TEXAS HAS EXECUTED AN INNOCENT MAN. MUST READ.

[trelvis tha thrilla]

Originally Posted by gescobe

Texas ain't that bad.

People on here just like to talk %%*#. 90% haven't stepped foot in Texas much less outside their state so they really have no idea.

Originally Posted by aubstuh86

Originally Posted by j671

DOWN WITH TEXAS

agreed, nothing but dirty hicks and rednecks.. all the hate foreigners have for the US stems from Texas, also most of the south.

Just like this idiot

 

[shaolin]

Originally Posted by COOLnificent

Originally Posted by EB14

Originally Posted by Pmighty

if this was any state other than tx id be surprised

pretty much sums up my thoughts

also... who remembers "Talha" texas... that small town were cops robbed passer-bys that were minorities.

 

[forgot about jae]

Originally Posted by shaolin

Originally Posted by COOLnificent

Originally Posted by EB14

Originally Posted by Pmighty

if this was any state other than tx id be surprised

pretty much sums up my thoughts

also... who remembers "Talha" texas... that small town were cops robbed passer-bys that were minorities.

It was a black cop doing it too

..Not surprised, most of them black troopers here be on some uncle Tom steez..dudes grew up in some no namecountry town and have it out for the blacks/latinos from the city in Houston

And the redneck state troopers everywhere else are

I need to leave the south

 

[sn dg]

Originally Posted by duke4005

Read all the facts first, not just the ones a magazine across the country digs up to try to show how corrupt the Texas Death Row is. This guy set this up from the start. Why did he have a refrigerator in front of the back door? Why didn't he take his oldest daughter out with him when she came and woke him, after which she was found IN HIS BEDROOM, where he was asleep? Explain the two previous attempts to kill the kids. Typical article from some reporter trying to uncover some ugly truth and get a movie about their life.

If you actually read the article, which is unsurprisingly thorough (as thorough as 17 pages gets) and a fine piece of investigative journalism, I find it hardto believe that one could be convinced of this mans guilt. The article has received nationwide praise, and has been featured all throughout the news onprograms such as 60 minutes. The article covers in detail the reasons why Vasquez (the arson "expert" in the case) and Jackson (the prosecutor)believe Willingham was guilty, and why scientific experts disagree. Here are some extremely relevant excerpts, although I recommend that any interested partiesread the whole article for all the facts of the case.

Willingham's family persuaded a Dr. Gerald Hurst to review Willingham's case pro bono, about 30 days before his execution date.

A child prodigy who was raised by a sharecropper during the Great Depression, Hurst used to prowl junk yards, collecting magnets and copper wires in order to build radios and other contraptions. In the early sixties, he received a Ph.D. in chemistry from Cambridge University, where he started to experiment with fluorine and other explosive chemicals, and once detonated his lab. Later, he worked as the chief scientist on secret weapons programs for several American companies, designing rockets and deadly fire bombs-or what he calls "god-awful things." He helped patent what has been described, with only slight exaggeration, as "the world's most powerful nonnuclear explosive": an Astrolite bomb. He experimented with toxins so lethal that a fraction of a drop would rot human flesh, and in his laboratory he often had to wear a pressurized moon suit; despite such precautions, exposure to chemicals likely caused his liver to fail, and in 1994 he required a transplant. Working on what he calls "the dark side of arson," he retrofitted napalm bombs with Astrolite, and developed ways for covert operatives in Vietnam to create bombs from local materials, such as chicken manure and sugar. He also perfected a method for making an exploding T-shirt by nitrating its fibres.
John Lentini, a fire expert and the author of a leading scientific textbook on arson, describes Hurst as "brilliant." A Texas prosecutor once told the Chicago Tribune, of Hurst, "If he says it was an arson fire, then it was. If he says it wasn't, then it wasn't."



Compared to Vasquez, this man was a genius.

Many arson investigators, it turned out, had only a high-school education. In most states, in order to be certified, investigators had to take a forty-hour course on fire investigation, and pass a written exam. Often, the bulk of an investigator's training came on the job, learning from "old-timers" in the field, who passed down a body of wisdom about the telltale signs of arson, even though a study in 1977 warned that there was nothing in "the scientific literature to substantiate their validity."
In 1992, the National Fire Protection Association, which promotes fire prevention and safety, published its first scientifically based guidelines to arson investigation. Still, many arson investigators believed that what they did was more an art than a science-a blend of experience and intuition. In 1997, the International Association of Arson Investigators filed a legal brief arguing that arson sleuths should not be bound by a 1993 Supreme Court decision requiring experts who testified at trials to adhere to the scientific method. What arson sleuths did, the brief claimed, was "less scientific." By 2000, after the courts had rejected such claims, arson investigators increasingly recognized the scientific method, but there remained great variance in the field, with many practitioners still relying on the unverified techniques that had been used for generations. "People investigated fire largely with a flat-earth approach," Hurst told me. "It looks like arson-therefore, it's arson." He went on, "My view is you have to have a scientific basis. Otherwise, it's no different than witch-hunting."



