For all the dismal stories to come out of Texas's justice system in recent years—defense attorneys falling asleep during death-penalty trials, thousands of rape kits left untested for years while perpetrators went free, and the nation's highest number (48) of wrongly convicted people who've been released on DNA evidence—the most disturbing may have come a few years ago when credible evidence emerged that the state had executed an innocent man. Cameron Todd Willingham, a Corsicana resident convicted of starting a house fire in 1991 in which his three young daughters died, was given a lethal injection in February 2004, even after arson experts had debunked nearly all of the physical evidence in the case. When David Grann published a
9,000-word exposé in The New Yorker in 2009, it created a national outcry. But Gov. Rick Perry stood by the execution, calling Willingham a "monster" and scuttling a state investigation.
By refusing to investigate the Willingham case, Texas was turning its back on revolutionary advances in the field of fire science over recent decades. Methods traditionally used to investigate arson and win convictions turned out to be, in the words of leading arson expert Gerald Hurst, little more than "old wives' tales." For instance, burn patterns long thought to show that gasoline had been used to intentionally ignite a fire are now known to be false indicators. But as The Texas Observer reported in 2009, nearly 800 Texans remained in prison on arson convictions based in part on such evidence. One of them was Ed Graf, a Waco accountant serving a life sentence for a fire that killed his two stepsons in 1986. His conviction, according to Hurst and other fire scientists, rested on even shakier evidence than Willingham's. Even so, it seemed unlikely that Graf or the many others convicted on flawed arson evidence would ever have a second chance to clear their names.
But on Oct. 6, Graf will be the first convicted arsonist in Texas to be retried—and could soon become the first to be freed from prison following the Willingham scandal.
Graf's story is in many ways a textbook example of how arson investigations can go awry. It began on a hot Tuesday afternoon in August 1986, when he left work early and picked up his 8- and 9-year-old stepsons, Joby and Jason, from day care. About 10 minutes after Graf and the kids got home, neighbors saw smoke pouring from the wooden shed behind the house. Flames ripped through the windowless structure in minutes. The boys were found dead inside.
The investigation was flawed from the beginning. Firefighters bulldozed the shed on the day of the tragedy; investigators had to examine the remnants in the town dump. But they nonetheless claimed to know how the fire started, theorizing that Graf had drugged the boys, dragged them into the shed, poured gasoline on the floor, ignited it, and locked the door.
Source: Government Executive, National Journal, Dave Mann, October 5, 2014. Dave Mann is editor of The Texas Observer.
Related:
"
Trial By Fire", David Grann, The New Yorker, September 2009.
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. 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"...
