Below is the full text of the report prepared by Craig Beyler for the Texas Forensic Science Commission entitled, “Analysis of the Fire Investigation Methods and Procedures Used in the Criminal Arson Cases Against Ernest Ray Willis and Cameron Todd Willingham“. The fatal house fire that led Texas to execute Cameron Todd Willingham in 2004 was erroneously ruled to be arson by fire investigators who relied on bad science, unproven theories and personal bias, according to the report.

Analysis of the Fire Investigation Methods and Procedures Used in the Criminal Arson Cases Against Ernest Ray Willis and Cameron Todd Willingham –

Sign the petition to urge Governor Rick Perry and the State of Texas to acknowledge that the fire in the Cameron Todd Willingham case was not arson, therefore no crime was committed and on February 17, 2004, Texas executed an innocent man.

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The Chicago Tribune is breaking the story that the investigator for the Texas Forensic Science Commission is going to report that the fire for which Cameron Todd Willingham was sentenced to death for setting to murder his children was an accidental fire and not arson. Willingham always maintained his innocence. He was executed for arson/murder in 2004. If the TFSC takes the investigator’s report and accepts his conclusions then it could acknowledge in its own report that Texas has executed an innocent person. The State of Texas should halt executions in light of the news that the investigator hired by the Texas Forensic Science Commission has concluded that the fire in the Cameron Todd Willingham case was accidental and not arson.

“Texas Moratorium Network has been warning for many years that Texas runs the risk of executing an innocent person because of the pace of executions in Texas and the many flaws in the system that can lead to innocent people being wrongfully convicted. Innocent people have been released from Texas death row in the past, including Ernest Willis. It is too late to release Todd Willingham because Texas already executed him in 2004 for supposedly setting a fire to murder his three children. Today’s news that the fire in the Willingham case was not arson means that Texas has moved another step closer to having to face the unspeakable horror that it has executed an innocent person”, said Scott Cobb, president of Texas Moratorium Network.

Ernest Willis was released from Texas death row in 2004 after he was exonerated of having set an arson fire to commit murder. Willis had spent 17 years on Texas death row for murder/arson. Willis had been wrongfully convicted of setting a 1986 fire that killed two sleeping women in Iraan, about 230 miles west of San Antonio.

The Chicago Tribune first reported on Willingham’s possible innocence in 2004 and followed up in 2006.

Excerpt:

In a withering critique, a nationally known fire scientist has told a state commission on forensics that Texas fire investigators had no basis to rule a deadly house fire was an arson — a finding that led to the murder conviction and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham.

The finding comes in the first state-sanctioned review of an execution in Texas, home to the country’s busiest death chamber. If the commission reaches the same conclusion, it could lead to the first-ever declaration by an official state body that an inmate was wrongly executed.

Indeed, the report concludes there was no evidence to determine that the December 1991 fire was even set, and it leaves open the possibility the blaze that killed three children was an accident and there was no crime at all — the same findings found in a Chicago Tribune investigation of the case published in December 2004.

Willingham, the father of those children, was executed in February 2004. He protested his innocence to the end.

The Tribune obtained a copy of the review by Craig Beyler, of Hughes Associates Inc., which was conducted for the Texas Forensic Science Commission, created to investigate allegations of forensic error and misconduct. The re-examination of the Willingham case comes as many forensic disciplines face scrutiny for playing a role in wrongful convictions that have been exposed by DNA and other scientific advances.

Among Beyler’s key findings: that investigators failed to examine all of the electrical outlets and appliances in the Willinghams’ house in the small Texas town of Corsicana, did not consider other potential causes for the fire, came to conclusions that contradicted witnesses at the scene, and wrongly concluded Willingham’s injuries could not have been caused as he said they were.

The state fire marshal on the case, Beyler concluded in his report, had “limited understanding” of fire science. The fire marshal “seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires and how fire injuries are created,” he wrote.

The marshal’s findings, he added, “are nothing more than a collection of personal beliefs that have nothing to do with science-based fire investigation.”

Over the past five years, the Willingham case has been reviewed by nine of the nation’s top fire scientists — first for the Tribune, then for the Innocence Project, and now for the commission. All concluded that the original investigators relied on outdated theories and folklore to justify the determination of arson.

Accompanied by 300 supporters standing outside the gates of the Texas Governor’s Mansion, family members (pictured) of Cameron Todd Willingham delivered a letter to Gov Perry on October 28, 2006 asking him to stop executions and investigate the case of their step son/uncle to determine if he was wrongfully executed. Eugenia Willingham slipped the letter, along with a copy of an article from the Chicago Tribune that concluded that her stepson was probably innocent, through the bars of the front gate of the mansion and left it lying on the walkway leading to the front door of the mansion. A DPS trooper on duty refused to take the letter, so Eugenia left it on the walkway. According to a Public Information Request sent to Perry by TMN, we know that his staff later retrieved the letter and delivered it to Perry’s office, however he never responded to Willingham’s family.

