I guess I wasn’t expecting this.
A majority of the Texas Forensic Science Commission has tentatively concluded that there was no professional negligence or misconduct by arson investigators whose flawed work in a fatal Corsicana fire contributed to the conviction and 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham.
It would be wrong to punish investigators for following commonly held beliefs about fire conditions that are known, in hindsight, to be invalid indicators of arson, said John Bradley, chairman of a four-member panel reviewing Willingham’s case.
“We should hold people accountable based on standards that existed when they were working on these things,” Bradley said during the commission’s quarterly meeting Friday.
All four members of the investigative panel agreed with the preliminary finding, which was reached during two meetings that were closed to the public, said Dr. Sarah Kerrigan, a forensic toxicologist and director of the Sam Houston State University crime lab in Huntsville.
“The panel unanimously felt the science was flawed by today’s standards, but the question for us was, was there professional negligence or misconduct?” Kerrigan said, adding that scientific arson standards — though adopted nationally in 1992, the year Willingham was convicted — had not filtered down to the front-line investigators in Texas.
I must have lost the thread of this whole saga awhile back, because as I write this I’m not really sure I know what I was expecting to come out of this. I knew the question of Cameron Todd Willingham’s innocence wasn’t on the table as it once had been – once Rick Perry and John Bradley squashed Craig Beyler’s testimony, all that was effectively swept under the rug – but the question about whether or not the fire investigators at the time of the Willingham blaze deserved official blame or not wasn’t what I had in mind. Thinking about it now, I’m not sure why that even matters. I suppose what I anticipated was more or less the same as Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project:
Instead of focusing on the fire investigators, Scheck implored commissioners to analyze the state fire marshal’s office , which he said adopted scientifically based standards for determining when a fire is arson yet failed to reinvestigate hundreds of arson convictions obtained from investigations now known to be flawed.
“Was it the fire marshal’s office that engaged in professional neglect or misconduct?” Scheck asked. “Does the (agency) have a duty to correct any past representations that are wrong, that are scientifically invalid?”
In the end, commissioners voted to give Scheck and other interested parties three weeks to submit objections to the proposed finding.
It’s well known that many other arson convictions are based on the same shoddy “science” that got Willingham executed. If there’s no action taken to review those convictions – if the Forensic Science Commission doesn’t force the issue in whatever fashion it can – then I don’t see the point of what they’re doing. I know this wasn’t the original intent behind the creation of the FSC. Time to schedule another committee hearing, Sen. Whitmire. Grits and the Chron has more.
UPDATE: Dave Mann, who has reported extensively on arson forensics, weighs in.
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The important thing about Friday’s TFSC meeting is that they confirmed that the forensic science used to convict Todd Willingham was seriously flawed. That acknowledgement is another step towards one day determining whether Texas executed an innocent person. The TFSC will not exonerate Todd Willingham and it was of course never intended that the TFSC exonerate him or confirm his guilt, but it is possible, now that the TFSC is confirming that the forensic science used to convict him was seriously flawed, that a Court of Inquiry could now exonerate Todd Willingham just like a court posthumously exonerated Timothy Cole.
I would like to see a Court on Inquiry initiated to look at the entire Todd Willingham case.
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