Culture of Life! Texas may have put innocent man to death

[Bluebear]

We must always err on the side of life....hmmm who said that?




With Texas' criminal justice system the subject of intense scrutiny for a crime lab scandal and a series of wrongful convictions, a 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 have been innocent but found nobody willing to listen to their claim in the days before the execution in February 2004.

"To say that this case was thoroughly reviewed," Reaves added, "I have my doubts."

The execution of Willingham, convicted of the December 1991 arson fire that killed his three young daughters, was a focus of a hearing into a proposed innocence commission.

http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/net/20050420/capt.2dfd19dc5f8a1d807f89d84f9604fecf
This is a Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice file photo of death row inmate Cameron Willingham, charged with setting a blaze two days before Christimas in 1991 that killed his three daughters. He was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2027&ncid=2027&e=6&u=/chitribts/20050420/ts_chicagotrib/texasmayhaveputinnocentmantodeathpaneltold

[Solly Mack]

1. I guess admitting to one error clears their conscience about the rest

that was sarcasm, of course

[Fenris]

2. Wouldn't be the first time.

Or the second. Or the fifteenth.

[Sanity Claws]

3. Convicted while Bush was governor?

Sounds like it. Bush has more blood on his hands.

[Bluebear]

4. Bush must have been assembling his "Tough on Crime" portfolio n/t

[xchrom]

5. lol -- texas wouldn't do that, would they?

[Tux]

8. Yes

He didn't go to a megachurch so they set him up.

[bigmonkey]

6. This is tragic.

If innocent, that man suffered the deaths of his daughters, and then was falsely accused of killing them and put to death. This could be a Greek mythic tale, it's so bad.

[ohio_liberal]

7. This is horrifying

The US's little death penalty experiment is a horrendous disaster.