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| Cameron Todd Willingham-Its Nearly Official:Texas Did Eecute Innocent Man | |
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| Topic Started: Aug 31 2009, 05:51 PM (870 Views) | |
| kbp | Oct 27 2009, 10:07 PM Post #16 |
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Grits... Scott has another good post on the case, with links to other good stuff also. |
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| Sydney Carton | Oct 29 2009, 11:31 AM Post #17 |
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Thanks, kpb.I didn't have Mrs Willingham's new and revised version when I last posted,However,when her brother gave his version (as recorded in my last printed link) she definitely denied it-and this was(I believe) long after she definitively split with her husband and came down on the prosecution's side.I think we must therefore come to the conclusion that her current statement is willfully false. And in case you readers haven't had enough of arson skullduggery with the Willingham case. Read here for a chronicle of thirty(count them) thirty more people allegedly falsely convicted of arson murders between 1970 and 2001.(No report on cases during the last eight years is yet available) but the Innocence Project is said to have several from the latest period (including more Texas cases) under investigation. http://www.victimsofthestate.org/CC/AM.htm And here is Stacey's new and revised version of what happened in history.Judge for yourselves against the above evidence and appended commentaries from the sharpest bloggers. http://www.star-telegram.com/texas/story/1709042.html Edited by Sydney Carton, Oct 29 2009, 11:40 AM.
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| kbp | Oct 30 2009, 08:15 AM Post #18 |
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I believe the death penalty is justified for the crimes it applies to, knowing I'd prolly do it myself should the victim be close family, but... ...with 150+ having been released, that were sentenced for death at some point, I do not trust the system that uses the death penalty. I have only given a few hours to the Willingham case, mainly reviewing what the NEW experts have said of the arson evidence and trial expert testimony, along with quite a few articles (media & blogs). Something that bothers me is the reaction of the prosecutor. Always general statements, like "other evidence", the jury blah, blah, blah, some statement to infer that the trial expert was qualified... Always a spin to avoid even debating specific details that could reveal whether or not the state executed an innocent man. |
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| Sydney Carton | Nov 2 2009, 05:44 PM Post #19 |
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I missed this one from "Eggs and Brains" Wednesday, October 14, 2009 Perry attorneys: Willingham arson probe "waste of money" The old saw about "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up" means that the governor is desperate to hide the fact that he let an innocent man be executed. Lawyers representing Gov. Rick Perry on two occasions grilled Austin lawyer Sam Bassett on the activities of his Texas Forensic Science Commission, telling him its probe into a controversial Corsicana arson case was inappropriate and opining that the hiring of a nationally known fire expert was a “waste of state money,” the ousted commission chairman said Tuesday. Bassett, who served two two-year terms as commission chairman before Perry replaced him on Sept. 30, said he was so concerned about what he considered “pressure” from the lawyers that he conferred with an aide to state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, who reassured him “the commission was doing what it's supposed to do.” ... Perry spokeswoman Allison Castle confirmed the lawyers met with Bassett, but only for routine, informational purposes. “They did not ask him to discontinue this review,” she said. No, I'm sure they didn't. They just told him it was a "waste of state money". And made a few other 'suggestions' that left Bassett with the distinct impression that he was being "pressured" to drop the investigation. |
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| Sydney Carton | Nov 2 2009, 05:54 PM Post #20 |
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And here's a televised interview with a juror who now has all kinds of doubts about her verdict .She was once surprised that she was let on the jury in view of her family's close relationship with the local fire marshal but she is not surprised in retrospect. http://stopexecutions.blogspot.com/2009/10/video-of-cnns-account-of-todd.html |
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| Sydney Carton | Nov 2 2009, 06:38 PM Post #21 |
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Here is more on Stacey's credibility from the Chicago Tribune of October 26th. Stacy Kuykendall, the ex-wife of Cameron Todd Willingham, said in a statement to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram published Sunday that Willingham told her he was upset by threats to divorce him after the new year. The fire that killed the couple's three girls was Dec. 23, 1991. Her last threat to divorce him, she said in a statement, occurred the night before the fire. "He said if I didn't have my girls I couldn't leave him and that I could never have Amber or the twins with anyone else but him," according to the statement from Kuykendall to the newspaper. Willingham went to his death proclaiming his innocence. And over the years, she has offered differing accounts. snip The first word of a confession came just before the execution, when Kuykendall's brother signed an affidavit in which he said that she told the family that, during the prison visit about two weeks before the execution in 2004, Willingham made a confession. But in a story in the local newspaper after the prison visit, she made no mention of a confession. In fact, she told the paper Willingham stuck to his story about his actions during the fire. In a brief interview at her home in 2004, Kuykendall told the Tribune Willingham never made such an admission. She confirmed that this year to a reporter from the New Yorker magazine. Her statement that he confessed -- and that he said he set the fire because she threatened to divorce him -- also conflicts with other accounts that she has provided. Eight days after the fire, in an interview with fire investigators and police, Kuykendall said that she and Willingham had not argued for at least two weeks and she made no mention of a threat the night before the fire to divorce him. On that night, she told authorities, the couple went to a Kmart and picked up family photographs that she intended to give as Christmas presents. She failed to mention a threat of divorce in a second interview as well, and under oath at the punishment phase of Willingham's trial said he never would have hurt their three girls. Kuykendall could not be reached for comment. |
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| kbp | Nov 2 2009, 09:21 PM Post #22 |
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Another Corsicana, TX story
Edited by kbp, Nov 2 2009, 09:21 PM.
