Cameron Todd Willingham Case Essay

Cameron Todd Willingham (January 9, 1968 – February 17, 2004) was an American man who was convicted and executed by lethal injection for the murder of his three young children by arson in Corsicana, Texas, on December 23, 1991. Although Willingham fought for his innocence for 12 years on death row, he was executed in Texas in 2004. The arson investigation has come into question many times, most recently in 2009, and new evidence and science have proven Willingham’s innocent, unfortunately too late for Willingham’s life to be saved. Capital punishment is a harsh criminal justice system, and without a complete fool-proof justice system, the risk of putting the innocent people to death through capital punishment cannot be ruled out. Willingham

The most damning evidence used against Willingham’s was the four patterns and the V-shape burn marks implying the fire began in multiple areas of the house. Vasquez and his partner Fogg concluded that Willingham poured the liquid accelerant under the twin’s bed, and at other main points throughout the house, and started the fire himself. This would explain the pouring patterns left after the fire and the unusually low burn marks on the wall. Grann’s article in The New Yorker details how the behavior of the fire was strikingly similar to that of Florida fire in 1990 that had been the subject of much discussion in arson-investigation circles because the behavior of the fire, in that case, was contrary to prevailing notions about the fire behavior. Experiments aimed at replicating the conditions that led to the Florida fire had demonstrated that such a raging, fast-traveling fire could be caused without the use of any accelerant at all. This subset of naturally occurring fires can leave behind the same type of pour patterns, and puddle configurations that Vasquez and Fogg had concluded confirmed the presence of an

In two days of interviews recently with the Marshall Project, Webb gave the most detailed account to date of how he came to testify against Willingham. According to Maurice Possley in The Washington Post, “Webb said that Jackson threatened him with a life sentence in the robbery case — a possibility under Texas law because Webb had several prior convictions — unless he testified. Webb said that he didn’t want to see Willingham go to death row and die for something he well knew was a lie and something he didn’t initiate”. Perhaps what, in the end, really did Willingham was the “Faulty Science” that was used in the beginning case. “The governor’s office had access to an affidavit that it was faulty science, and either ignored it or dismissed it,” says former Texas governor Mark