The Texas Legislature should conduct an interim study on the Todd Willingham case, whether Texas has executed an innocent person, and whether Texas should enact a moratorium on executions in order to prevent more innocent people from being executed. If you live in Texas, find out who your state representative is and urge him or her to tell Speaker of the House Joe Straus to conduct an interim study on issues raised by the report that the fire in the Willingham case was not arson and that Texas most likely executed an innocent person.

The Temple Daily Telegraph is reporting that the Speaker of the Texas House, Joe Straus “commented on the recent news coverage about the 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham of Corsicana and fire investigation, criticized as flawed, that played a role in him receiving the death penalty. Willingham was convicted for the December 1991 deaths of his three children, who died in a fire that investigators said he started.”

Straus said he was aware of the recent (New Yorker) article, but had no plans as speaker of the house to revisit the death penalty.

“We’re in a period where I have asked members of the House to submit items for interim studies, so I’m always open-minded to whatever the members seem to want to look at,” he said. “I want the state to be responsible for whatever laws we have on the books, to make sure they are enforced fairly . . . and the death penalty is the most severe case.”

The New York Times reports that in the late-Senator Ted Kennedy’s new 532-page memoir to be published Sept 14, Kennedy reveals that “he had written a letter to the Los Angeles district attorney asking that he not seek the death penalty for Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan. (The judge, Herbert V. Walker, disregarded the letter, Mr. Kennedy said, though Mr. Sirhan’s life would be spared by the California Supreme Court.)”

According to Wikipedia, “on February 10, 1969, a motion by Sirhan’s lawyers to enter a plea of guilty to first degree murder in exchange for life imprisonment (rather than the death penalty) was made in chambers and denied. The court judge, Herbert V. Walker, ordered that the record pertaining to the motion be sealed”.

The Death Penalty, Race, Institutional Flaws and What You Can Do

In 1991 Troy Anthony Davis was convicted of the murder of off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail and sentenced to death in Georgia. In the case Davis pleaded innocent and through out his time on death row he has never changed this assertion. After his first appeal, seven out of nine eyewitnesses recanted their testimony or contradicted their previous statements. Many asserted that the police had coerced them to give evidence implicating Mr. Davis. One of the two eyewitnesses who did not change testimony was himself a suspect in the trial prior to Mr. Davis. Mr. Davis appealed his case to the Supreme Court of the United States and, on August 17th, 2009, the Court ordered a new evidentiary hearing.

On September 24th Rice University’s Amnesty International Chapter will examine this case and the ways in which it reflects the deep inadequacies within the American justice system, especially when it comes to the death penalty and it’s interaction with race. Rice Amnesty urges all who are interested in the case, in the justice system, in fairness and in the abolition of the death penalty to attend.

The event will be held on Thursday, September 24th at 6:30pm. The event will be located in the Humanities Building, number 31 on the campus map, Houston TX, 77005.

For further information, please contact Julia Lukomnik, External Vice President of the Rice university Amnesty International Chapter, at jel2@rice.edu

This video of David Grann talking about the Todd Willingham case includes footage of damage from the fire in the Willingham home, as well as an experiment conducted that recreated the Lime Street Fire and that resulted in proving that the Lime Street Fire was not arson.