On the day in 2004 that her first cousin
Cameron Todd Willingham was scheduled to be executed in Texas, Patricia Cox had good reason to believe he was innocent.
Willingham was convicted of murder for killing his three daughters in a late-1991 house fire following a prosecution that was based almost entirely on a forensic fire analysis performed by an assistant fire chief and a state deputy fire marshal in the days after the blaze. Two weeks before Willingham’s execution date, though, Cox managed to get famed arson analyst Gerald Hurst to take a fresh look at the case.
Working pro bono, Hurst reviewed the evidence and drafted a study that devastated the original findings. While Hurst’s conclusions relied on his own skills, arson forensics had become far more advanced and standardized in the previous 13 years. “A contemporary fire origin and cause analyst might well wonder how anyone could make so many critical errors in interpreting the evidence,” Hurst’s report began.
Hurst found that there was, in fact, no arson at all. Hurst and Willingham’s attorney rushed the report to the office of Governor Rick Perry on Feb. 13, just four days before the scheduled execution, Cox says.
Little is known about why the Hurst report did not compel Perry to use his authority to delay Willingham’s execution for further review. The governor’s office has resisted legal efforts to pry loose Perry’s most sensitive deliberative documents on the Willingham execution. “The governor’s office has been a giant black hole of information,” says Walter Reaves, Willingham’s post-conviction attorney.
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