Basically, Vasquez was an "expert" trained by attending a 40 hour class, while Hurst was an expert with a PHD in chemistry from Cambridge university.Here are just some of the many reasons why Vasquez was mistaken about the case being arson. In the article, pages 11-15 provide the complete overview of why itwas not arson.

As Hurst looked through the case records, a statement by Manuel Vasquez, the state deputy fire marshal, jumped out at him. Vasquez had testified that, of the roughly twelve hundred to fifteen hundred fires he had investigated, "most all of them" were arson. This was an oddly high estimate; the Texas State Fire Marshals Office typically found arson in only fifty per cent of its cases.
Vasquez and Fogg had cited as proof of arson the fact that the front door's aluminum threshold had melted. "The only thing that can cause that to react is an accelerant," Vasquez said. Hurst was incredulous. A natural-wood fire can reach temperatures as high as two thousand degrees Fahrenheit-far hotter than the melting point for aluminum alloys, which ranges from a thousand to twelve hundred degrees. And, like many other investigators, Vasquez and Fogg mistakenly assumed that wood charring beneath the aluminum threshold was evidence that, as Vasquez put it, "a liquid accelerant flowed underneath and burned." Hurst had conducted myriad experiments showing that such charring was caused simply by the aluminum conducting so much heat. In fact, when liquid accelerant is poured under a threshold a fire will extinguish, because of a lack of oxygen. (Other scientists had reached the same conclusion.) "Liquid accelerants can no more burn under an aluminum threshold than can grease burn in a skillet even with a loose-fitting lid," Hurst declared in his report on the Willingham case.

With his finger, Hurst traced along Vasquez's diagram the burn trailer that had gone from the children's room, turned right in the hallway, and headed out the front door. John Jackson, the prosecutor, had told me that the path was so "bizarre" that it had to have been caused by a liquid accelerant. But Hurst concluded that it was a natural product of the dynamics of fire during post-flashover. Willingham had fled out the front door, and the fire simply followed the ventilation path, toward the opening. Similarly, when Willingham had broken the windows in the children's room, flames had shot outward.

Hurst recalled that Vasquez and Fogg had considered it impossible for Willingham to have run down the burning hallway without scorching his bare feet. But if the pour patterns and puddle configurations were a result of a flashover, Hurst reasoned, then they were consonant with Willingham's explanation of events. When Willingham exited his bedroom, the hallway was not yet on fire; the flames were contained within the children's bedroom, where, along the ceiling, he saw the "bright lights." Just as the investigator safely stood by the door in the Lime Street experiment seconds before flashover, Willingham could have stood close to the children's room without being harmed. (Prior to the Lime Street case, fire investigators had generally assumed that carbon monoxide diffuses quickly through a house during a fire. In fact, up until flashover, levels of carbon monoxide can be remarkably low beneath and outside the thermal cloud.) By the time the Corsicana fire achieved flashover, Willingham had already fled outside and was in the front yard.

Vasquez had made a videotape of the fire scene, and Hurst looked at the footage of the burn trailer. Even after repeated viewings, he could not detect three points of origin, as Vasquez had. (Fogg recently told me that he also saw a continuous trailer and disagreed with Vasquez, but added that nobody from the prosecution or the defense ever asked him on the stand about his opinion on the subject.)

After Hurst had reviewed Fogg and Vasquez's list of more than twenty arson indicators, he believed that only one had any potential validity: the positive test for mineral spirits by the threshold of the front door. But why had the fire investigators obtained a positive reading only in that location? According to Fogg and Vasquez's theory of the crime, Willingham had poured accelerant throughout the children's bedroom and down the hallway. Officials had tested extensively in these areas-including where all the pour patterns and puddle configurations were-and turned up nothing. Jackson told me that he "never did understand why they weren't able to recover" positive tests in these parts.

Hurst found it hard to imagine Willingham pouring accelerant on the front porch, where neighbors could have seen him. Scanning the files for clues, Hurst noticed a photograph of the porch taken before the fire, which had been entered into evidence. Sitting on the tiny porch was a charcoal grill. The porch was where the family barbecued. Court testimony from witnesses confirmed that there had been a grill, along with a container of lighter fluid, and that both had burned when the fire roared onto the porch during post-flashover. By the time Vasquez inspected the house, the grill had been removed from the porch, during cleanup. Though he cited the container of lighter fluid in his report, he made no mention of the grill. At the trial, he insisted that he had never been told of the grill's earlier placement. Other authorities were aware of the grill but did not see its relevance. Hurst, however, was convinced that he had solved the mystery: when firefighters had blasted the porch with water, they had likely spread charcoal-lighter fluid from the melted container.

Without having visited the fire scene, Hurst says, it was impossible to pinpoint the cause of the blaze. But, based on the evidence, he had little doubt that it was an accidental fire-one caused most likely by the space heater or faulty electrical wiring. It explained why there had never been a motive for the crime. Hurst concluded that there was no evidence of arson, and that a man who had already lost his three children and spent twelve years in jail was about to be executed based on "junk science."



