From the Houston Chronicle:

Related story here….

Despite repeated rebuffs by the state of Texas, relatives of Cameron Todd Willingham on Wednesday again will try to get officials to admit that the Corsicana man was wrongly executed eight years ago for the 1991 deaths of his three young children in a Christmas-season fire.

Eugenia Willingham, the convicted killer’s stepmother, and two of his cousins are scheduled to join lawyers from the New York-based Innocence Project in Austin to announce they will ask the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend a posthumous pardon.

Also to be present is Ernest Willis, a West Texas man who spent 17 years on death row for the 1986 suspected arson murders of two Iraan women. In December 2004, 10 months after Willingham’s execution, Willis was freed when a Pecos County district attorney concluded the fire in his case likely had been accidental.

A draft of Willingham’s pardons petition asserts that “since his trial, scientific advances have shattered every assumption underlying the testimony of the two fire investigators who declared to the jury and the court that Willingham had set the fire that killed his children. In fact, today, no credible arson expert would make such a declaration.”

Willingham’s relatives could not immediately be reached for comment, but in a statement released Tuesday, the killer’s stepmother said “it was Todd’s last wish that we help clear his name.” His cousin, Patricia Willingham, added, “It’s time for the state of Texas to own up to its mistake and give Todd the justice he deserves.”

Only once, in 2008, has the pardons board recommended that Gov. Rick Perry grant a posthumous pardon. That case involved Timothy Cole, a Texas Tech University student who died in prison 14 years after being convicted of rape. His case – the victim later admitted she had misidentified Cole as her attacker – was a catalyst for a state law providing compensation for exonerated prisoners.

The Innocence Project began championing Willingham’s cause in 2008 when it asked the Texas Forensic Science Commission to review the quality of arson investigations leading to the former auto mechanic’s conviction.

Three reviews of the investigations, one commissioned by the Innocence Project and another by the forensic science commission, found that Corsicana and state arson investigators had misread evidence at the fire scene. Willingham went to his death at the Texas death house protesting his innocence.

The forensic science commission puzzled through conflicting claims in the case until July 2011 when Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott shut down the inquiry by finding commissioners were acting outside their jurisdiction.

Although the review led to far-reaching recommendations to improve education for firefighters, commissioners stopped short of finding that investigators in the Willingham case had done sloppy work.

In a separate attempt to have Willingham declared wrongfully executed, the Innocence Project in 2010 petitioned Austin district courts for a court of inquiry. A proceeding in state District Judge Charles Baird‘s court ended abruptly when an appeals court ruled the judge acted improperly in accepting the case.

Baird’s term ended weeks after that ruling, and no effort was made to revive the court of inquiry in another venue.

Innocence Network president Keith Findley has posted the above-titled article on SSRN.  Download piece here.  The abstract states:

This is the text of a talk given by Keith Findley as part of the Integris Law & Medicine Lecture Series at Oklahoma City University School of Law on September 27, 2011, with commentary by Dr. Patrick Barnes, Professor David Moran, and Professor Carrie Sperling. The talks address controversies that have arisen in the past ten or twelve years over the diagnosis Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS) (now known also more expansively as Abusive Head Trauma (AHT)) and prosecution of individuals based on the hypothesis that the child was injured or died after an adult caregiver violently shook the child. The talks examine the science-dependent nature of prosecutions (or child removal actions) based on the shaking hypothesis, as well as emerging controversies from new medical research about whether shaking can cause such injuries and death, at least without causing extensive neck and cervical spine injuries; whether the indicators previously attributed almost exclusively to shaking — such as subdural hematomas and retinal hemorrhages — are indeed diagnostic of abuse; whether other causes, both natural and accidental, can mimic abuse and lead medical professionals astray; and whether the onset of clear neurological impairment can reliably be timed to the infliction of injuries so that the medical science can be used to identity the perpetrator (assuming there was one). This talk examines how the legal system is being called upon to re-examine SBS convictions in light of this evolving medical science.

From Salon.com:

Donald Eugene Gates, convicted of murder in Washington D.C., would spend 28 years in prison before he was exonerated in 2009 through the tireless work of his lawyers at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia – but it was not until this Spring that the flawed FBI forensics supposedly “matching” his hair to the crime scene would finally come under broader scrutiny.

