Justice for an executed man delayed

[nuclearfm]

This could be easily in the political forum. However, it's so justified and outrageously ignored it just needs attention and not so much debate.

t9KQuDAKiz4

[angel_luv]

Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

[PM5K]

I never liked rick perry anyway, so fuck him.

[BlackSwordsMan]

that's so shitty

[nuclearfm]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann




The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky.

Buffie Barbee, who was eleven years old and lived two houses down, was playing in her back yard when she smelled the smoke. She ran inside and told her mother, Diane, and they hurried up the street; that’s when they saw the smoldering house and Cameron Todd Willingham standing on the front porch, wearing only a pair of jeans, his chest blackened with soot, his hair and eyelids singed. He was screaming, “My babies are burning up!” His children—Karmon and Kameron, who were one-year-old twin girls, and two-year-old Amber—were trapped inside.

Willingham told the Barbees to call the Fire Department, and while Diane raced down the street to get help he found a stick and broke the children’s bedroom window. Fire lashed through the hole. He broke another window; flames burst through it, too, and he retreated into the yard, kneeling in front of the house. A neighbor later told police that Willingham intermittently cried, “My babies!” then fell silent, as if he had “blocked the fire out of his mind.”

Diane Barbee, returning to the scene, could feel intense heat radiating off the house. Moments later, the five windows of the children’s room exploded and flames “blew out,” as Barbee put it. Within minutes, the first firemen had arrived, and Willingham approached them, shouting that his children were in their bedroom, where the flames were thickest. A fireman sent word over his radio for rescue teams to “step on it.”

More men showed up, uncoiling hoses and aiming water at the blaze. One fireman, who had an air tank strapped to his back and a mask covering his face, slipped through a window but was hit by water from a hose and had to retreat. He then charged through the front door, into a swirl of smoke and fire. Heading down the main corridor, he reached the kitchen, where he saw a refrigerator blocking the back door.

Todd Willingham, looking on, appeared to grow more hysterical, and a police chaplain named George Monaghan led him to the back of a fire truck and tried to calm him down. Willingham explained that his wife, Stacy, had gone out earlier that morning, and that he had been jolted from sleep by Amber screaming, “Daddy! Daddy!”

“My little girl was trying to wake me up and tell me about the fire,” he said, adding, “I couldn’t get my babies out.”

While he was talking, a fireman emerged from the house, cradling Amber. As she was given C.P.R., Willingham, who was twenty-three years old and powerfully built, ran to see her, then suddenly headed toward the babies’ room. Monaghan and another man restrained him. “We had to wrestle with him and then handcuff him, for his and our protection,” Monaghan later told police. “I received a black eye.” One of the first firemen at the scene told investigators that, at an earlier point, he had also held Willingham back. “Based on what I saw on how the fire was burning, it would have been crazy for anyone to try and go into the house,” he said.

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Willingham was taken to a hospital, where he was told that Amber—who had actually been found in the master bedroom—had died of smoke inhalation. Kameron and Karmon had been lying on the floor of the children’s bedroom, their bodies severely burned. According to the medical examiner, they, too, died from smoke inhalation.

News of the tragedy, which took place on December 23, 1991, spread through Corsicana. A small city fifty-five miles northeast of Waco, it had once been the center of Texas’s first oil boom, but many of the wells had since dried up, and more than a quarter of the city’s twenty thousand inhabitants had fallen into poverty. Several stores along the main street were shuttered, giving the place the feel of an abandoned outpost.

Willingham and his wife, who was twenty-two years old, had virtually no money. Stacy worked in her brother’s bar, called Some Other Place, and Willingham, an unemployed auto mechanic, had been caring for the kids. The community took up a collection to help the Willinghams pay for funeral arrangements.

Fire investigators, meanwhile, tried to determine the cause of the blaze. (Willingham gave authorities permission to search the house: “I know we might not ever know all the answers, but I’d just like to know why my babies were taken from me.”) Douglas Fogg, who was then the assistant fire chief in Corsicana, conducted the initial inspection. He was tall, with a crew cut, and his voice was raspy from years of inhaling smoke from fires and cigarettes. He had grown up in Corsicana and, after graduating from high school, in 1963, he had joined the Navy, serving as a medic in Vietnam, where he was wounded on four occasions. He was awarded a Purple Heart each time. After he returned from Vietnam, he became a firefighter, and by the time of the Willingham blaze he had been battling fire—or what he calls “the beast”—for more than twenty years, and had become a certified arson investigator. “You learn that fire talks to you,” he told me.

He 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. Arson investigators have always been considered a special breed of detective. In the 1991 movie “Backdraft,” a heroic arson investigator says of fire, “It breathes, it eats, and it hates. The only way to beat it is to think like it. To know that this flame will spread this way across the door and up across the ceiling.” Vasquez, who had previously worked in Army intelligence, had several maxims of his own. One was “Fire does not destroy evidence—it creates it.” Another was “The fire tells the story. I am just the interpreter.” He cultivated a Sherlock Holmes-like aura of invincibility. Once, he was asked under oath whether he had ever been mistaken in a case. “If I have, sir, I don’t know,” he responded. “It’s never been pointed out.”


continued on page

[nuclearfm]

The prosecutor in this case actually said this man was a devil worshiper for having "Iron Maiden" posters....


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[desflood]

What kind of sick, sadistic individual would name their daughter "Buffie Barbee"?

