Texas killed an innocent man - What should it do about it?

they didn't cook up evidence (I hope the pun wasn't intended), they used the same wrong ass junk science they have been using for years

 

Too true. Innocent until proven guilty (this isn't France!). The man's guilt wasn't proven by the scientific evidence. That Perry is going to incredible lengths to cover this little fact up is unquestionable.

 

Yes, I can see your point, a shadow of doubt.

DD

 

Always wanting to think the best of people, I held out hope that the new commission would still be one of integrity, even if Perry's appointments were a stalling manuever. It's not looking to good:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/casey/6748157.html

[rquoter]Can e-mail be saved by deleting it?
By RICK CASEY Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Dec. 1, 2009, 8:27PM

A couple of weeks ago I sent a request to the Texas Forensic Commission under the Public Information Act for any documents or e-mails regarding two new policies put into place by the commission's controversial new chairman, John Bradley.

A quick refresher: Bradley is the Williamson County district attorney appointed Sept. 30 by Gov. Rick Perry to replace the previous chairman. This was just days before the commission was to discuss in open session a report from a national expert saying that the arson evidence that led a jury to convict and sentence to death the late Cameron Todd Willingham was grievously flawed. Bradley's first act was to cancel the meeting.

The first new policy I asked about requires all members to refer reporters to Leigh Tomlin, the commission coordinator, who would take the requests to Chairman Bradley.

I received a response with a promptness that is rare for governmental bodies.

“… (T)he commission does not have any communications responsive to your request,” wrote Tomlin.

I wasn't surprised. Her answer merely confirmed the existence of the other policy about which I was seeking information: That members should destroy all e-mails regarding commission business.

I know that because I have a copy of an e-mail (now apparently destroyed) from Tomlin to commission members dated Oct. 30. It asks them to forward “any and all communications” regarding the Willingham matter to her. The e-mail closed: “Also, as a reminder of our e-mail retention policy, please delete all commission correspondence. If you feel there is something that needs to be saved, forward it to my office.”

No discussion
In two other e-mails, the first on Oct. 6 and the second on Nov. 5, Tomlin says:

“Please also keep in mind that any communications regarding the commission's activities should be delivered through the commission chair, Mr. Bradley.”

And: “I also would like to remind everyone of our media policy. Please continue to forward any media inquiries to my office.”

The commissioners — seven scientists, one defense attorney and Chairman Bradley — did not vote on those policies. They were dictated by Chairman Bradley.

The reason I know that is that they have not met in the two months since Chairman Bradley was appointed.

What once had been a collaborative body, in which all decisions were discussed and made in open sessions, seems now to be a commission in which serious matters concerning public communication and document retention are made by an all-powerful chairman.

No communication
I would be surprised if at least some of the seven scientists on the commission, who work in a profession that mandates that all procedures be carefully notated and that the notes be preserved for posterity (and integrity), don't find it a bit unseemly to destroy their correspondence.

Some may also be at least a little annoyed that a man whom they haven't met, who has demonstrated little understanding of the work they've done over the past few years, is telling them they're not allowed to speak to the public about that work.

Chairman Bradley told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram through an e-mail, that he “simply seeks to make sure that all relevant information is saved at a single location.”

That is patently absurd. You don't need to be a scientist to understand that deleting e-mails doesn't save them at a central location.

No transparency
During his appearance before a Senate Committee last month, senators told Chairman Bradley they intended for the commission to act with transparency. He transparently didn't get the message.

The commission's first meeting is being planned for next month, nearly four months after Chairman Bradley's appointment. Based on his behavior so far, I'm betting it will be held in some far-off corner of Texas, inconvenient to troublesome reporters and troubled citizens.

I'll put five bucks on Presidio.[/rquoter]

 

texas also likes killing mentally challenged folks, basically in opposition of SCOTUS:

nyt

 

You got to be f'ing kidding me.

 

If the evidence used to prove a man guilty is flawed and totally bogus, than yes, that man is innocent.

In this country, you are innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around. Maybe in Iran it's guilty until proven innocent, but not here.

 

Not a shadow of doubt, no shadow of suspicion.

 

He was already "proven" guilty. I think this report debunking the arson investigation would be a good reason to re-open a trial, or for a plea for pardon. Then, he could procedurally be found to be not guilty. That's what should have happened. But, it didn't and now he's dead. So, procedurally, legally, he's still guilty. Being factually innocent isn't going to change the fact that he's legally guilty. You can't change that without a trial (which won't be conducted because he's dead) or a pardon (which Perry would never grant).

 

if ppl actually think its innocent until proven guilty you're smoking crack. Everyone knows how much help the legal system needs, its in shambles. Look at all these rape cases that are being dismissed now just based on eye witness testimony ,now days its my word against your word.

