(A great recap of the weekend's biggest news... - promoted by Phillip Martin)
According to an article in today's Houston Chronicle, Texas Governor Rick Perry is refusing to release documents that could show whether or not he considered or even read the information sent to him on the day of the execution of Todd Willingham informing him that there was new evidence casting doubt on Willingham's guilt and raising the question of whether Texas was about to execute an innocent man.
We must put pressure on Perry to release all information dealing with the Willingham execution. Rick Perry is continuing to hide information and cover up whether Texas executed an innocent person. The same information that Perry is refusing to release has been released before. In 2003, there was an article by Alan Berlow in The Atlantic ("Texas Clemency Memos") that discussed and contained copies of execution day memos sent to Governor George W Bush from his staff, including many written by his legal counsel Alberto Gonzales. According to Berlow:
Gonzales never intended his summaries to be made public. Almost all are marked CONFIDENTIAL and state, "The privileges claimed include, but are not limited to, claims of Attorney-Client Privilege, Attorney Work-Product Privilege, and the Internal Memorandum exception to the Texas Public Information Act." I obtained the summaries and related documents, which have never been published, after the Texas attorney general ruled that they were not exempt from the disclosure requirements of the Public Information Act.
Samuel Bassett, whom Perry replaced on the Texas Forensic Science Commission two weeks ago, said he twice was called to meetings with Perry's top attorneys. At one of those meetings, Bassett said he was told they were unhappy with the course of the commission's investigation.
"I was surprised that they were involving themselves in the commission's decision-making," Bassett said. "I did feel some pressure from them, yes. There's no question about that."
Call Perry's office at 512 463 1782 and demand that he release all information.
In a letter sent Feb. 14, three days before Willingham was scheduled to die, Perry had been asked to postpone the execution. The condemned man's attorney argued that the newly obtained expert evidence showed Willingham had not set the house fire that killed his daughters, 2-year-old Amber and 1-year-old twins Karmon and Kameron, two days before Christmas in 1991.
On Feb. 17, the day of the execution, Perry's office got the five-page faxed report at 4:52 p.m., according to documents the Houston Chronicle obtained in response to a public records request.
But it's unclear from the records whether he read it that day. Perry's office has declined to release any of his or his staff's comments or analysis of the reprieve request.
A statement from Perry spokesman Chris Cutrone, sent to the Chronicle late Friday, said that "given the brevity of (the) report and the general counsel's familiarity with all the other facts in the case, there was ample time for the general counsel to read and analyze the report and to brief the governor on its content."
A few minutes after 5 p.m., defense lawyer Walter M. Reaves Jr. said he received word that the governor would not intervene. At 6:20 p.m. Willingham was executed after declaring: "I am an innocent man, convicted of a crime I did not commit."
Summaries of gubernatorial reviews of execution cases previously were released as public records in Texas, most recently under former Gov. George W. Bush. Yet Perry's office has taken the position that any documents showing his own review and staff discussion of the Willingham case are not public - a claim the Chronicle disputes.
Plan to attend the 10th Annual March to Abolish the Death Penalty on October 24 in Austin at the Texas Capitol. We plan to deliver the petition that day. Members of Todd Willingham's family are expected to attend the march and rally.
Todd Willingham was executed for arson/murder on February 17, 2004. He professed his innocence from his arrest until he was strapped down on the execution gurney. Now, we know for certain that he was telling the truth. On August 25, 2009, Dr Craig Beyler, the investigator hired by the Texas Forensic Science Commission to review the Willingham case, released his report in which he found that "a finding of arson could not be sustained" by a scientific analysis (Read the report here). He concluded that the fire in the Willingham case was accidental and not arson. In fact, there was no arson, so there was no crime. Texas executed an innocent person. The proven execution of an innocent person should mean the end of the death penalty in the United States.
Craig L. Beyler, the nationally recognized forensics expert whose public testimony was scuttled when Gov. Rick Perry shook up the Texas Forensic Science Commission, said today his testimony would have been matter-of-fact and based on his report that is already public.
Also, Capitol sources confirmed today that Perry’s office worked hard to kill funding for the Texas Forensic Science Commission during the last legislative session. “They knew what was coming,” said one source. “They worked the halls hard to defund the agency.” That news could be devasting to Perry’s public argument that his dismissal of his three appointees was “business as usual.”
Beyler would not comment about Perry’s politicization of the the 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, whom experts believe was innocent in the deaths of his three daughters. Beyler’s report, already filed with the commission, is extremely critical of the Willingham investigation.
The investigators [in Willingham's case] had poor understandings of fire science and failed to acknowledge or apply the contemporaneous understanding of the limitations of fire indicators. Their methodologies did not comport with the scientific method or the process of elimination.
“I haven’t made any statements because the commission asked me not to say anything,” Beyler said in an interview with DogCanyon. Beyler had been scheduled to testify before the commission last Friday, but the hearing was canceled after Perry, at the last minute, replaced three of his four appointees to the nine-member forensics agency. The agency hired Beyler, so it’s understandable that he would follow agency instructions.
Asked what he would have said at the agency hearing had it not been cancelled, Beyler said, “Maybe the commissioners wanted to probe more deeply into things [in the report] that they did not understand.”
