Audrey Dodgen for PMT

“We really set out to make a piece of cinema. It’s a scientific murder mystery, and we wanted it to hold up as a film,” Mims said.

A graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, Bailey brings unique perspective to a film about law, science and politics. INCENDIARY examines the facts of the case against Cameron Todd Willingham, executed in 2004 for killing his three daughters in a deliberate house fire. The questionable science used to convict, and the legal and political machinations spawned by the case pose unanswerable questions.

“It’s human nature to want to get to the bottom of it. We’ll never know exactly what happened, because all of the people who know what happened are dead. But we know that it didn’t happen the way Willingham was convicted of it,” he said.

INCENDIARY features a cast of real-life Texas figures, many unwittingly pitted against each other by their passion for the subject. Each person involved in the case is convinced of their view, creating an enigmatic puzzle in which the two sides are diametrically opposed and completely invested in their position.

“There are giant personalities in this film. Giant personalities with big opinions. These are people with conviction,” Mims said. Among the larger-than-life personalities, viewers will recognize some unmistakeable Texas archetypes — Bailey calls the myriad characters “very, very Texan, almost caricatures of Texas stereotypes.”

The filmmakers acknowledge gathering inspiration from King of Kong, and groundbreaking films like Errol Morris’ Thin Blue Line. Viewers will see moments in the film which are reminiscent of those inspirations. “We looked at films like King of Kong, where I don’t care about the subject, but it’s just a great film. You can’t make characters like these up, and that’s what we found in this film,” Mims said.
Bailey and Mims (himself a UT grad, with a master’s in film production) emphasize that the film is a puzzle, encouraging viewers to ruminate on the case and its effects.

“People’s opinions are going to be changed by this film. They are going to leave thinking about it, with one opinion, and the next day they are going to have a different opinion. The mystery is the thing,” Bailey said.

The Austin American Statesman reported today that the “Guns 4 Groceries” program is returning to Austin on Saturday.

Austin police will be on hand to collect the weapons from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at the Oak Meadow Baptist Church, 6905 South Interstate 35 near William Cannon Drive in South Austin. A key draw: it’s a “no questions asked” program.

“The response was overwhelming last time. We had to shut down after a few hours,”said Cary Roberts, executive director for the Greater Austin Crime Commission, an Austin nonprofit that is co-sponsoring the event. “We anticipate the same interest this time.”

Participants can collect $200 for each assault rifle, $100 each for handguns and rifles and $10 apiece for air guns, BB guns or replicas, sponsors said. There is a two gun limit per participant.

Read the full article here.

Story originally posted by NPR, Jan. 4, 2011

A Texas man had his conviction overturned Tuesday for a rape and robbery he didn’t commit after serving 30 years in prison, more time than any other inmate subsequently exonerated by DNA evidence in his state.

Cornelius Dupree Jr., 51, was formally cleared of the aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon conviction that had kept him behind bars from December 1979 until July of 2010. He served 30 years of his 75-year sentence before making parole in July. About a week later, DNA test results came back proving his innocence.

Read full story here.

by Laura Sullivan, NPR News

Last year, two men showed up in Benson, Ariz., a small desert town 60 miles from the Mexico border, offering a deal.

Glenn Nichols, the Benson city manager, remembers the pitch.

“The gentleman that’s the main thrust of this thing has a huge turquoise ring on his finger,” Nichols said. “He’s a great big huge guy and I equated him to a car salesman.”

What he was selling was a prison for women and children who were illegal immigrants.

“They talk [about] how positive this was going to be for the community,” Nichols said, “the amount of money that we would realize from each prisoner on a daily rate.”

But Nichols wasn’t buying. He asked them how would they possibly keep a prison full for years — decades even — with illegal immigrants?

“They talked like they didn’t have any doubt they could fill it,” Nichols said.

That’s because prison companies like this one had a plan — a new business model to lock up illegal immigrants. And the plan became Arizona’s immigration law.

by Morgan Smith, The Texas Tribune
October 26, 2010

On Sept. 25, 2007, Sharon Keller allegedly spoke the words that launched a thousand editorials: “The court closes at 5 p.m.” According to lawyers for Michael Richard, that’s what the presiding judge of the Court of Criminal Appeals said when she denied their request to file a last-minute appeal of his death sentence on the night he was to be executed.

Ever since, a glaring national spotlight has focused on the state’s death row appeals process and, to a lesser extent, on its method of regulating judicial conduct. But despite the public furor, Keller has escaped any official punishment for her actions that day. Judge David Berchelmann, reviewing the evidence on orders from the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, said that while her behavior was “not exemplary of a public servant,” he recommended no reprimand. And though the commission went against his wishes and issued its own sanction, Keller successfully appealed: Two weeks ago, a special court of review found the commission acted outside of its authority.

