Down in Orlando for some flying lessons, I’m catching up on my New Yorker magazines. One article that I missed is “Trial by Fire” from the September 7, 2009 issue. It discusses the process of arson investigation in the context of a fire at the home of Cameron Todd Willingham. The fire killed Willingham’s three young children and he was sentenced to death for the crime. The most surprising part of the article was how the standard process of arson investigation was found to be mostly flawed in the early 1990s. An investigator decided to see whether an accused arsonist was telling the truth by reconstructing a similar house and its contents, then setting fire to a couch. The case against the arsonist was dropped when the test house burned exactly like the crime scene house (more), without benefit of the gasoline that the original experts had concluded must have been used to accelerate the fire.
More: read the article.
Wow, through provoking article.
What flabbergasts me is this quote from Scalia’s 2006 opinion, “a single case—not one—in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.”
That may, or may not, be true. But I don’t know that I feel that comfortable with situations where it’s not necessarily clear that a person was guilty. Especially when I would assume that many branches of forensic fields have had renaissances similar to arson investigation.
I’m also pretty astonished about how many wrong assumptions arson investigators were operating under, which weren’t debunked until a prosecution’s team financed a simulation… Nobody had bothered to actually test the actual burning of a structure under the conditions they were assuming. Wow.
I believe that this article confirms some of the darkest nightmares expressed in Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” – we but a chance event away from becoming hostages (even victims) of the systemic failure of rational thought and compassion which is the bureaucratic mindset.
It’s not often that such a scathingly-thorough indictment of the judicial system makes it to print – thank you for pointing this one out.