 

More evidence that Texas executed an innocent man in 2004.
I strongly suspect that since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 there have been others besides Willingham who were innocent and have been executed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...ebdab8-c451-11e4-ad5c-3b8ce89f1b89_story.html

2004 Texas execution

CORSICANA, Tex. — More than a decade after Cameron Todd Willingham was executed for the arson murder of his three young daughters, new evidence has emerged that indicates that a key prosecution witness testified in return for a secret promise to have his own criminal sentence reduced.

In a previously undisclosed letter that the witness, Johnny E. Webb, wrote from prison in 1996, he urged the lead prosecutor in Willingham’s case to make good on what Webb described as an earlier promise to downgrade his conviction. Webb also hinted that he might make his complaint public.

Within days, the prosecutor, John H. Jackson, sought out the Navarro County judge who had handled Willingham’s case and came away with a court order that altered the record of Webb’s robbery conviction to make him immediately eligible for parole. Webb would later recant his testimony that Willingham confessed to setting his house on fire with the toddlers inside.

Jackson’s handling of the case is now under investigation by the State Bar of Texas, following a formal complaint of prosecutorial misconduct last summer. That grievance asked that Jackson be sanctioned or even prosecuted for falsifying official records, withholding evidence and obstructing justice.

On Monday, an attorney for Jackson said he expected the Texas bar to notify his client soon that it will pursue formal charges of misconduct. The attorney, Joseph E. Byrne, said Jackson would seek to have any such charges heard by a jury, as the bar rules allow.

Regardless of when Jackson would have learned of a possible deal, he would have been legally bound to disclose any such favorable treatment of a witness to the defense. For Willingham — who maintained his innocence until he was executed in 2004 — the revelation might have been sufficient grounds for a new trial.

To death penalty opponents, Willingham’s case is among those that have come closest to proving for the first time in the modern era of capital punishment that an innocent person has been put to death in the United States.

In an e-mail, Byrne said he could not comment on any of the specific allegations against Jackson, because they involved pending litigation. But he added, “We are confident that a Texas Jury who hears all of the evidence in this case will find that Mr. Jackson has done nothing inappropriate.”

Jackson did not personally comment in response to e-mails or telephone calls requesting he address the matter.

Jackson has long denied that the state cut any sort of deal with Webb for his testimony. But Jackson recently amended his account, telling the Texas bar that he had intervened on Webb’s behalf after Webb’s attorney told Jackson in 1996 that she believed her client’s conviction should have been for the lesser charge. Webb’s attorney said she based this belief on her negotiations with Jackson’s boss, the district attorney, Jackson said.

At the time of the fire that erupted in the small frame house Willingham shared with his wife and three daughters, he was 23 years old, an out-of-work car mechanic with a volatile marriage and a local reputation as something of a troublemaker. He said he awoke from a nap to find the home so filled with smoke and flames that he could not locate his sleeping children and was barely able to stumble out of the house alive.

Webb later said that while they both were being held in the Navarro County jail, Willingham spontaneously confessed to him that he had set the fire to cover up his wife’s abuse of one of the girls. Autopsies of the girls showed no signs of abuse — but it was the strongest evidence the prosecution had other than the finding of arson by fire investigators. That finding has been discredited by a series of forensic experts.

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. He 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.

“I did not want to see Willingham go to death row and die for something I damn well knew was a lie and something I didn’t initiate,” Webb said.

“I lied on the man because I was being forced by John Jackson to do so,” Webb said. “I succumbed to pressure when I shouldn’t have. In the end, I was told, ‘You’re either going to get a life sentence or you’re going to testify.’ He coerced me to do it.”

During Willingham’s three-day trial in August 1992, Jackson pointedly asked Webb on the witness stand whether he had been promised a lighter sentence or some other benefit for his cooperation. Webb told the judge and jury that he had not.

Documents published last year by the Marshall Project and The Washington Post showed that during and after Webb was in state prison, he received thousands of dollars in aid from a wealthy local businessman, Charles S. Pearce Jr. Webb said in interviews that Pearce had helped him at the behest of Jackson; Patrick C. Batchelor, the district attorney; and the county sheriff. Jackson later denied that claim, saying that any support Pearce gave “had no connection” to Webb’s testimony in the Willingham case.

But in his formal response last September to the misconduct complaint, Jackson revised his long-standing assertion that Webb had not cut any sort of deal in return for his testimony.

This time, he said that after receiving correspondence from Webb questioning his sentence, he turned to Webb’s former defense attorney, April Sikes, who had worked with Jackson as a prosecutor before joining the defense bar. Sikes “indicated to me that she believed Webb’s conviction should be a second-degree felony because he cooperated in the Willingham case,” Jackson said. He added that this was based on “her recollection of negotiations with Patrick Batchelor.”

Whether Jackson then discussed Sikes’s recollection with Batchelor is unclear. Jackson also says that Batchelor met with him prior to Willingham’s trial and “was adamant that we were not to offer Webb anything in return for his testimony.” Neither Batchelor nor Sikes responded to written questions that were sent to them by overnight mail.