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| Sydney Carton | Nov 6 2009, 06:41 PM Post #23 |
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Once again an important story which is difficullt to pigeon hole but deserves to be pondered a wide readership.So since it coomes from a Texas justice group,I will append to this popular thread. The Justice Project http://www.thejusticeproject.org/ I thought I had heard about every possible piece of forensic malfeasance but this one landed like a kick to the stomach: "Recent studies have demonstrated the risk of inadvertent bias affecting the outcome ..." of fingerprinting identifications. "One 2006 study in the Journal of Forensic Identification asked experienced analysts to evaluate a series of fingerprints to determine if they matched. These analysts believed they were examining prints for an open, unsolved case, but they were in fact re-examining prints that they had previously analyzed accurately. The prints were given to the analysts along with artificial contextual information, such as the fact that the suspect had confessed. In cases where analysts were given contextual information about the fingerprints, they were wrong in almost seventeen percent of the cases." Prior to DNA discoveries,fingerpriniting was recorded as the one infalliable mode of identification(save in a single case which involved identical twins).Now it comes out that the fingerprints are no better than the quite erratic(17% off!) expert doing the identifying. How many more contested identity cases should now be up for review? Again,we thank Steve Gilmore for the link.Despite(or perhaps because of) his own legal frustrations,Steve has become quite active on behalf of the rights of others. Edited by Sydney Carton, Nov 6 2009, 06:46 PM.
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| Quasimodo | Nov 6 2009, 07:15 PM Post #24 |
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Fingerprint identification requires a certain number of identical points to be matched up. With regard to using "ear" prints (as is sometimes done in Europe) http://www.forensic-evidence.com/site/ID/DNAdisputesEarlID.html Pristine ear measurements, or carefully recorded ear photographs, discern many details that are nevertheless easily distorted when the soft and highly flexible ear skin is impressed against a smooth surface to produce a frequently blurred and partial two-dimensional image of an essentially three-dimensional, malleable portion of the human skin. By the "proper" application of different degrees of pressure in taking ear impressions, one may likely produce partial latent ear images of different persons that are indistinguishable and appear to provide a sought-after "match." (snip) "The expert evidence presented by scientists testifying for the defense at the appeal hearings in 2002 agreed that ear print examinations could be a useful police investigative tool, and could be used to positively eliminate an individual, but ought not to be used as evidence that the defendant was the perpetrator of a crime." I guess that many false IDs are made with "partial" fingerprints, which the "expert" then either "tends to believe" is a match, depending on how certain he and the police are that they have the right man... |
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| Sydney Carton | Nov 13 2009, 05:45 PM Post #25 |
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Forensics panel overhaul may delay arson inquiry for years, ex-official says 12:00 AM CST on Thursday, November 12, 2009 By ROBERT T. GARRETT / The Dallas Morning News rtgarrett@dallasnews.com AUSTIN – The pending overhaul of a state forensic science panel could delay by two years or more its review of the arson investigation that led to the 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, the panel's former head said Wednesday. Sam Bassett, an Austin criminal defense lawyer, said Gov. Rick Perry's newly appointed chairman of the Texas Forensic Science Commission wants to spend too much time rewriting rules and standards for the fledgling panel. "The commission doesn't need to evolve into a large, bureaucratic state agency to carry out its mission," Bradley warned in an e-mail to reporters. He said a complaint about junk science used in the Willingham case, filed with the commission three years ago, could drag into 2011 "or beyond." Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley, tapped by Perry to replace Bassett on Sept. 30, said Bassett wants to deflect attention from his own shortcomings. "Bassett utterly failed to adopt even a definition of negligence or misconduct to be applied to investigations of forensic science," Bradley wrote in an e-mail to The Dallas Morning News. "In the scientific world, that amounts to incompetence." Bassett responded that he won't engage in "dialogue which is personally attacking," and that he and fellow members of the commission "did the best job we could under the circumstances." The commission was thrust into the spotlight when Perry replaced several members just before it was to hear from an arson expert who questions the conviction of Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for a Corsicana house fire that killed his three daughters. That expert, and others, have said that the methods used to identify the 1991 fire as arson have since been discredited, prompting some to question whether Texas executed an innocent man and Perry was trying to impede further investigation of the case. Perry, who reviewed the case and allowed the execution to proceed, and others say there was ample other evidence of Willingham's guilt. Perry spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger said Wednesday that "justice was served" in the Willingham case and "the governor has complete confidence in John Bradley, who is a capable, experienced attorney well-suited to move the Forensic Science Commission forward." |
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