However, when Hurst submitted his report to the Texas board of Pardons and Parole, all signs indicate that it was not even read by the seven members of theboard. In fact, these 7 members were not even required to discuss the case in person, they could simply mail in their vote through fax.

The Innocence Project obtained, through the Freedom of Information Act, all the records from the governor's office and the board pertaining to Hurst's report. "The documents show that they received the report, but neither office has any record of anyone acknowledging it, taking note of its significance, responding to it, or calling any attention to it within the government," Barry Scheck said. "The only reasonable conclusion is that the governor's office and the Board of Pardons and Paroles ignored scientific evidence."

LaFayette Collins, who was a member of the board at the time, told me of the process, "You don't vote guilt or innocence. You don't retry the trial. You just make sure everything is in order and there are no glaring errors." He noted that although the rules allowed for a hearing to consider important new evidence, "in my time there had never been one called." When I asked him why Hurst's report didn't constitute evidence of "glaring errors," he said, "We get all kinds of reports, but we don't have the mechanisms to vet them." Alvin Shaw, another board member at the time, said that the case didn't "ring a bell," adding, angrily, "Why would I want to talk about it?" Hurst calls the board's actions "unconscionable."



Now are you really going to tell me that you are convinced that this man was guilty?

In December, 2004, questions about the scientific evidence in the Willingham case began to surface. Maurice Possley and Steve Mills, of the Chicago Tribune, had published an investigative series on flaws in forensic science; upon learning of Hurst's report, Possley and Mills asked three fire experts, including John Lentini, to examine the original investigation. The experts concurred with Hurst's report. Nearly two years later, the Innocence Project commissioned Lentini and three other top fire investigators to conduct an independent review of the arson evidence in the Willingham case. The panel concluded that "each and every one" of the indicators of arson had been "scientifically proven to be invalid."

The fact of the matter is, unless you can afford a great lawyer, you are at the mercy of a flawed legal system.


Truth. Willingham was locked up with another inmate who had virtually the same arson charges against him, and due to a "bad @@! lawyer" gotexonerated. Willingham was only afforded a public defender, and by the time he managed to get Hurst's support, it was already too late and the Board ofPardons did not even bother to read Hurst's report. I don't believe there is any way for any person to believe beyond a reasonable doubt thatWillingham was guilty.

 

[mc otaku]

RIP. smh

 

[jumpmanfeva]

Yo I graduated from Sam Houston State located in Prison City (Huntsville, TX) aka Death Row! "Don't Mess With Texas"

 

[houstonsnk]

Originally Posted by Forgot About Jae

Originally Posted by shaolin

Originally Posted by COOLnificent

Originally Posted by EB14

Originally Posted by Pmighty

if this was any state other than tx id be surprised

pretty much sums up my thoughts

also... who remembers "Talha" texas... that small town were cops robbed passer-bys that were minorities.

It was a black cop doing it too

..Not surprised, most of them black troopers here be on some uncle Tom steez..dudes grew up in some no name country town and have it out for the blacks/latinos from the city in Houston

And the redneck state troopers everywhere else are

I need to leave the south

I got stopped by a State Trooper the other day. He aint even ask anything and he wasnt running radar (I have a V1). I still dont know how I got a ticket withno proof of my speed.

 

[jbeezie]

Originally Posted by j671

DOWN WITH TEXAS

 

[icekickz89]

Damn

 

[memphisboi55]

Texas..

Only thing i enjoyed while living there was the music.

 

[af1 beast]

Honestly, Texas is better than every state other than Cali and New York.
Real S--t

 

[sonunox34]

Originally Posted by aubstuh86

Originally Posted by j671

DOWN WITH TEXAS

agreed, nothing but dirty hicks and rednecks.. all the hate foreigners have for the US stems from Texas, also most of the south.

 

[xtapolapacetl]

The sad thing that people behind this execution probably still read their Bibles without feeling any guilt.

 

[ricekrispies420]

what is wrong those people

 

[214tx972]

Texas is my home

 

[redrum sb]

dude was at the wrong place at the wrong time.
RIP to him...

 

[blackxme]

Some people are so ignorant as far as what they know about other places, complete morons.
Texas

, Houston and Austin specifically.

But this story is beyond sad, poor dude.

 

[jumpmanfeva]

Story is sad...But Texas is still the best state! Racism exist everywhere even though it is more prominent in the South...

 

[guerrilla warfare]

DAMN

 

[supremeape]

With more and more of these cases popping up, i dont know how the US can still sentence people to death

 

[gescobe]

Texas

, Houston and Austin specifically.

 

[sure lock 510]

Originally Posted by dnycemodel

Im from Texas and they dont play with executions. They'd prolly shoot you at your hearing if they could.

welldamn!

 

[teeoh owens]

Originally Posted by nealraj006

I just did a speech on the death penalty. It's crazy how flawed the legal system is. I still don't understand how such an outdated system of punishment is still in effect to this day. It should never have been reinstated.

i wonder if you would feel the same way if somebody raped your mom then killed her.