Texas Gov. Rick Perry has presided over the executions of more condemned inmates than any governor in this nation’s history. To say that Perry is a staunch supporter of the death penalty would be a paltry understatement. A recent Dallas Morning News report (Sept. 18, 2009) featured Perry’s reaction to three independent studies conducted by seven of the nation’s top arson experts over the past five years which support the growing belief among anti-death penalty groups that the State of Texas executed an innocent man when it put Cameron Todd Willingham to death in February 2004. Willingham had been tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in Corsicana, Navarro County, Texas for the arson murder of his three children.

            Expressing his skepticism—even disdain with his sophomoric gesture of making quotation marks with his fingers—Gov. Perry dismissed the expert arson reports by saying “I’m familiar with the latter-day supposed experts on the arson side of it.” The governor’s cavalier dismissal of the reports by the experts—all of which were highly critical of the State’s evidence presented through two local Navarro County fire officials—actually reflects Perry’s lack of understanding of the science involved in investigating arson fires.

            Gov. Perry then took his reaction into a realm that perhaps only he understands. He stated that even without proof of arson there was “clear and convincing, overwhelming evidence” in the court records he reviewed about the Willingham case which convinced him that “he [Willingham] was in fact the murderer of his [three] children.”

            There was absolutely no evidence that the Willingham children had been beaten, stabbed, choked, or shot to death. All the evidence pointed to the fact that the children died by fire. The only issue in dispute from the very beginning was whether the fire that killed them was caused by arson. Based on Perry’s personal experience and his political history with the death penalty, it can only be assumed that the court records the governor cited which caused him to believe there was “clear and convincing, overwhelming evidence” of Willingham’s guilt was the indictment itself. Many death penalty proponents in the State of Texas do in fact believe that a criminal indictment, which historically has been nothing more than a formal accusation, is by itself “clear and convincing, overwhelming evidence” of a person’s guilt; that the constitutional presumption of innocence associated with any state criminal charging instrument is an antiquated legal concept.

            I think Barry Scheck, the co-director of the Innocence Project at the Cardozo School of Law in New York and who has been a longstanding advocate of Willingham’s innocence, best summed up Gov. Perry’s reaction: “Governor Perry refuses to face the fact that Texas executed an innocent man on his watch. Literally all of the evidence that was used to convict Willingham has been disproven—all of it. He [Perry] is clearly refusing to face reality.”

            I became absolutely convinced of Willingham’s innocence after Maryland’s renowned arson expert Graig Beyler released the results of his extensive review of the State’s evidence against Willingham last month and concluded that the prosecution’s fire experts relied on a “poor understanding of fire science” to reach conclusions that Willingham had started the fire that killed his children.

            And I don’t believe that either Gov. Perry or any of the prosecution officials involved in securing the death sentence against Willingham would ever concede his innocence even if Jesus Christ reappeared and delivered a second Sermon on the Mount attesting to Willingham’s innocence.