Results matching “willingham”

The anti-death-penalty crowd very earnestly desires a case of a demonstrably innocent person actually executed, and if they can't find a real one they will just invent one.  Employing the Lenin Principle, if they can simply repeat enough times that Cameron Todd Willingham was innocent of burning to death his baby daughters, he will become innocent.  The original New Yorker article on the case was a shameless piece of propaganda, as demonstrated in this post.  After the first year, it seemed like we were making some progress on balanced coverage, as noted in this post, but as time went on the only people interested in the case were those with an anti-death-penalty agenda, and that has become the overwhelmingly dominant narrative.

In their quest, they went after the original prosecutor in the case for a claimed Brady disclosure violation.  Interestingly, in Texas you can take a bar discipline case to a local jury, so that is what former prosecutor (and now judge) John Jackson did.

Regrettably, the only coverage on the decision I can find is by the Marshall Project, an advocacy group masquerading as journalists.  So we have to take the story with a heaping tablespoon of salt.  The WaPo is printing this report instead of devoting actual journalism resources to it.  Update:  Michael Kormos has this article on the verdict in the Corsicana Daily Sun, the local paper for the venue.  Regrettably, the article has no information on the trial or the evidence presented that convinced the jury the charges were groundless.

We are about to find out.

Back in August, as noted here, the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies asked Californians in simple terms if they were in favor of the change Proposition 66 will make.  The result was 3-1 in favor.

With no good argument against the initiative, the opponents -- with more money than the supporters -- have resorted to deceit.   Christine Mai-Duc and Allison Wisk report for the LA Times on campaign mailers, one of which is the notorious Willingham mailer by the No on 66 campaign we have discussed here before.  In order to bring a Texas case into the discussion, the No on 66 campaign tells the bald-faced lie that 66 is "modeled after laws in Texas."  There is no truth to that whatever.

Polls on 62 are mixed, and polls on 66 are very few.  The Field Poll is one of the few, but it simply read the respondents the confusing ballot label.  So we really don't know where things will come out tonight.

Bob Egelko has this article in the SF Chron on the California death penalty initiatives.  The story includes this gem regarding the reform initiative, Proposition 66:

"It's modeled after the laws in Texas, where we know innocent people have been executed," said Elisabeth Semel, director of the Death Penalty Clinic at UC Berkeley Law School. Death penalty supporters heatedly dispute that claim, but Semel cited the Texas case of Cameron Todd Willingham, executed in 2004 for killing his three children in a fire that a series of experts, including one hired by the state, have since concluded was most likely accidental.

One might read that paragraph to say that supporters dispute the claim that Texas has executed innocent people but concede the claim that the initiative "is modeled after the laws of Texas."  Not so.

Unlike Ms. Semel, I actually know the answer.  I wrote the draft of the procedural reform provisions of the initiative, and I participated in the meetings where the draft was revised.  Not once did I refer to or even think of the laws of Texas in drafting the reform.  Not once did anyone in the committee meetings ever refer to Texas as a model for the initiative.

The system that would be established by the final product bears little resemblance to Texas CCP Article 11.071.  It resembles much more the federal system of 28 U.S.C. §2255.  Ms. Semel just made it up.

We have discussed Willingham before on this blog, so I won't rehash it here.

The death penalty came up briefly in the Clinton-Sanders debate.  Even though it came second, let me quote Sanders first:

MADDOW: Senator Sanders, you have singled out the death penalty, and Senator Clinton's support for the death penalty, as an issue that makes it hard to consider as progressive in your mind...

SANDERS: ... Look, I hear what the Secretary said, and I understand, but look, there are -- all of us know that we have seen in recent years horrible, horrible crimes. It's hard to imagine how people can do, bomb, and kill 168 people in Oklahoma City, or do the Boston Marathon bombing, but this is what I believe, and for a couple of reasons.

Number one, too many innocent people, including minorities, African Americans, have been executed when they were not guilty. That's number one. We have to be very careful about making sure about that.

Too many?  Name one, Senator Sanders.  Name one demonstrably innocent person executed in the modern capital punishment era (1976+).

For many years, Roger Coleman was the poster boy as the absolutely, incontrovertibly innocent person wrongfully executed.  Then improved DNA technology conclusively proved him guilty.  Oops.  Then they latched on Cameron Willingham, a case where the arson evidence was shown to be inconclusive.  (Contrary to myth, the arson evidence does not affirmatively show accidental fire.)  When AP contacted the jurors, every one they could find said that would have made no difference, because it never was the forensic evidence that convinced them in the first place.  The most damning evidence against Willingham was his own words and actions, all of which still stand.

