Questions Raised About Possible Errors in Arson Convictions

A Texas man executed two years ago after a deadly house fire killed his three young daughters may have been wrongly convicted due to faulty science that may effect other U.S. fire investigations, experts report.

Cameron Todd Willingham was put to death in 2004 after junk science was accepted in court as expert testimony.

Now, veteran arson investigators and people with backgrounds in science and engineering fear that at least some of the more than 5,000 people imprisoned in the U.S. for arson may have been wrongfully convicted.

“It’s an unspeakable error and people don’t want to admit they made that error,” said John Lentini, an arson expert. “It means you might’ve sent someone to prison based on bad science,”

The Innocence Project, a New York-based group that seeks to uncover wrongful convictions commissioned a team to study Willingham’s case, which is of particular importance because he was executed. Other state projects around the nation have also begun to evaluate other arson convictions.

“It’s really hard to get a number of how many people have been falsely accused, falsely convicted, falsely excluded from insurance payment,” Lentini said, which is why researchers will begin evaluating the evidence that convicted the alleged criminals.

Among the faulty errors that were part of the expert testimony in the Willingham case were:

· Gas-fueled fires are hotter than wood fires, and melted aluminum found in the home proved the fire was intentionally set. In fact, gas fires are not necessarily hotter than wood, experts said.
· Investigators testified that the spidery cracking of glass, “crazed” glass, proved the presence of a hotter gas-fueled fire. However, experts now say that cracking may occur when water is sprayed on the glass or if the glass is struck.
· Investigators said that the fire had “multiple origins,” which implied that it was intentionally set. However, now experts say there is no way to credibly determine that.

Gerald Hurst, a private arson investigator said the ideas presented in the Willingham case were “a hodgepodge of old wives’ tales,” that were accepted as factual evidence without much scientific support.

In 1992, The National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit group of firefighters, builders, insurers, and others, issued an agreement document discrediting many long-accepted fire investigation procedures, said Lentini.

A few states including Texas have commissioned a federal law associated to crime-lab funding to further investigate more adequate techniques of fire investigating and uncover mistakes made in the past.

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