I apologize for being a bit late to the party, but if you haven’t already read David Grann’s reported essay in this week’s New Yorker, you really should. Grann looks at the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, a man executed by the State of Texas in 2004, though he very well may have been innocent. It’s a beautifully reported and written piece, and one of the most terrifying explorations of the state’s power that I’ve read in many years. Seriously, set aside an hour or so — it’s a long article, and you almost certainly won’t be able to stop once you start — and begin reading.
(The title of the post, by the way, is a quote from Sandra Day O’Connor.)
The Edge of the American West 
12 comments
September 4, 2009 at 11:48 am
N. Merrill
I read that in under an hour. More seriously, the prosecutor has a response here. I’m not convinced, but my legal opinion is cheap.
September 4, 2009 at 11:52 am
ari
I’ll let you know what I think of the prosecutor’s response — in about an hour.
September 4, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Anderson
The prosecutor is rebutted here and is the subject of this thread at John Cole’s blog. I don’t know the facts myself, but Jackson’s op-ed certainly sounds a bit desperate, relying heavily on inferences about Willingham’s psyche that are only slightly less convincing that those made at trial from Willingham’s fondness for Iron Maiden.
N.b. btw that in the New Yorker photo of Willingham in his jail bunk, he’s reading a DragonLance novel. Yet another family destroyed by Dungeons & Dragons …
September 4, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Anderson
Oh, sorry to double up, but noticed this in the Cole thread, from an online discussion w/ the article’s author:
DAVID GRANN: I saw Jackson’s op-ed, which came out the day before my article appeared in print. I had investigated the points he cites, and found, for a host of reasons, that they were not credible. I plan to respond to his points later, in detail, on the New Yorker News Desk blog.
September 4, 2009 at 1:29 pm
dana
What I found fascinating and disturbing is how once the authorities had decided that he must be guilty, relatively innocuous things in his life, like posters, became evidence that he was mentally disturbed, a sociopath, clearly the sort of person that could murder his children.
September 4, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Anderson
Dana describes a fairly common psychological mechanism, one that any *just* legal system would bend over backwards to counteract.
Texas is an evil place.
September 4, 2009 at 2:00 pm
dana
Yeah, I know it’s a common mechanism, but it’s still mind-boggling to see it in action.
September 4, 2009 at 8:47 pm
TF Smith
51 legal codes; some are better than others…
September 5, 2009 at 11:57 am
N. Merrill
All I wanted was a pepsi.
September 5, 2009 at 4:39 pm
a nonny mouse
prosecutors nationwide routinely try to build a case that a capital defendant is a sociopath in need of a good killin’. the criminal justice system in texas stands out because it is the leading execution factory in the nation, but you will find junk science, jailhouse snitches, changing witness stories, prosecutors withholding evidence, prosecutors offering diagnostic impressions based on crap, the whole 9 yards and more, in any state with a substantial number of capital prosecutions.
take a look at the Death Penalty Information Center website, if you are interested in learning more: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/
September 6, 2009 at 1:40 pm
matt w
The Texas Death Penalty Center does what looks like a good job with Jackson’s op-ed (seriously, polygraphs?) but the most revealing bit is the end:
“The Willingham case was charged as a multiple child murder, and not an arson-murder to achieve capital status. I am convinced that in the absence of any arson testimony, the outcome of the trial would have been unchanged, a fact that did not escape the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.”
The girls died in a fire. If Jackson thinks (and I don’t doubt him) that he could have obtained a conviction without actually showing any evidence that the fire was even deliberately set, that’s a bigger indictment of the system than anything in the New Yorker article.
September 6, 2009 at 2:04 pm
ben
Anderson’s comment seems to imply that he thinks Texas is notably worse than other states in this regard; I am less sanguine (not on the basis of evidence, though).
One thing I found remarkable about the events related (I mean out of a host of really intolerable stuff) was: “Sharon Keller, who is now the presiding judge on the court, stated in a majority opinion, ‘The new evidence does not establish innocence.'” Perhaps not, but couldn’t it establish a finding of not guilty, which is what, after all, juries find? Or are judges presumed to have greater powers of discernment such that if a judge doubts reasonably, that could only be because the person is in fact innocent?
Also, the New Yorker‘s storied copyeditors let through some pretty bad faulty parallelism in this, specifically:
You can see precisely how this happened.