DEATH PENALTY OPPONENTS' CELEBRATION PREMATURE

According to Barry Scheck’s Innocence Project, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed by Texas in 2004.because of junk-science testimony. Willingham received the death sentence after a jury found him guilty of murdering his three young daughters by setting fire to their house in 1991.. The jury relied heavily on the testimony of two arson investigators. Willingham proclaimed his innocence in an obscenity laced death chamber statement

The New York based Innocence Project has produced a prominent arson expert who claims that the Texas arson investigators’ testimony was unreliable and that the fire was accidental, not arson. The media’s coverage of this story has convinced just about everybody that Texas executed an innocent man. Death penalty opponents are jumping up and down with joy.

But hold your horses! It seems that the death penalty opponents’ celebration has been rather premature. It has just been revealed that Willingham confessed to his ex-wife when she visited with him for almost two hours on death row just nine days before his execution.

The Fort Worth Star Telegram is reporting that in 2004, former peace officer Ronnie Kuykendall,, the brother of Willingham’s ex-wife Stacy, gave a Navarro County district attorney’s investigator an affidavit on the confession.

The affidavit states that Stacy called a family meeting on 2-8-04. “Stacy asked all of us to come into the living room; at this time she started crying and told us about her visit with Willingham,” repeating her ex-husbands assertion that he had set the fire to try to head off his wife’s divorce threats, the affidavit said. Willingham “figured if he did this she would stay with him, and she could get her tubes untied and that they could start another family.”

But wait, that’s not all. Just this month, Tony Ayala, a neighbor of Willingham’s at the time of the deadly fire, gave a sworn statement to a Corsicana police detective that puts the lie to Willingham’s protestations of innocence.

Contrary to what other witnesses reported, Ayala said he saw a man running out of the burning house and back his car out of a carport. He returned inside to get some boxes but didn’t mention that anyone was in the house until an ambulance and fire trucks arrived. “That’s when he first said anything about kids being in the house.” In 1991, Ayala tried to tell the Corsicana police what he had seen and heard at scene of the burning house, but they were not interested in taking down his statement.

Willingham claimed that he had tried to rescue his children, offering his first and second degree burns as evidence of his frantic efforts, but the retrieval of the boxes would explain how he got burned.

As for the arson expert produced by the Innocence Project, University of Houston Law Center professor David Crump had serious reservations about his conclusions. In a letter to the Houston Chronicle, Crump had this to say: “For example, criticizing a burn-pattern conclusion, as the expert did, because the [arson investigation] report does not explicitly rule out electrical sources in connection with the burn pattern, sounds to me like an academician’s put-down of a field investigator.”

Crump has good reason to question conclusions reached by an expert who, from his lofty perch in academia, studied an arson investigation report many years after it was written and at a great distance from the scene of the fire.

So, for all you bleeding heart death penalty opponents, it’s time to come back down to earth. The arson investigation report aside, there is good evidence that Texas did NOT execute an innocent man when they put that piece of shit, Willingham, to death. Score one for us death penalty proponents, big time!