The soft-spoken and, until now, media-shy judge sat down with the Tribune in her office on Friday to talk about the death penalty in Texas, the flaws in the way the state sanctions judges, what really happened that afternoon and what it’s like to be known as Sharon “Killer” Keller. She was quick to say she planned to run for re-election in 2012 — despite the impeachment proceedings that state Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, says he’ll file against her in the upcoming session and the fodder all of the negative attention over the Richard case provides for an opponent. The more the public learned about her actual judicial record and what really happened that day, she said, the less it would matter.

“The idea that I don’t care about defendants, or indigent defense, is ridiculous,” she insisted.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://trib.it/a8rW2e.

by Morgan Smith, The Texas Tribune
October 19, 2010

Two weeks before the gubernatorial election, the season premiere of PBS’s Frontline features a timely topic: the Cameron Todd Willingham case — and despite initial hesitation, all public broadcasting stations in Texas will air it. 

When Texas PBS stations originally learned the episode of the nationally syndicated show would run so close to Election Day, some expressed concern over how the public might perceive the decision to show the hourlong documentary on the highly controversial case, which raises the question of whether Texas executed an innocent man, according to Bill Moll, the general manager of San Antonio’s KLRN. But after reviewing and discussing its content with Frontline producers, Moll said, “We felt that there was no motive that has anything to do with the election; it just kind of hits where it hits.”

The Tribune obtained an early copy of the episode. Most of the documentary focuses on interviews with the Corsicana man’s relatives and neighbors, who describe the events leading up to the fire that killed his three daughters, and fire experts who take apart the arson evidence the state used to convict him of arson in 1992. Willingham doesn’t come out looking saintly: One neighbor describes overhearing the then-23-year-old Willingham’s frequent beatings of his wife and calls him a “very mean man.” The last quarter of the episode addresses the current commotion over whether Gov. Rick Perry erred in allowing the execution to proceed in 2004 and intentionally meddled with the makeup of the Texas Forensic Science Commission when it was set to take on the case late last year. Perry declined multiple interview requests from PBS producers, a Frontline spokesperson says. 

Bill Young, the vice president of programming at KERA — which serves North Texas, including Dallas and Fort Worth area — said the station never questioned whether to run the episode, only the scheduling. “There was just an interest of us wanting to talk to Frontline to figure out the timing — why now?” he says. But after viewing it, it became clear that “there is so much more to it than being just two weeks before the election.”

“We’re a little bit more sensitive here in the state, because we have the election in two weeks, than somebody in Kansas City,” he said, adding, “Any other time on earth, nobody would have even thought twice about it.” 

View excerpts from the episode, which will air tonight at 8 p.m. Central Standard Time, here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://trib.it/d6ieTZ.

KUT’s Matt Largey reports: Willingham was convicted of starting a fire that claimed the lives of his three daughters in 1991. But two private arson experts told the court yesterday that there was no evidence that the fire was started deliberately. John Lentini told the court that the conclusions of the original investigation were based on bad science.

“I can’t go back and re-investigate the fire, unfortunately,” said Lentini. “I can only use the documentation the fire marshal collected and provided. But what I have seen that the fire marshal put forward as evidence of arson is not evidence of arson” (KUT).

Governor Perry has fought the review of the case, and declined to participate in the hearing. Katherine Cesinger, his spokeswoman, said, “Nothing the Austin court does can change the fact that Todd Willingham was convicted in a trial court with the appropriate jurisdiction, and sentenced to death by a jury of his peers for murdering his three young daughters” (NYT).

“Texas is home to more verified wrongful convictions than any other state in the nation,” Tarrant County Medical Examiner Nizam Peerwani (FWST).

by Morgan Smith, The Texas Tribune
October 8, 2010

The protracted U.S. attorney appointment process has claimed its latest casualty: Michael McCrum, who withdrew his name from consideration on Thursday.

In his letter to White House general counsel Robert Bauer, the San Antonio-based lawyer, who was poised to become the state’s first federal prosecutor appointed by Barack Obama, said that there was “no practical option” but to remove himself from consideration and that he felt “profound regret” for not having the chance to take over the job.

“I have not been able to take any cases for the past six to nine months, and as a result my practice has dwindled to almost nothing,” McCrum told the San Antonio Express-News. “It’s a very difficult situation.”

All four Texas U.S. attorney posts stand vacant — more than any other state — in part due to squabbling between the Texas House Democratic delegation and the two Republican senators over who should control the recommendation process and in part due to delays from the White House. McCrum, a consensus candidate backed by both House Democrats and the senators in the Western District, lately represented the state’s best shot at a presidentially confirmed federal prosecutor. 

