Willingham home after the fire Photo courtesy of Texas state fire marshall's office and the Marshall Project.
The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to covering America's criminal justice system, has released its first story. Maurice Possley looks into the 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was convicted of deliberately setting the fire which killed his three young daughters.
From the story:
"Opponents of the death penalty have long focused on questionable evidence used against Willingham, believing that his case could be the first to show conclusively that an innocent man was put to death in the modern era of capital punishment. As the Supreme Court upheld the death penalty in Kansas in 2006, Justice Antonin Scalia declared that the opposition could not cite “a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit.'"