Cameron Todd Willingham, of Texas, was the husband of Stacy Willingham and the loving father of three young girls. There is a reason why I did not include the word ‘loving’ in front of the word ‘husband’. This is because Willingham was anything but that; he regularly verbally abused and beat his wife, and in some of these instances, the police was called. While Todd Willingham was by no means a good husband or a good person, he truly did love his kids. However, his poor reputation would eventually cause community members to doubt this fast, and even worse, cost him his life.
The Christmas of 1991 was no merry one for the Willingham family. Two days prior, a massive fire broke out in the family’s home while Stacy at work. Todd Willingham awoke to the smell of smoke and the sight of flames, and he quickly fled the house in fear, leaving his three girls inside. He screamed for help, yelling that his babies were in there. After the fire department arrived, they pronounced the three girls dead and Willingham wept. Deep down, he knew that he was a coward for not going back inside to rescue his daughters from the flames, but he had truly feared for his life and did what nobody admits that they would do in this circumstance: he saved his own life.
Whether he was guilt ridden or trying to distract himself from his loss, Willingham’s behavior at the scene and in following days seemed very odd to the police. He told them that he tried to look for them and could not find them, and the police and fire department found this suspicious considering that he had been barefoot yet had no burns on his feed. They also thought that he seemed almost unsympathetic, and this caused them to wonder whether the fire was actually arson. They launched an investigation by fire fighters who had plenty of experience fighting fires, but did not know all of the science behind how fires work, and ultimately concluded that the fire was arson. Cameron Todd Willingham was their only suspect.
Despite word from Stacy that Todd would not do something to hurt his kids, the state of Texas took him to court for murdering his three daughters. He was told that if he did not accept a plea deal, he would receive the death penalty if he was convicted; knowing that he was innocent, he still pleaded not guilty. With what prosecutors described as “20 counts of evidence of arson” and Willingham’s abuse of his wife, the State of Texas found him guilty and sentenced him to the death penalty.
Just months before his execution though, arson experts began to question the reliability of the arson investigation conducted by the fire department. After looking into the evidence themselves, they concluded that what was described as “evidence that Willingham poured lighter fluid on the floor” was actually ventilation patterns that occur during a flash-over. They also disproved the other nineteen pieces of “proof”, ultimately leaving no evidence that an arson occurred at all. In order words, there was no evidence that any type of crime that occurred. Days before Willingham’s execution, a leading arson expert signed an appeal proposal claiming that all evidence in the case was insufficient and that the accused was innocent. However, Texas, being tough on crime, still believed that witness testimonies that showed Todd was a wife beater meant that he was a bad dad, thus denying the appeal. On February 17th, 2004, Todd Willingham was executed by lethal injection.
He is not the only person to be falsely executed in the United States. A U.S. study of death row estimated that 4% of defendants sentenced to death are innocent. This may seem like a small number, but for being a margin of error, this is extremely significant and is one of the reasons capital punishment should not be used in the United States. There are many implications to capital punishment, including that it is inhumane and its median cost of $1.26 million per execution. However, to me, the loss of innocent lives is the biggest one.
I find myself outraged at the use of capital punishment in the United States. No matter how much someone thinks the most heinous criminals deserve it, the fact that some innocent will be killed is enough of a reason to discontinue this practice all together. Even just one innocent life taken by the state should be enough of a reason to ban capitol punishment.
You make your posts so interesting! This weeks lesson in my criminology class was actually the death penalty so it was interesting to compare this case with some of the information I learned in that class. The death penalty is certainly a controversial case and it is awful that things like this happen to innocent people. “Death Row” seems to be so long so that people like Willingham could be proven innocent with further evidence but innocent executions still seem to occur every once in a while. To your point about the cost, it is much more expensive than jail even though it is used a lot less often!