Posted on 04/20/2005 12:42:04 PM PDT by seacapn
AUSTIN, Texas - (KRT) - With its criminal justice system the subject of intense scrutiny for a crime lab scandal and a series of wrongful convictions, a Texas state Senate committee heard testimony Tuesday about the possibility that Texas had experienced the ultimate criminal justice nightmare: the execution of an innocent person.
Fourteen months after Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in the nation's busiest death chamber, a renowned arson expert and Willingham's lawyer told the Senate Criminal Justice Committee that they believed Willingham might well have been innocent but found nobody willing to listen to their claim in the days before the execution in February 2004.
(Excerpt) Read more at kansascity.com ...
If the system gets any better at obsessing over whether the death row inmate is guilty, their won't be any reason for a death penalty at all. Which is what you want anyway.
What particularly interests me is the statement that "new investigation techniques" have negated experts' theories of how the fire started. -- I did arson investigations for about 10 years.
Note that they do not say that anything negated the theory THAT IT WAS ARSON. What looks as though it has been challenged is the ignition mechanism - match or fuse or an electrical short. But the article doesn't say.
There is no valid reason for accelerant to be poured all over the house other than arson. (Do you clean your carpets by soaking them with gasoline?) That has not been disproved or even challenged. And for him to get out of a house with gasoline-soaked floors without serious injury or smoke inhalation is most unlikely -- unless he was the arsonist. And that apparently was part of the evidence presented to the jury.
But it looks like the proponents/excuse-makers are using a question about the source of ignition to dishonestly contend that there was no arson, hence no "in the course of a felony," hence no DP case.
One other point: there's a missing factor in your calculations. People get murdered in prison - not just other prisoners, but guards and librarians and kitchen staff. Unless you put somebody like this in solitary for the rest of his life (which the ACLU won't let you do), as a homicidal sociopath he is a serious risk to kill again.
I'm wondering where all the Terri Schiavo "always err on the side of life" folks are.
What does Terri Schaivo have to do with the death penalty? I'm pro-life and was hoping Terri would be spared and I believe in death penalty. Operative word here is innocence.
Hardly.
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