Beyler may get a chance to answer such questions publicly when Sen. John Whitmire holds a hearing on the matter before the Senate Criminal Justice Commission meeting he chairs. Whitmire has not finalized plans for the committee meeting. The only witness Whitmire confirmed was John Bradley, the Williamson County prosecutor who now heads the commission. Bradley told the Dallas Morning News’ Christy Hoppe that he thought the agency’s investigation would continue, but he didn’t know when.
Given Beyler’s belief that his testimony only involved an already public report, it remains a mystery why Perry decided to obstruct the commission hearing. Since he is likely the first governor in modern history to have presided over the execution of an innocent man (Perry denied Willingham a stay of execution), it may have been that his campaign considered any public airing of the issues to be potentially dangerous.
We'll continue to bring you more information as this develops...
When you do a search on Google News for the words Rick Perry execution you come away with over 353 news articles.
As the story grows bigger and bigger, it can become essential to find the most important news stories covering it - to archive the main points. Therefore, as a little lunch-time help for BOR readers, I present these must-read stories about Rick Perry's cover-up of the investigation into the exeuction of Todd Willingham:
The 16,000+ word manifesto that started it al. This piece ran a month ago, and remains the single most important article to read about the entire event.
Flawed Arson Science Series - Texas Observer
The Texas Observer is doing a series "investigating how widespread use of flawed arson science wrongly convicted dozens, perhaps hundreds, of innocent people in Texas." Each part in the series is incredible:
Glenn Smith has really tied all the threads together in this one, simple piece over at Dog Canyon -- including a link to the public report by Craig Beyler, a national arson expert, who says:
The investigators [in Willingham's case] had poor understandings of fire science and failed to acknowledge or apply the contemporaneous understanding of the limitations of fire indicators. Their methodologies did not comport with the scientific method or the process of elimination.
Glenn's post also has some details about Senator John Whitmire's expected hearing in a few weeks.
Houston Chronicle Coverage
It is hard to choose just one -- their reporting has been stellar so far -- so here's the main ones:
It links to a video that is a version of the story that ran on Anderson Cooper and Headline News over the weekend, but now it is linked to on the front page of CNN.com. (I saw it on the front page after midnight on Oct 6.)
I tried to embed the video using the code on cnn.com, but I got an error message from Soapblox, so below is the CNN video that aired over the weekend from YouTube.
But, in the past week, a brouhaha over his refusal to reappoint three members of an obscure forensic-science commission has political observers wondering if Perry, who is facing a potentially bruising GOP primary battle, has made a political misstep.
A well-placed source has confirmed to TIME that Perry ignored the written pleas from several members of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, including two of his own appointees, to reappoint the board's well-respected chairman, Austin lawyer Sam Bassett. Bassett's departure has resulted in a delay in an important investigation of evidence in a death-penalty case that critics say will prove an innocent man was executed on Perry's watch.
...
Sarah Kerrigan, a forensic toxicologist who was appointed by Texas attorney general Greg Abbott, told TIME that she had circulated a letter she had sent "three or four weeks ago" in support of Bassett to Perry among the commission's members and she was aware of similar letters written by Watts and Levy. (The governor appoints four members of the forensics board; the state attorney general appoints two and the lieutenant governor appoints three. In this case, Bassett, Levy and Watts were all Perry appointees. Bassett was first named to the commission in 2005 and reappointed in 2007.)
It would be a dangerous political liability for any candidate: The possibility that, as governor, Rick Perry presided over the execution of an innocent man
Yet, that's the prospect raised in recent years by several arson experts and exhaustive national media reports in the case of Cameron Todd Willingham. Maintaining his innocence until the end, Willingham was executed in 2004 for the deaths of his three small children in a blaze that destroyed their Corsicana home in 1991.
As we have blogged about previously (see links to our coverage below), Perry has since fired the Chairman and other two members of the Texas Forensic Science Commission in order to cancel and postpone the meeting and save himself the potential of having an official state group rule that he executed an innocent man.
Paul Burka of Texas Monthly has more in his post, simply titled, "Cover-Up" --
The commission was going to hear a report from an arson expert that the investigation leading to the conviction and execution of Cameron Willingham for the murder of his three daughters was flawed. The case has received national attention because of the possibility that Texas executed an innocent man on Perry’s watch. The removal of the three members forced the cancellation of the meeting and prevented the report from being heard.
Let’s call this what it is: a cover-up. The new chairman, Williamson County district attorney John Bradley, is a political ally of Perry’s (see below) who famously tough on crime. It would be a conversion of mythic proportions if he were to agree with the investigators’ criticism. He now controls when the commission will meet, and you can bet that the report will not be heard or discussed in a public forum before the March 2 primary.
Rick Perry has no political shame, but this latest stunt is simply outrageous and completely unacceptable. I'd have a lot more worse things to say, but the Houston Chronicle's Lisa Falkbenberg says what needs to be said:
The governor's removal of dedicated public servants, apparently for being too diligent, too thorough, in revealing truths that happen to be inconvenient to his re-election bid, is an outrageous affront to the duties of his office.
