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The Willingham house
after the blaze |
A state investigation into the science used to convict and execute Cameron Todd Willingham came to a quiet close Friday, but its results might echo across the justice system and the nation's death penalty debate for years to come.
Making final changes to its report on the Willingham case, the Texas Forensic Science Commission signed off on a document acknowledging that unreliable fire science played a role in the Corsicana man's conviction for the murder-by-arson deaths of his three young daughters in 1991. He was executed in 2004.
Following commonly held beliefs now known to be wrong, arson investigators testified that the Willingham house fire was intentionally set using a liquid accelerant, the commission concluded.
Modern fire experts working for the commission and for the New York-based Innocence Project, which is representing Willingham posthumously, have determined that none of the more than 20 "arson indicators" identified by fire investigators in 1991 are reliable evidence of accelerant use. The cause of the fire should have been "undetermined," the experts said.
Though the commission's inquiry was never intended to weigh Willingham's guilt or innocence, the findings have added fuel to the debate over capital punishment.
"The world should now know that the evidence relied upon to convict and execute Cameron Todd Willingham for the fire that killed his daughters was based on scientifically invalid and unreliable evidence," said Stephen Saloom , policy director for the Innocence Project. "By any fair estimate, that indicates he was innocent, that he did not set that fire."
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