Below is a copy of the letter
The Honorable Rick Perry
Governor of Texas
Austin, Texas

October 28, 2006

Dear Governor Perry,

We are the family of Cameron Todd Willingham. Our names are Eugenia Willingham, Trina Willingham Quinton and Joshua Easley. Todd was an innocent person executed by Texas on February 17, 2004. We have come to Austin today from Ardmore, Oklahoma to stand outside the Texas Governor’s Mansion and attempt to deliver this letter to you in person, because we want to make sure that you know about Todd’s innocence and to urge you to stop executions in Texas and determine why innocent people are being executed in Texas.

Todd was not the only innocent person who has been executed in Texas. There have been reports in the media that Ruben Cantu and Carlos De Luna were also innocent people who were executed in Texas. It is too late to save Todd’s life or the lives of Ruben Cantu or Carlos De Luna, but it is not too late to save other innocent people from being executed. We are here today to urge you to be the leader that Texas needs in order to make sure that Texas never executes another innocent person. There is a crisis in Texas regarding the death penalty and we ask you to address the crisis. Because the public can no longer be certain that Texas is not executing innocent people, we urge you to stop all executions.

Strapped to a gurney in Texas’ death chamber, just moments from his execution for setting a fire that killed his three daughters, our son/uncle, Todd Willingham, declared his innocence one last time, saying “I am an innocent man, convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do.” Todd is now dead and can no longer speak for himself, so we have come to Austin to speak for him.

Before Todd’s execution, you were given a report from a prominent fire scientist questioning the conviction, but you did not stop the execution. The author of the report, Gerald Hurst, has said, “There’s nothing to suggest to any reasonable arson investigator that this was an arson fire. It was just a fire.”

Another report issued in 2006 by a panel of national arson experts brought together by the Innocence Project concluded that the fire that killed Todd’s three daughters was an accident. The report says that Todd’s case is very similar to the case of Ernest Willis, who was convicted of arson murder and sentenced to death in 1987. Willis served 17 years in prison before he was exonerated in 2004 – the same year Todd was executed. The report says that neither of the fires which Todd and Ernest Willis were convicted of setting were arson. The report notes that the evidence and forensic analysis in the Willingham and Willis cases “were the same,” and that “each and every one” of the forensic interpretations that state experts made in both men’s trials have been proven scientifically invalid. In other words, Todd was executed based on “junk science”.

Please look into our son/uncle’s case and ask the District Attorney in Corsicana to reopen the investigation into the crime for which my brother was wrongfully executed. You should also establish an Innocence Commission in the next session of the Texas Legislature that could investigate my brother’s case, as well as other cases of possible wrongful executions, such as Ruben Cantu and Carlos De Luna.

Please ensure that no other family suffers the tragedy of seeing one of their loved ones wrongfully executed. Please enact a moratorium on executions and create a special blue ribbon commission to study the administration of the death penalty in Texas. Texas also needs a statewide Office of Public Defenders for Capital Cases. Such an office will go a long way towards preventing innocent people from being executed. A moratorium will ensure that no other innocent people are executed while the system is being studied and reforms implemented.

We look forward to hearing from you and we pledge to work with you to ensure that executions of innocent people are stopped.

Yours sincerely,

Eugenia Willingham
Stepmother of Cameron Todd Willingham who raised him from the age of 13 months

Trina Willingham Quinton
Niece of Cameron Todd Willingham

Joshua Easley
Nephew of Cameron Todd Willingham

Rick Casey of the Houston Chronicle has an opinion column today titled “My thanks to maligned Judge Keller“, in which he thanks Sharon Keller for having inadvertently caused some improvements to the Court of Criminal Appeals.

Excerpt:

The firestorm of criticism that followed her decision not to keep the clerk’s office open for a late filing, based on a U.S. Supreme Court decision from earlier in the day, of a man scheduled to be executed an hour after closing time, has produced some improvements.

According to her own testimony and that of other court officials during this week’s four-day trial, the court had a protocol for dealing with execution day filings, but it was something of a secret.

For one thing, it wasn’t written.

For another, the court staff was not given any formal training on it.

Part of the procedure was the appointment, on a rotating basis, of a single judge to whom all communications regarding the pending execution would be directed. But the name of that judge was not to be disclosed to anyone outside the court, including lawyers for the condemned man.

In Keller’s seven years as the court’s chief judge, that was the state of things.

