham — his neighbors, the witnesses, even eventually his ex-wife — became convinced he was guilty. Without any conscious lying, or so I assume, people’s memories were recreated in a way that made Willingham seem guilty.
A strength of David Grann’s fascinating New Yorker article is that he does show how the case for arson was persuasive:
[Fogg] was soon joined on the case by one of the state’s leading arson sleuths, a deputy fire marshal named Manuel Vasquez, who has since died. Short, with a paunch, Vasquez had investigated more than twelve hundred fires. […] Vasquez, who had previously worked in Army intelligence, had several maxims of his own. One was “Fire does not destroy evidence—it creates it.”[…]
As he and Fogg removed some of the clutter, they noticed deep charring along the base of the walls. Because gases become buoyant when heated, flames ordinarily burn upward. But Vasquez and Fogg observed that the fire had burned extremely low down, and that there were peculiar char patterns on the floor, shaped like puddles.
Vasquez’s mood darkened. He followed the “burn trailer”—the path etched by the fire—which led from the hallway into the children’s bedroom. Sunlight filtering through the broken windows illuminated more of the irregularly shaped char patterns. A flammable or combustible liquid doused on a floor will cause a fire to concentrate in these kinds of pockets, which is why investigators refer to them as “pour patterns” or “puddle configurations.”
The fire had burned through layers of carpeting and tile and plywood flooring. Moreover, the metal springs under the children’s beds had turned white—a sign that intense heat had radiated beneath them. Seeing that the floor had some of the deepest burns, Vasquez deduced that it had been hotter than the ceiling, which, given that heat rises, was, in his words, “not normal.”
Perception is everything. Vasquez and Fogg perceived themselves as smart, experienced investigators applying real knowledge of how fires worked. And once they had convinced the cops, everyone else began perceiving Willingham as guilty, as well. Memories were rebuilt and altered to conform to the new consensus:
In Diane Barbee’s initial statement to authorities, she had portrayed Willingham as “hysterical,” and described the front of the house exploding. But on January 4th, after arson investigators began suspecting Willingham of murder, Barbee suggested that he could have gone back inside to rescue his children, for at the outset she had seen only “smoke coming from out of the front of the house”—smoke that was not “real thick.”
An even starker shift occurred with Father Monaghan’s testimony. In his first statement, he had depicted Willingham as a devastated father who had to be repeatedly restrained from risking his life. Yet, as investigators were preparing to arrest Willingham, he concluded that Willingham had been too emotional (“He seemed to have the type of distress that a woman who had given birth would have upon seeing her children die”); and he expressed a “gut feeling” that Willingham had “something to do with the setting of the fire.”
And, of course, a jailhouse informant told the cops that Willingham had confessed the crime to him. Jailhouse informants are involved in a huge proportion of the false convictions I’ve read about; they’re notoriously dishonest, but that doesn’t keep prosecutors from using them.
When I recently asked Webb, who was released from prison two years ago, about the turnabout and why Willingham would have confessed to a virtual stranger, he said that he knew only what “the dude told me.” After I pressed him, he said, “It’s very possible I misunderstood what he said.” Since the trial, Webb has been given an additional diagnosis, bipolar disorder. “Being locked up in that little cell makes you kind of crazy,” he said. “My memory is in bits and pieces. I was on a lot of medication at the time. Everyone knew that.” He paused, then said, “The statute of limitations has run out on perjury, hasn’t it?”
And that was the case against Willingham.
But it turns out, a lot of the things experienced arson investigators believe are nonsense; it’s a nice theory backed up with some common sense, but it’s contradicted by scientific experiments. It’s intuitive to think that puddle patterns on the floor prove that someone poured flammable liquid on the floor to set the fire. It makes sense. But it’s not true. Grann describes an experimental fire set by arson investigators:
After the fire was extinguished, the investigators inspected the hallway and living room. On the floor were irregularly shaped burn patterns that perfectly resembled pour patterns and puddle configurations. It turned out that these classic signs of arson can also appear on their own…
All the other evidence of arson turned out to be based on myths about how fire behaves — myths that arson investigators probably honestly believed were science.
For me, the blame for Cameron Todd Willingham’s execution lie with the Texas parole board, and with then-governor Rick Perry.
The vote was unanimous. Reaves could not offer an explanation: the board deliberates in secret, and its members are not bound by any specific criteria. The board members did not even have to review Willingham’s materials, and usually don’t debate a case in person; rather, they cast their votes by fax—a process that has become known as “death by fax.” Between 1976 and 2004, when Willingham filed his petition, the State of Texas had approved only one application for clemency from a prisoner on death row. A Texas appellate judge has called the clemency system “a legal fiction.” Reaves said of the board members, “They never asked me to attend a hearing or answer any questions.”
The Innocence Project obtained, through the Freedom of Information Act, all the records from the governor’s office and the board pertaining to Hurst’s report. “The documents show that they received the report, but neither office has any record of anyone acknowledging it, taking note of its significance, responding to it, or calling any attention to it within the government,” Barry Scheck said. “The only reasonable conclusion is that the governor’s office and the Board of Pardons and Paroles ignored scientific evidence.”
But I also blame the voters, who find this system acceptable, and if anything seem to prefer it. Not that they want innocent people put to death, exactly. But they want a system that executes people surely, and without any namby-pamby concerns about new evidence or due process. They don’t want to elect anyone who seems “soft on crime,” and in practice softness on crime means questioning the death penalty, or its application, in any way at all.
Nothing in the system would reward a governor for appointing a board who carefully considers claims of innocence. Nothing in the system would reward a prosecutor who declined to use jailhouse snitches. And nothing in the system would reward a prosecutor, or a police chief, who declined to use arson investigators who don’t actually have any scientific basis for their beliefs about evidence and arson.
Nothing in our system will in any way punish a single one of the many officials who made the decisions that led to an almost certainly innocent man’s execution.
Cameron Todd Willingham wasn’t a saint; he beat his wife, among other crimes. But there’s no reason to believe he set a fire to burn his children to death. And he was executed. There’s something wrong with that. But I doubt it’ll ever be fixed.
@Avvaa: I'm not sure even WASP male immigrants are welcome. There have been several tourists who have been detained because…