"We have to be very careful about making sure about that."  Correct.  And we are.

Andrew Dugan has this report for the Gallup Poll with the above title.

Still, there is no denying that the opponents have made inroads.  The number of people answering "not in favor" to Gallup's poorly worded basic question is the highest it has been since before Furman v. Georgia in 1972, when the Supreme Court's audacious act of judicial activism precipitated a sharp drop in opposition and a sharp jump in support.

On the better-worded, but still less than ideal, question of whether the death penalty is presently imposed too often, about right, or not often enough, the sum of about right and not enough is still 2/3 of the population.  That remains a powerful supermajority in favor.  Dugan writes:

By many metrics -- the number of states that have banned the death penalty, the number of executions carried out or the actual population of inmates currently on death row -- the death penalty appears to be losing popularity in statehouses and courthouses across the country. But the public at large continues to support the use of the death penalty. A majority continue to assess the punishment as applied fairly, and a plurality wish it were applied more often.

The biggest problem is that the other side has all the megaphones.  Academia enforces adherence to anti-death-penalty dogma.  We saw that when the economists who dared to publish studies showing deterrence were hounded out of the field.  In journalism, balanced reporting is the exception, and propaganda pieces on the anti side dominate.

Yet despite all that, the side of justice still has two-thirds.  It's both discouraging and heartening at the side time.

Bill noted earlier the case of the State Bar of Texas pressing charges against the former prosecutor in the Willingham matter, and the Washington Post's astonishing publication of an article written by a partisan in the case without identifying him as such.

Now we have this article in the Corsicana Daily Sun.  This is the local paper for the scene of the crime (Navarro County, on I-45, the second county south of Dallas) and the most reliable source of objective reporting in the matter.  This article says it is "from staff and wire reports."

Evidently in Texas bar discipline cases are referred to county courts. 

The case has been assigned to Judge David A. Farr, a family court judge in Houston, but is expected to be heard in Navarro County. Jackson's attorney said he has requested a jury trial.

"We're very confident that when a jury sees this evidence, they will find that John Jackson has not done anything wrong," Byrne said.

Jury trial in a bar discipline matter?  Things are different in Texas.

Anyway, I am glad to see an aspect of the Willingham matter assigned to a tribunal where there is a shot at a fair hearing.  Previously, the Innocence Project tried to steer the matter to a judge leaning heavily in their favor, a proceeding I dubbed Charlie Baird's Circus.  Here is a post with links to a number of earlier posts on the subject.

Willingham's actual guilt is not the subject of the bar discipline matter, but perhaps will we get a useful airing and some factual findings out of it.

The March 18 edition of the Washington Post carried a story titled, "Prosecutor Accused of Misconduct in Disputed Texas Execution Case."  The story is about the much-heralded controversy surrounding Cameron Todd Willingham.  Willingham was executed in 2004 for murdering his three children by setting fire to his (and their) house.

I take press reports with a grain of salt, not because I think reporters are biased (although some certainly are), but because I much prefer facts about alleged crimes to be proved by the rigors of presentation in court, in particular oath-taking and cross-examination.  This is one reason that, for example, I put no great stock in one-sided "reports" that, 22 years after the fact, Cameron Todd Willingham has been "proved" innocent by "more advanced" scientific testing conducted by his partisans without oversight, scrutiny, or adversarial process of any kind.

Rosemary Lehmberg holds the office of District Attorney of Travis County, Texas because she was elected to it.  The question  --  given that she served time on a drunk driving conviction and acted like a belligerent teenager in the lockup after her arrest  --  is: How?  And the answer is an old standby, though often overlooked in the perplexity of the moment:  

Eliott C. McLaughlin reports for CNN:

More than a decade after his execution, Cameron Todd Willingham is still a pawn in the debate over the death penalty.

Opponents of capital punishment say Willingham's is a clear case of an inmate being wrongfully executed, while the original prosecutor and state of Texas have been steadfast in their assertion that Willingham should be no one's cause célèbre.

"Willingham was a psychopathic killer who murdered his three children," John H. Jackson, the former Navarro County prosecutor who handled the case in 1992, wrote in an e-mail. "He submitted to a polygraph with predictable results, he confessed the murders to his wife, the trial evidence established two prior incidents when he tried to kill his children in utero by vicious attacks on his wife."