[angel_luv]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann?currentPage=15


On February 13th, four days before Willingham was scheduled to be executed, he got a call from Reaves, his attorney. Reaves told him that the fifteen members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which reviews an application for clemency and had been sent Hurst’s report, had made their decision.

“What is it?” Willingham asked.

“I’m sorry,” Reaves said. “They denied your petition.”



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.”

That's sickening, if that is true.

[clambake]

deciding on a man's life or death is a god given talent.

[BacktoBasics]

Guess what happens next?

NOTHING. This kind of shit happens every day and there isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it. No matter how hard anyone tries to hold another man accountable for reprehensible actions the result is always the same.

Nothing.

[Spurminator]

Guess what happens next?

NOTHING. This kind of shit happens every day and there isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it. No matter how hard anyone tries to hold another man accountable for reprehensible actions the result is always the same.

Nothing.

Yeah but it's usually a black guy that got executed. This story might have legs.

[nuclearfm]

Guess what happens next?

NOTHING. This kind of shit happens every day and there isn't a damn thing anyone can do about it. No matter how hard anyone tries to hold another man accountable for reprehensible actions the result is always the same.

Nothing.

I disagree with this, the prosecutor believed this man was a devil worshiper from some Iron Maiden posters. There are enough vigilante that will seek justice legally or not.

[BacktoBasics]

I disagree with this, the prosecutor believed this man was a devil worshiper from some Iron Maiden posters. There are enough vigilante that will seek justice legally or not.Nothing will happen.

[Rogue]

Nothing will happen.
I agree. Next time those officers should concoct some better reasons to amnesty him IMHO.

[PM5K]

The truth will come out and eventually this case will be an interesting movie and Governor Perry will be known at the first Governor in U.S. history to preside over the execution of an innocent man.

[mouse]

Even if the man is innocent or not why would Perry act like a dick head? He had no problem using the News media when he needed votes. I guess since Bush and his crew can get off lying to the American people so we can invade Iraq, Gov Perry can rest easy justice doesn't exist anymore in the USA.

[CosmicCowboy]

You guys realize that this is pure death-penalty politics, right? This case has been tried, appealed, appealed again, appealed again and even had 4 trips to the Supreme Court. Even the guys original lawyer has said he thought the guy was guilty and during the trial he tried, but based on the physical evidence could not find a single fire expert that would testify that it even MIGHT have been an accident.

Now, years later all these forensic guys using "modern" theories (but no burned house or evidence to examine) can say that it wasn't arson? C'mon guys... there was lighter fluid sprayed all over the floor at the only exit to the house...tests after the fire confirmed it.

They are just twisting facts and trying to make this guy the poster boy for abolishing the death penalty.

[CosmicCowboy]

Did you guys know he was a serial wife beater and kicked his pregnant wife in the stomach trying to get her to mis-carry? Oh yeah..that loving father really wanted those kids...

[Kermit]

Did you guys know he was a serial wife beater and kicked his pregnant wife in the stomach trying to get her to mis-carry? Oh yeah..that loving father really wanted those kids...

his wife testified otherwise. perry's cya clause.

[CosmicCowboy]

his wife testified otherwise. perry's cya clause.

She only testified that he didn't hit the kids. It was never denied that he kicked his wife's ass.

[Kermit]

Did you guys know he was a serial wife beater and kicked his pregnant wife in the stomach trying to get her to mis-carry?

again, there is no evidence of this happening.


She only testified that he didn't hit the kids.
weird behavior from a man who wanted them dead.

[CosmicCowboy]

but she beat his ass too

His last words before he got the needle was to tell his wife "I hope you rot in hell" and then he tried to shoot the finger at her.

[Kermit]

C'mon guys... there was lighter fluid sprayed all over the floor at the only exit to the house...tests after the fire confirmed it.

this is also in question.

[Kermit]

Over the past five years, the Willingham case has been reviewed by nine of the nation's top fire scientists—first for the Tribune, then for the Innocence Project, and now for the commission. All concluded that the original investigators relied on outdated theories and folklore to justify the determination of arson. The only other evidence of significance against Willingham was twice recanted testimony[1] by another inmate who testified that Willingham had confessed to him. Jailhouse snitches are viewed with skepticism in the justice system, so much so that some jurisdictions have restrictions against their use- chicago tribune

yup, without a doubt.

[Spursfan092120]

Reminds me of this case...if you don't know anything about it, do yourself a favor and study up...if you think our justice system is perfect...this will change your mind.

http://www.freewestmemphis3.org/

[Kermit]

no one said it was perfect, but there are safeguards to make sure this shit doesn't happen. luckily, none of the memphis three have been executed yet. this guy wasn't so lucky. instead of trying to own it and make sure it doesn't happen again, perry has tried to sweep it under the rug in an attempt to make it go away and it's coming back to bite him in the ass. his only saving grace is that his opponent probably would've done the same thing and she's keeping her mouth shut for the most part.

[PM5K]

Todd Willingham's wife never testified during the trial. She did testify during the penalty phase on his behalf.

She had also believed in his innocence almost up until he was executed, and as his last wish he'd asked her to spread his ashes over the graves of his children, which she denied him, she also would not testify to the Clemency Board on his behalf so his feelings towards her and pretty understandable, but her feelings after having been told her husband was guilty for over a decade are pretty understandable, you have to just accept what you can't change so you can move on.

Appeals don't look at new evidence, they simply make sure that procedures were followed at trial, so saying this case had been appealed many times isn't saying much.

The only place accelerant was found was near the front door, where three or four bottles of lighter fluid were placed that were used for cooking.