Apparently, in 2004 Texas executed an innocent man. Via Barry Scheck,
An extraordinary new investigative report in the New Yorker shows that Willingham was telling the truth. He was innocent. David Grann’s report, in the September 7 issue, exhaustively deconstructs every aspect of the case and shows that none of the evidence used to convict Willingham was valid. Since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1974, Grann’s report constitutes the strongest case on record in this country that an innocent man was executed.
Willingham was convicted of murdering his two young children by arson. He spent 12 years on death row in Texas before he was executed. Forensic science that supposedly proved the fire was intentionally set was central to Willingham’s conviction was, in fact, completely invalid — which the experts who testified should have known in 1992. A state forensic science commission in Texas is officially looking into the case and selected a widely respected expert to analyze whether the forensic testimony was valid. Last week the expert filed a report confirming what five other leading arson experts have found — what passed for arson analysis in the Willingham case had no scientific basis…
As Mark Kleiman points out:
The issue here isn’t capital punishment; it’s a trial process too open to bullsh*t, and the fetishization of “finality of verdict.” If only 1% of our prison inmates are factually innocent - which seems to me like a ludicrously optimistic estimate, given how many convicts have been exonerated by DNA testing - we have 17,000 people behind bars at any one time for crimes they didn’t commit.
I am aware of only one jurisdiction in the United States that maintains a team of investigators dedicated to developing new evidence to overturn guilty verdicts (and pleas). That’s a crime. And it’s also a crime that Gov. Rick Perry’s role in allowing the execution of an innocent man seems very unlikely to damage his political future in Texas.
I don’t understand how we can call our penal system a system of justice when we put no effort into exonerating people who are innocent.
Of course, it is obvious why we still have this “justice” system. Writing a dissenting opinion in a recent case Justice Antonin Scalia criticized his colleagues for thinking that innocence is grounds to overturn a conviction:
This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged “actual innocence” is constitutionally cognizable.
There is nothing recognizably human about Antonin Scalia. Until we have a court free of so-called “conservatives” there will be no justice in the U.S.