The case brought still worse problems to light. This Spring, the Washington Post released the results of a remarkable investigation, uncovering a buried 1990’s Department of Justice inquiry into FBI hair cases, and finding hundreds more cases with flawed forensics. Some of the cases were death row cases — for example, a Texas man was executed in the late 1990s, but if it had not been for the FBI’s flawed hair analysis, he would not have been even eligible for the death penalty.

This Spring, the Public Defender Service also cleared two more people who had flawed FBI hair testimony, using DNA tests. One, Kirk Odom had served 22 years in prison for a crime he did not commit and has been exonerated. The second man, Santae Tribble, spent 28 years in prison, and is still waiting for a ruling on Continue reading →

From Nature.com:

A group that has used DNA evidence to free nearly 300 wrongly convicted people from prison reached out to scientists this week, asking chemists to engage with forensic science. Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, an organization based in New York that investigates potential wrongful convictions, asked researchers at the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to do more to improve the troubled field of forensic science.

Complaints about the unreliability of some scientific evidence used in courts worldwide are long-standing, and a 2009 report by the US National Research Council called for major reforms to the US forensic-science system, including better standardization of protocols and more research into the reliability of methods used. The US Congress is now considering a bill that would provide money for forensics research and require the US National Institute of Standards and Technology to establish standards in the area (see ‘Proposed bill calls for better forensic science‘).

But despite such concerns, little has changed on the ground, says Justin McShane, an attorney at the McShane Firm in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who works with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project and serves as co-chair of the ACS Division of Chemistry and the Law. “It’s still a Wild Wild West out there in forensic science.”

Neufeld says that misuse of forensic science is a major factor in nearly half the cases investigated by the Innocence Project. He is calling on chemists to lobby Congress individually and through the ACS in support of the bill. But he also wants more scientists to engage with forensic science research. “What we want to do is make forensic science more about science and less about law enforcement,” he says, so it becomes an impartial assessor of evidence rather than a branch of law enforcement.

This call was echoed by Frederick Whitehurst, a chemist and former investigator for the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. “What we seem to know in the world of science is that there are some real problems in the world of forensic science, and we’d rather work on something cleaner,” he told an ACS session on chemistry and the law. “We don’t seem to want to work with dirty crime sciences.”

Whitehurst says that crime-laboratory technicians are often under pressure to produce evidence that agrees with police or prosecutor theories. Scientists can “run into a sledgehammer” when their evidence doesn’t confirm prosecutors’ hypotheses, says Whitehurst, potentially putting their careers at risk.

Greg Hampikian, a geneticist at Boise State University in Idaho and director of the Idaho Innocence Project, told the meeting that he regularly has nightmares about the ease with which innocent people can be convicted because of flaws in forensics systems.

Hampikian has worked on such high-profile cases as that of Meredith Kercher, a British student who was murdered in Italy in 2007. Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were convicted of the murder, partly on the basis of DNA evidence, but were freed in 2011, in part because Hampikian showed that DNA can easily be transferred via gloves from an item a person has touched to another item — such as a knife — that they have not touched. As new techniques allow ever smaller amounts of DNA to be detected, such contamination will be an increasing problem, Hampikian says.

But DNA analysis can also prove innocence: several attendees at the ACS meeting had been exonerated through investigations by the Innocence Project.

Steven Barnes was convicted of rape and second-degree murder in 1989 and spent nearly 20 years in prison before DNA testing showed that sperm cells from the crime scene did not match his. Ray Krone was sentenced to death on the basis of a bite-mark analysis in a 1991 murder case. He was proven innocent by DNA testing after serving ten years in prison. “I had never been in trouble in my life. They put me on death row. This could happen to you,” said Krone. “I’m calling on the ACS to get more involved in forensic science.”

ACS president Bassam Shakhashiri, a chemist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has been a strong supporter of the Innocence Project, and he appeared with many of the speakers for the Innocence Project at a press conference on Monday. He told Nature that before the society could lobby Congress in favour of the bill, the board would need to approve a policy statement on the matter, but that he planned to speak to several of the governance committees that oversee the topics involved.

“The topics discussed by the Innocence Project are vitally important to all of us,” he says.