Don't get convicted in Texas

Last night, I read David Grann's profoundly disturbing article "Trial By Fire" in the New Yorker. An investigation into the arrest, trial, conviction, and execution of Cameron Willingham, Grann makes a remarkably strong case that the unthinkable has happened -- that the State of Texas put to death an innocent man. What's worse is that in a state other than Texas, there's a good chance that Cameron Willingham would still be alive, if not a free man.

Willingham was tried and convicted in the 1991 deaths of his three children, accused of setting fire to his home while his wife was out and the children were asleep. The conviction rested largely on the testimony of an assistant fire chief and a deputy arson investigator. Their commentary, along with the statements of two psychologists who never actually met or spoke with Willingham, were sufficient to lead the jury to a guilty verdict and hand down the death penalty.

Looking at several reports that were commissioned in recent years to examine the Willingham case, however, Grann eviscerates the "expert" arson investigators whose testimony directly led to Willingham's execution:

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.”

In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.” What’s more, Beyler determined that the investigation violated, as he put it to me, “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.”

What's almost as tragic as the use of such disastrously flawed "evidence" to convict and then execute a man is the case Grann makes for how skewed in favor of death the Texas penal system is right now. Reading the article, I was aghast at the callous and indifferent attitude of officials who have the ultimate responsibility for whether or not someone lives or dies:

• Judge Sharon Keller, now facing charges of judicial misconduct, refused to allow a clerk's office to remain open for an additional 15 minutes to permit defense attorneys to submit a petition for a stay of execution for another inmate following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that very day that directly applied to the Texas inmate's case. The inmate was executed hours later.
  
• A scientific report submitted to the Board of Pardons and Paroles and demolishing the prosecution's case against Willingham was apparently never even read by members of the Board, one of whom remarked, "We get all kinds of reports, but we don’t have the mechanisms to vet them" despite the fact that according to that same member of the Board, they are tasked with ensuring that before an execution occurs that there are "no glaring errors."
  

What does this add up to? 439 executions in Texas between 1976 and 2009 with the trend line accelerating (33 in the 1980s, 166 in the 1990s, and 240 thus far in the 2000s).

I guess comedian Ron What wasn't actually joking when he declared "Texas has the death penalty and we use it! Other states are trying to abolish the death penalty. My state's putting in an express lane."

I've always had somewhat mixed feelings about the death penalty. In virtually all cases, I'm opposed though I suppose that there could be extreme situations in which I could be convinced it would be justified. Maybe. The issue is that execution is irrevocable. There's no option for "oops!" You can't take a mulligan. There's no additional appeal. If you're wrong, you can never take it back.

Former Supreme Court Justice referred to the execution of an innocent person as "a constitutionally intolerable event". On the flip side, Justice Antonin Scalia, that paragon of compassion, declared that there has not been “a single case—not one—in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.”

Sadly, David Grann's article and the diligent work of arson investigators basing their work on scientific analysis appear to make a compelling case that the State of Texas did indeed execute an innocent man in the face of evidence that he was innocent, a profoundly wrong and irrevocable action.

Perhaps it will be Cameron Willingham's name that will be shouted from the rooftops, hopefully somewhere within earshot of Antonin Scalia, Sharon Keller, Texas Governor Rick Perry, and the members of the Texas Pardons and Parole Board.

Book Review: "The Lost City of Z"

In the waning days of summer, I'm plowing through more of my summer reading, this time moving from the fun fiction to some very interesting non-fiction.

In a nice juxtaposition of my passion for history and my enjoyment of travel writing, I plowed through the outstanding "The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon" by David Grann, a staff writer for The New Yorker. In it, Grann explores the disappearance of Col. Percy Fawcett, "the last of the individualist explorers", his son, and his son's best friend as they entered the Amazon rain forest in search of the fabled city of El Dorado, or "Z" as Fawcett named it.

A parallel story of past and present exploration, "The Lost City of Z" follows both Fawcett's history and the events leading up to his final expedition along with Grann's own expedition into the Amazon in search of the truth of Fawcett's disappearance though the majority of the is given over to Fawcett, his obsession with finding the legendary lost city, and the realities of exploring the vastness of the Amazon rainforest that keep you riveted.

Before the age of movie stars, it was the British explorers who sought to expand out view of the world -- men like Richard Francis Burton, the first European to reach the headwaters of the Nile; Ernest Shackleton of the Endurance expedition; Robert Falcon Scott who died after reaching the South Pole Antarctic as part of the Terra Nova expedition; Henry Livingstone (he of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume"), and Colonel Percy Fawcett -- who were the rock stars of their day.

With the South Pole reached and Africa largely opened to the western world, Fawcett (an inspiration for both Professor Challenger in Conan Doyle's "The Lost World" and Indiana Jones) focused on the Amazon, one of the last great unexplored stretches on modern maps. In many cases, those entering the jungle did so to find what was there, to seek the headwaters of the great rivers, to find a way through it, or take advantage of its resources. However, it was the tales of lost cities and civilizations, of vanished treasures, of natives who coated themselves in gold dust because it was so plentiful, that drove so many of those who sought fame in the jungle and, in many cases, died there.

Fawcett was foremost among these Amazon explorers, a legend in his own right for his ability to survive where so many others fell as well as for his ability to coexist with Indians that otherwise were hostile to those entering their forest. Grann leads us through his repeated expeditions as he brought to light much that was previously unknown to western science -- giant anacondas, the double-nosed Andean tiger hounds, Indian tribes with little if any prior contact with westerners -- and mapped the previously impassable border of Brazil and Bolivia.

It is also clear from Grann's research and personal experience that the Amazon was and still is, in its own way, just as inhospitable a place for those not accustomed to it. The squeamish might want beware of those sections in which Grann details the various gruesome ways members of various expeditions became disease-infested (e.g., five simple words: "maggots growing in his elbows"), crippled or killed.

But it is Fawcett's growing fascination with the legendary lost city he designated as "Z", his final expedition in search of it, and the decades of fruitless searches, rumors, and deaths in efforts to find Fawcett and his companions, that are the engine for Grann's story. Grann's research into Fawcett's thinking, including access to letters and other materials that had not previously been made available by Fawcett's family, spur Grann himself to enter the Amazon rainforest in search of the truth of Fawcett's disappearance as well as a possible resolution to the legend of Z.

The result is the rediscovery of a tale that gripped the western world for decades before sliding into obscurity as well as an examination of how the Amazon of Fawcett's day is both changing and unchanged in a world of bulldozers and ripstop nylon tents. At times long-winded with details (Grann is up front about how this research became an obsession for him and it shows at times in the writing and not in a good way), it's not a book you want to put down once you begin.

While we know from the start that Fawcett was never found, the knowledge of that result doesn't detract from the tale of how Fawcett reached that point where he would risk his life at age 58, along with that of his eldest son, Jack, and Jack's best friend, in pursuit of his obsessive desire to find Z. Grann's own journey, abetted by GPS, trucks, roads, and motorboats, seems small in comparison but his tale of Fawcett's explorations as well as his own realizations about both the possible fate of Fawcett as well as the existence of Z make the journey worthwhile.