Now, due to the allegations that she violated that procedure by not referring the call seeking to file a late plea for a stay of execution to Judge Cheryl Johnson, the assigned judge for that execution day, everyone knows the procedures.

The court’s judges, some of whom were waiting around in expectation of a filing and were angered to learn days later of Keller’s actions, agreed to put the protocol in writing. And the protocol has been widely publicized in the controversy.

There is another improvement. Ed Marty, the general counsel who took the request to Keller rather than to Johnson (who testified she would have accepted late pleadings), retired.

His replacement, Sian Schilhab, said she contacts the appropriate attorneys days ahead of the prosecution to make sure they know she is available up until the execution takes place. She said she not only gives them her cell phone number, but forwards the office phone to her cell.

She also says all outside communications not only “clearly go to the assigned judge, but I try to communicate them to all the judges, or at least their staffs.”

She said that’s not because of the recent controversies, but because “I believe in more communication rather than less.”

If Keller had instructed Marty to do that, we wouldn’t have had this firestorm.

August 22, 2009
The New York Times as Reprinted in the Dallas Morning News

Excerpt:

It will probably be months before a decision is made on whether appellate Judge Sharon Keller should be censured or forced to resign for closing the court clerk’s doors promptly at 5 p.m., when she knew that a death row inmate was about to file an appeal, lawyers involved in the case said.

“There won’t be any decision, I would say, until December,” said Seana Willing, executive director of the Texas Commission on Judicial Misconduct.

The unusual trial of Keller, presiding judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, ended Thursday in San Antonio. In testimony, she denied having done anything wrong.

For many opponents of the death penalty, the judicial misconduct proceedings this week have become a referendum on the career of Keller, a conservative Republican and former Dallas County prosecutor who has a reputation for favoring the prosecution in death penalty cases.

But those calling for her ouster will have to wait. The special master overseeing the trial, Judge David Berchelmann Jr., must wade through transcripts of the four days of testimony, accept objections from both sides and then submit “findings of fact” to a 13-member commission.

The panel – made up of six judges, two private lawyers and five state residents appointed by the governor – then will decide whether to censure or remove the judge, a process that has no time limit.

If the judicial misconduct panel should decide to call for Keller’s removal, a seven-member panel of appellate judges, selected at random, must review the decision. The panel’s decision can be appealed to the Texas Supreme Court.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 20, 2009
CONTACT: Scott Cobb, 512-552-4743 www.sharonkiller.com

Evidence Presented at Trial Supports Removal of Sharon Keller from CCA

Texas Moratorium Network, which filed a judicial complaint against Sharon Keller in November 2007, has monitored the trial of Sharon Keller and finds the evidence presented at trial supports the severest sanctions against Keller – her removal from office for violating the Execution-Day Procedures of her court and for casting discredit on the Texas judiciary.

“Keller’s testimony on the witness stand that in hindsight she would do nothing differently on Sept 25, 2007 if she had it to do over again, has further damaged the integrity of the Texas judiciary. The most effective way to restore integrity to Texas’ highest criminal court is for Sharon Keller to be removed from office. She has seen that the consequences of her saying “we close at 5” were that Michael Richard was unable to file an appeal with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, even though his lawyers called the court again shortly before 6 PM and were told not to bother to bring the appeal to the court because no one was there to accept it”, said Scott Cobb, president of Texas Moratorium Network.

“Cheryl Johnson, the duty judge assigned to receive all communications regarding the case of Michael Richard on Sept 25, 2007, testified at the trial that she was not informed about the request by Richard’s lawyers to file a late appeal. She testified that she would have accepted the appeal. Sharon Keller was obligated by the rules of her own court to direct all communications regarding Richard to Judge Johnson,” said Cobb.

“Sharon Keller could have avoided being charged with misconduct and incompetence, if she had responded to Ed Marty when he called her at 4:45 pm on Sept 25 by saying, “tell them the clerk’s office closes at 5, but they can submit an appeal after 5 by directly contacting any judge on the court who is willing to accept the appeal. Let them know that Judge Johnson is the assigned duty judge on the Richard case and inform Judge Johnson of their request to file an appeal”, said Cobb.

Excerpt from the judicial complaint filed by TMN: “It is clear from her actions that Judge Keller can no longer be expected to preside over death penalty cases with the requisite fair, bias-free and even-handed disposition so critical to such serious life and death matters.”

A PDF of the judicial complaint filed by TMN in November 2007 is here: http://su.pr/2ArO3J

A video of a copy of the judicial complaint being delivered for Sharon Keller to the clerk of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in November 2007 is on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbVd9P3R7MU. The video contains a statement by the sister of Michael Richard outside the CCA. The video also contains footage of the clerk’s office remaining open 3-4 minutes after 5PM to receive the copy of the complaint.

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