There are many prior posts on this blog on this case.  A few of them are:

Firing Back in the Willingham Case

More on Willingham Case

Willingham's Last Words

Statement on Willingham

Stacy Kuykendall press conference

Folding the Tent on Charlie Baird's Circus

Inconclusive Willingham Report

Still Guilty

One of the staples of abolitionist lore is that we execute innocent people. Abolitionists squabble among themselves as to what the number is, although they largely coalesced around the Roger Keith Coleman innocence hoax as the star attraction.

There is a lot of buzz about a case from Corpus Christi, Texas.  Lifelong anti-death-penalty advocate James Liebman claims he has proven that Carlos DeLuna is innocent of the crime for which he was executed.  As with the Willingham case, the view from the local scene is very different from what you read in national media.  Michelle Villareal has this story in the Corpus Christi Caller Times.

CORPUS CHRISTI -- A study released Tuesday may have sparked debate about the death penalty but those closest to the case say researchers aren't raising new questions about the 1983 capital murder case and execution.

The 400-page study, "Los Tocayos Carlos," in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review argues that Carlos DeLuna wrongfully was executed in 1989.

DeLuna was convicted of fatally stabbing Wanda Lopez on Feb. 4, 1983, during a robbery of a Corpus Christi convenience store. He testified at his trial, claiming a man named Carlos Hernandez killed Lopez.

The Columbia study asserts that Hernandez committed the crime and DeLuna was innocent.

Paul Rivera, a Corpus Christi police investigator who transported DeLuna between city and county jails, said the study's researchers asked him years ago to reread the DeLuna case.

Rivera said he took his time combing through the investigation reports and transcripts. In the end, he drew the same conclusion.

"I know exactly what happened," he said. "DeLuna stabbed Wanda Lopez when she was on the phone and she was screaming for help."

Rivera, who investigated more than 200 murders in Corpus Christi, said at least nine of those people were on death row and no one questioned his investigations or methods before DeLuna's case.

DeLuna received the appropriate punishment, he said.

The US Supreme Court denied a stay of execution to Ohio triple murderer Reginald Brooks.  Four times.  Orders are here, here, here, and here.  No dissents are noted.

Kantele Franko reports for AP that the execution proceeded. There is no question of identity of the perpetrator in this case.  Brooks "fatally shot his three sons while they slept in 1982, shortly after his wife filed for divorce."

Prosecutors acknowledged Brooks was mentally ill but disputed the notions that it caused the murders or made him incompetent. They said he planned merciless killings, bought a revolver two weeks in advance, confirmed he'd be home alone with the boys, targeted them when they wouldn't resist and fled on a bus with a suitcase containing a birth certificate and personal items that could help him start a new life.

The Court also denied a stay to Florida triple murderer Oba Chandler.  Matthew Hendley has this post at the Broward-Palm Beach New Times.  The post incorrectly says the stay was denied by Justice Thomas.  Standard procedure is for stay applications to be submitted to the Justice assigned to the circuit, who then regularly refers the application to the full Court for decision, except in emergencies.  That is what happened in this case.

Update:  Alan Johnson reports in the Columbus Dispatch, "Those witnessing the execution behind glass about 10 feet away gasped but said nothing as Brooks first glared at and 'flipped off' his ex-wife, the mother of the three children he murdered nearly 30 years ago after she filed for divorce."

About a year ago, the notorious Judge Charlie Baird in Austin, Texas was proceeding with a patently illegal "court of inquiry" on the Willingham matter.  As explained in this post, the proceeding was illegal on at least three grounds.  The most important of these was that the Texas Legislature had enacted legislation specifically to prevent judge-shopping in these matters.  The law required Baird, if he thought a court of inquiry was warranted, to refer the case to the presiding judge for assignment.  Yet Baird and the Innocence Project were charging ahead anyway.  When you are on an anti-death-penalty crusade, you see, compliance with the law is optional, as is honesty.

Baird and the Innocence Project probably expected that no one would oppose them.  The DA no longer had a tangible interest in the case, as the judgment was carried out long ago.  They could present half-truths to their hand-picked favorite judge, who would then pronounce Willingham innocent and wrongly executed despite all the nonforensic evidence confirming guilt.

Well, they were wrong, as also explained in the prior post. 

Now, Janet Jacobs reports in the Corsicana Daily Sun, "Lowell Thompson, Navarro County District Attorney, was honored by his peers at the Texas District and County Attorneys Association conference last week in Corpus Christi with the Lone Star Award for his work on the Willingham case."  Congratulations on a recognition well earned.

