BobHarris.com - Texas executed an innocent man

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Rude Pundit

Texas executed an innocent man

Tag it now -

Wednesday, 03 May 2006

Common sense says it had to have happened at least once. Well, it did:

A man executed by the state of Texas in 2004 was convicted on an erroneous interpretation of fire evidence, according to a report from four leading arson experts.
[snip]
"Each and every one of the indicators relied upon have since been scientifically proven to be invalid," the Arson Review Committee report states.
[snip]
John J. Lentini, the former chairman of the forensic science committee of the International Assn. of Arson Investigators, led the review panel and said in an interview that he was convinced that Texas had executed an innocent man.

One of the many ill-conceived arguments pro-death penalty advocates use is that nobody had ever proved that an innocent person was legally executed in the United States. Not anymore.

Fire is a truly complex and poorly-understood subject. When I used to work at CSI, we had a number of discussions about doing an arson case and really digging into the relevant forensic examination techniques. But we never did, at least while I was there. One big reason was that on close scrutiny, most of the "techniques" amounted to little more than unscientific guesswork, more a series of beliefs and habits than any peer-reviewed analysis, really just one notch up from finding witches with dunking chairs. (The other reason we never did such an episode -- probably the main one, as I understand it -- was that fire is really super-hard and crazy expensive to shoot.)

It turns out -- big shock! -- that fire behaves in unexpected ways. Many of the rules of thumb that arson investigators have used for many years turn out to be complete crap.

"Arson is the only crime for which you can be executed based on the opinion of a man with a high school education," Lentini said, referring to the fact that many arson investigators are qualified by judges as "experts" even though they lack scientific training.

Back when Chimpus Maximus was governor, you recall, he signed death warrants with a bloodthirst unparalleled in modern U.S. history. If somebody out there has time to go through the cases looking for arson, there may be some important history to correct.