No ammo to those damn liberals!

If Texas were still a foreign country, I wonder how it would do in the State Department’s annual report on human rights conditions. How would analysts review President (currently merely ‘Governor’) Rick Perry’s handling of the burgeoning controversy over the 2004 execution of Todd Willingham for setting fire to his house and slaughtering his two daughters? A crime Willingham probably did not commit.

The New Yorker had a long piece on the case a few issues back, detailing how the uneducated Willingham, who had been in trouble with the law for minor offenses, was incompetently defended and convicted on the evidence of arson ‘experts’ who turned out not to know shit from Shinola. He refused a life sentence in exchange for confessing and told his executioners he was an innocent man.

The Texas Forensic Science Commission, established in 2004, reported in August that a ‘finding of arson could not be sustained’ in the case, so Perry had no choice: he fired the Commissioners and appointed a slew of his political cronies to replace them.

But the whole sorry spectacle is about a lot more than one egregious miscarriage of justice. It was exactly five years ago, just as Willingham was getting his fatal injection of poison, that the Houston forensic lab scandal broke wide open, which in turn led to the establishment of the TFSC to review shoddy evidence in a torrent of other cases.

Investigators found that the supposedly solid and incontrovertible evidence flowing from the crime lab in the nation’s fourth-largest city was consistently flawed and the lab itself run by an incompetent who escaped perjury charges after the statute of limitations ran out. Prosecutors in Houston’s Harris County had to agree to review DNA evidence in thousands of cases—that is, where the local CSI geniuses had not used up the entire sample in the testing process, thereby making it impossible for a defendant to refute or verify their original results in a retest.

One of the first to go free after that scandal broke was George Rodríguez, who had spent 17 years in Texas jails for raping a teenaged girl. Rodríguez was prosecuted despite a confession from the co-rapist implicating someone else and sworn testimony from Rodríguez’s employer that he was at work that day. But forensic ‘evidence’ by sworn ‘experts’ at the Houston lab destroyed his life.

Texas is the execution center of the United States, and Harris County/Houston the leading supplier of prisoners with 110 deaths in the modern era, enough there alone to outrank any other state. Incarceration rates are similarly off the charts. But it has not mattered much to Texans whether or not those falling into the jaws of its prison apparatus are actually guilty of crimes.

The problem at Houston’s crime lab wasn’t unique. A federally-mandated report from the National Research Council issued in February of this year found the whole forensic system seriously flawed and in need of independent oversight and nationally mandated standards.

The report strongly implied what the Rodríguez and other similar cases confirm—that in their rush to obtain convictions, the prosecutor/police/crime lab nexus tends to give each other what they want: evidence for conviction. When defendants are poor and poorly defended, they have little chance to prove their innocence as the white-gloved ‘scientists’ trot out their convenient ‘facts’.

It was inevitable given this scenario that Texas eventually would railroad an innocent man to death.

Nor is it particularly surprising now to recall the enthusiasm the entire country displayed (with laudable exceptions) at the idea of torturing confessions out of Ay-rabs rather than patiently gathering evidence of criminal activity and putting them on trial. We actually have a long tradition of slapping people into jail because of who they are rather than what they did, and it didn’t start at Guantánamo nor in 2001.

But the Willingham case, instead of leading to a sober reassessment of systemic bias and possible injustice, leads certain Texas pols to worry instead that revelations that the state probably killed an innocent defendant might interrupt its deathhouse machinery. Senator and gubernatorial candidate Kay Bailey Hutchison, who looks at first glance to be a nice lady but in fact isn’t, hammered Perry not for obstructing justice but, in her words, for ‘giving liberals an argument to discredit the death penalty’.

To get elected in Texas, you have to prove that you’re a snake. Hutchison and Perry strike a blow for gender equity by proving that our ophidian cousins come in both male and female variations.