Texas: First Ever State Murderer? Yeeehaw!

This is you: It's 1991 in the sleepy town of Corsicana, Texas (pop 25,000). You're asleep in your home when you hear your 2-year-old daughter screaming in the night. You wake to find the house filled with smoke. You tell your 2-year-old to run outside as you desperately enter the fiery bedroom of your 1-year-old twins to rescue them. You cannot find them. Injured and burned, you give up. All three children die. So do you - in every sense of the word.

It's a year later. You've just been convicted of arson and charged with three murders of your precious children. It's a nightmare of small town Texas justice. You plead your innocence to no avail. A jailhouse rat testifies you confessed to him the crime. Finally, a witch doctor draws forth a lethal needle and injects you to death. Justice is served.

Justice of the insane. Justice of the blind and unhearing. Justice of men with hearts so twisted, they hope that in proving the evil of your heart, no one will see the evil in their own.

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Once again, the Chicago Tribune has delved into Texas law enforcement and found it wanting:

In a withering critique, a nationally known fire scientist has told a state commission on forensics that Texas fire investigators had no basis to rule a deadly house fire was an arson -- a finding that led to the murder conviction and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham.

The finding comes in the first state-sanctioned review of an execution in Texas, home to the country's busiest death chamber. If the commission reaches the same conclusion, it could lead to the first-ever declaration by an official state body that an inmate was wrongly executed.


We like to be first in everything here in Tejas. Especially when it comes to killing people. It gets us all excited and bouncy. We brag about our love for law and order. "One thing about the death penalty: you know they won't do it twice!" Sound logic there! One thing is for sure: if we had the death penalty for those responsible for wrongful convictions it sure as hell wouldn't happen twice. Funny, but when I bring that up, they start singing a different tune. Life becomes far more precious when it's your own, huh?

Among Beyler’s key findings: that investigators failed to examine all the electrical outlets and appliances in the Willingham house in Corsicana, did not consider other potential causes for the fire, came to conclusions that contradicted the witnesses at the scene, and wrongly concluded that Willingham’s injuries could not have been caused as he said they were.

The state fire marshal on the case, Beyler concluded in his report, had "limited understanding" of fire science. The fire marshal "seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires and how fire injuries are created," he wrote.

You see, in rural areas, competence is considered "uppity" and mean to the common folk, the salt of the earth. Xenophobia for them applies to anyone who lives beyond the city limits - or anyone who thinks differently. And the civil war is still being fought. Here we got them know-it-all Yankees sticking their damn noses in our bidness all over again! What do they care what the truth is? Why do they got to go stir the pot up fer anyways? Damn you Chicago fascist foreigners! I'm gonna believe what I damn well please!



Over the past five years, the Willingham case has been reviewed by nine of the nation's top fire scientists -- first for the Tribune, then for the Innocence Project, and now for the commission. All concluded that the original investigators relied on outdated theories and folklore to justify the determination of arson.

Eric Ferrero, spokesman for the Innocence Project, a New York-based organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people, said Beyler’s findings on the Willingham case "confirms what several experts have found over the last five years after reviewing thousands of pages of evidence."

"Every expert who has looked at this case has determined there was no reason to call it arson," he said.

We all know the supposed rationale for the death penalty: deterrence. But I guess I's jess a big ole dummy cuz I can't rightly figger out that with all this here deterrin' we got goin' on why we still gots to kill so many of mah fellah Texans. No suh! I doan get that atall!

We kill of course, because we are such caring souls. Nothing concerns us more than victims' rights, our bleeding hearts love them so! It's all part of our relentless pursuit of truth and justice, things to heal the human heart. That's what we're doing here: making the world a better place one dead body at a time. Just ask us.

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"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red."

I know that feeling. There's a lot of tears in those words. In previous posts, I've asked, "Who killed Jesus?" It would be easier to answer who did not.

Was it the dutiful soldiers who followed orders rather than their hearts, they who actually nailed him to the cross?

Wonder how many times Jesus covered his face

Or the mindless sheep, clamoring for lies for their lives, that their truth is the truth?

Click to see the guy in the middle

Was it Pilate, the slanderous slick jurist who asked, "What is truth?" in a pretense of not knowing, perverting the meaning of blind justice?

Let's ask him what the truth is

Was it the Pharisees who gained acclaim by their forked tongues and staged debates, through whom sin came?



Yes, words alone can make you a murderer. So can silent hearts. On behalf of my resident state I hereby declare, "We killed in error, turning our backs on the truth. We are sorry for our lack of faith and judgement, and lack of heart. We must do better if we are to have a future. We confess to this crime."

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