Jackson said that he “was not the prosecutor responsible for the Webb case,” despite the fact that he appeared in court at Webb’s guilty plea. He was merely standing in for Batchelor on that day, he said, but “had no input into the plea agreement with Webb . . . or the drafting of the judgment.”

Legal experts say that even if Jackson did not make a deal with Webb himself and was unaware of one at the time of Willingham’s trial, he would still have been obligated to report to Willingham’s defense attorney in 1996 if he believed one had been made.

“The prosecutor’s office had a duty to disclose the agreement,” said Stephen A. Saltzburg, a professor at the George Washington University Law School. “Whenever that was discovered, it should have been disclosed.”

In his response to the bar complaint, Jackson said that he tried to help Webb get out of prison early and orchestrate his transfer back to the county jail but insisted that he had done so to try to protect Webb from unspecified threats of “murder, injury, or threats by the AB [Aryan Brotherhood] or Willingham sympathizers.” Jackson said in his response to the bar, “In my opinion this is proper conduct and certainly not evidence of a pre-trial agreement, inducement of Webb to give perjured testimony, or other wrongdoing.”

A letter that Webb said he sent to Jackson on June 24, 1996 — a signed, carbon copy of which he kept in his voluminous record of prison correspondence and provided to the Marshall Project — indicates that Jackson had promised to help Webb.

“Dear John,” Webb wrote. “Recently, as I was going over my case notes, I noticed that you had told me that the charge of aggravated robbery would be dropped, or lowered, to robbery. . . . You told me this would be done before my transfer to TDC [Texas Department of Corrections].” Webb was transferred from the Navarro County Jail to the Texas prison system in the fall of 1992.

Webb explained that prison officials were still calculating his sentence as an aggravated offender, a first-degree charge. “There may be an error in the paperwork, or in TDC’s computer and they are not following the agreement we entered,” Webb wrote.

In what appears to have been an attempt to pressure Jackson, Webb said that if Jackson could not “take care of it on your own,” Webb might file a court motion to request the adjustment — a move that might have brought his purported deal with Jackson to light as Willingham was appealing his death sentence.

Webb had written weeks earlier to the Navarro County judge who had handled his case and Willingham’s, Kenneth “Buck” Douglas, asking to be moved back to the Corsicana jail or into protective custody and writing that “the state offered me certain benefits in exchange for my testimony.”

Webb also addressed that document to Jackson. In the June letter, he went further, pressing Jackson to check whether Webb’s case file reflected a conviction for aggravated robbery and, if so, to seek a court order changing the record “to clarify any problems.”

Within three weeks after Webb’s letter, Jackson did just that: He first persuaded Douglas to enter a new judgment in Webb’s case, officially recording his conviction as second-degree robbery.

Jackson then wrote to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, appending the judgment and saying the court order confirmed that Webb had been convicted of the lesser charge. The result was that Webb, to whom Jackson sent a copy, became immediately eligible for parole.

Webb’s letter to Jackson was never placed in the public file of Webb’s case or the district attorney’s internal file on the case, which was turned over to the nonprofit Innocence Project in response to a disclosure request.

Although Jackson declined to answer questions about whether he received Webb’s letter and what he might have done about it, in his response to the Texas bar complaint, Jackson said he sought the order from Douglas “upon the request of Johnny Webb.” Jackson also said that in July 1996, the issue of the “inconsistent judgment” was raised “most likely through letters from Webb.”

In Jackson’s response to the bar complaint, he also provided other details that seem to jibe with Webb’s account.

Jackson acknowledged that around the time Webb went off to state prison in 1992, he checked with a court clerk about Webb’s conviction and was surprised to see that the trial judgment was contradictory. It listed robbery instead of aggravated robbery as the crime to which Webb had pleaded but included the penal code for aggravated robbery nonetheless.

An undated note that was discovered in the clerk’s file of the case years later seemed to indicate that Jackson had tried to use the ambiguity in Webb’s favor: It said that if a Texas corrections official called for clarification, “tell them ROBBERY with No Deadly Weapon Used. . . . This is what John Jackson wants it to be.”

Jackson has denied that he wrote the note or asked the court clerk to put such a note in the file.

“As a matter of due process, Jackson’s alleged unawareness of the deal at the time of the trial would not matter,” said Bennett Gershman, a law professor at Pace Law School in White Plains, N.Y., and a national expert on the ethical and legal duties of prosecutors. “He still would be deemed responsible for the nondisclosure.”

Webb regrets his decision in 1992, saying that if he had refused to testify and gotten a life sentence, he probably would have been paroled after 20 years. “As it is,” Webb said, “I’m stuck in this Willingham thing for the rest of my life.”

 

Even though this was from 5 years ago I realized I never responded to this.

Unfortunately that is true. In Oregon v Guzek the USSC ruled that that the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution does not grant criminal defendants facing the death penalty the right to introduce new evidence of their innocence during sentencing that was not introduced during trial. Accordingly, states could constitutionally exclude such evidence from the sentencing phase of a capital trial.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_v._Guzek