The ever-reliable New York Times editorial page today lashes the audience at last week's Republican debate for applauding when Brian Williams tendentiously asked Rick Perry whether, among the 234 executions that have occurred on his watch, Perry had misgivings about whether any of the condemned might have beem innocent.  Perry said he did not.  The applause registered the audience's approval that a state might be so bold as to actually enforce capital punishment, which of course is the law, and quite a popular one.

The Times is aghast.  What a bunch of wahoos! 

As Michael Rushford has noted, Kent had the dubious honor of appearing on "Hardball" to answer stand-in host Ron Reagan as Reagan fired one loaded question after the next, seldom allowing a response.  The ostensible purpose of the program was to explore Gov. Rick Perry's record on executions.  The actual purpose was to stage the "Willingham-Was-Innocent" show and paint death penalty advocates as bloodlusting hoodlums, ready to string up anyone at hand, guilty or not.

I note this because the death penalty might well become an issue in Presidential politics.  While Perry has been Governor, Texas has had vastly more executions than any other state.  With President Obama confronted with the prospect of having to run on a weak and sinking economy; sustained high unemployment; runaway debt; and an approval rating headed toward Jimmy Carter levels, you don't have to be a genius to figure out that the plan will be to make the election about his opponent's views and leadership rather than his.*

This presents a wonderful and, I must say, unexpected opportunity for a national debate about capital punishment.  A candidate has seldom been handed a more one-sided issue. 

*  The President's record on issues other than criminal law is not the subject of C&C, but has recently been noted elsewhere. 

CJLF Legal Director Kent Scheidegger appeared on today's broadcast of Hardball on MSNBC to defend executions in Texas under Governor Rick Perry and the death penalty generally against Jordan Steiker, Professor at the Capital Punishment Center at the Texas University School of Law, and the show's replacement host Ron Reagan, Jr.   As expected, the Todd Willingham case, which is the "innocent execution" case de jour among DP opponents, was cited by the host as one example of Governor Perry's badness and the injustice of capital punishment.  After Kent dispatched the "are you concerned about that case?" question Reagan asked Kent the classic "how many innocent people must be executed?" question.  When Kent noted that opponents have not been able to produce one provable case of an innocent person being executed, Reagan quickly cited a number claimed by Amnesty International, then cut Kent off in mid-response.     

Brandi Grissom of the Texas Tribune has this article, also in the NYT, on Dr. Nizam Peerwani, who will now chair the Texas Forensic Science Commission.

Dr. Peerwani said he agreed with experts who testified before the board that the arson science used to convict Mr. Willingham was seriously flawed. But when asked whether Mr. Willingham was guilty or innocent, he was less definitive.

"There were other issues," Dr. Peerwani said of what led to Mr. Willingham's conviction. "There were eyewitness accounts; there were hospital and doctor testimony given and investigative findings."

The latter point is a good one to see in the NYT, even buried far down the story.  A finding that the forensic evidence originally claimed to show arson was "flawed" is not the same thing as a finding that the forensic evidence disproves arson, as Willingham's advocates so often claim.  If the forensic evidence tells us little or nothing either way, then we look to the other evidence cited by Dr. Peerwani, which continues to show guilt.

At the NYT's 538 political blog, Nate Silver has a post titled Debate Swings Door Open for Perry, Closed for Palin.  He suggests that Perry may be the potential presidential candidate best fitting the Buckley Criterion:  "the most conservative candidate who is electable."

Meanwhile, at the Houston Chronicle's political blog, Richard Dunham has this list of potential attacks on Perry by his in-state critics.  One of them, of course, is "The 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham for murder of his three children by arson, despite significant evidence that arson had not caused the fire."

Don't bother clicking on that "significant evidence" link.  It is David Grann's notorious propaganda piece in the New Yorker.  (See, e.g., this post.)

If Perry does decide to run, he will certainly need to make a more vigorous defense of the Willingham execution than he has to date.  The distinction between forensic evidence that fails to prove arson by itself and evidence that affirmatively disproves arson is vital to understanding this case, but that distinction is widely glossed over in discussions of it.  The non-forensic evidence confirming guilt has been pushed to the background when it should be front and center.  A run by Perry could be helpful in bringing all this out in more prominent form.

Chuck Lindell reports in the Austin American-Statesman:

A state commission acknowledged Thursday that fire science has improved since investigators concluded that Cameron Todd Willingham killed his three children by setting fire to his Corsicana home in 1991.

But in issuing its long-awaited draft report on the Willingham case, the Texas Forensic Science Commission reached no conclusions about whether Willingham was convicted and executed based on evidence now considered scientifically unreliable.

As we have noted on this blog before, even if the forensic evidence tells us nothing, there is much other evidence indicating Willingham's guilt.