In April, Beaumont state district judge John B. Stevens, Obama’s only nominee in Texas, also withdrew his name in the Eastern District because of the lengthy confirmation process.

So far, the state Democrats and GOP senators haven’t found candidates they both like in any of the other districts. In the Dallas-based Northern District, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn is pushing assistant U.S. attorney Sarah Saldaña. Democrats want U.S. Magistrate Jeff Kaplan in the spot. And in the Southern district, the senators are standing firm behind career U.S. assistant attorney (and Republican) Ken Magidson.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://trib.it/aedszi.

by Brandi Grissom, The Texas Tribune
October 5, 2010

[Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect additional comments from Judge Charlie Baird.]

Fifteen years ago, Judge Charlie Baird was one of the justices on the state’s highest criminal court who reaffirmed Cameron Todd Willingham’s death sentence. Now a state district judge, Baird is scheduled on Wednesday to begin a process that could determine that the conviction — and Willingham’s execution — were mistakes. And the prosecution objects.

Lawyers for Willingham’s family are set to take their high-profile fight to exonerate the executed arsonist to a new venue today. They’ve asked Baird to convene a court of inquiry to determine whether Willingham was wrongfully convicted, and whether state officials committed a crime when they executed the Corsicana man despite evidence casting doubt on his guilt. Baird agreed to hold a hearing to determine the need for such a court to investigate the case. But Navarro County District Attorney R. Lowell Thompson, whose office originally convicted Willingham, says Baird’s impartiality is tainted by his previous ruling in the case, and his own beliefs about the death penalty. “Therefore he should recuse himself or be disqualified,” Thompson writes in a motion seeking to disqualify Baird. Thompson argues that the hearing should be put on hold until a decision on the motion is made. But the hearing remained scheduled as of late Tuesday.

Whether Baird presides or not, the larger question is whether Willingham’s case represents systemic flaws in the Texas criminal justice system that may have landed countless other alleged arsonists behind bars or even in the death chamber. “The goal is to see if we have the proper procedures to eliminate the prospect that some innocent person would be executed,” says Mark White, former Democratic Texas governor and attorney general who is among several lawyers representing Willingham’s survivors.

Willingham was convicted of intentionally igniting the blaze that killed his three daughters in 1991. In the 12 years between his conviction and his execution, he repeatedly proclaimed innocence. Days before he was executed in 2004, arson expert Gerald Hurst sent the results of his investigation of the Willingham fire to state officials. Hurst — and other experts since — concluded that investigators used faulty science to prove that Willingham started the fire. Nevertheless, Willingham was executed. His case drew national attention last year when The New Yorker published an investigative story on the case.

Since then, the Innocence Project has sought a review of the investigative science used to convict Willingham and other arsonists from the Texas Forensic Science Commission. That process, though, has been fraught with controversy. As the commission last year was set to review another report that concluded that Willingham investigators used faulty science to determine the fire was arson, Gov. Rick Perry abruptly replaced three of the commissioners, including the chairman. The reconfigured commission sought a different scientist to review the arson evidence. The new report concluded that there was no wrongdoing. At a hearing last month, the commission decided — against the wishes of its new chairman, John Bradley — that it needed even more time to review the case and determine whether investigators used bad techniques or whether they abided by the standards of the day.

Unlike the Forensic Science Commission, the court of inquiry would have the authority to decide on Willingham’s guilt or innocence — and whether the evidence supports “official oppression” charges against any officials involved in the case. “State officials have intentionally denied or impeded Mr. Willingham’s and his survivors’ right to a remedy to his reputation,” lawyers for the Willingham family wrote in a petition requesting the court of inquiry.

Baird declined to comment Tuesday about how he might rule on the recusal motion. In an earlier interview, he said evidence contradicting state arson investigators’ findings was not available when he first heard the case as a judge on the Court of Criminal Appeals in March 1995. “It just seems to me like the enormity of the issue … is just as large as it [gets] in the criminal justice system,” Baird says. “The seminal issue of, did we wrongfully execute someone, is just overwhelming.”

District attorney Thompson said there was no wrongful conviction in the Willingham case. “The criminal justice system was utilized correctly in this case,” he said in an interview. In a motion filed this week, Thompson wrote that Baird should be disqualified because he was on the Court of Criminal Appeals when it upheld Willingham’s guilt, the central question at issue in the court of inquiry. In the same motion, Thompson contends — in a seemingly contradictory argument — that Baird has a reputation as a death penalty opponent. He cites comments from a newspaper website that question the judge’s impartiality and an award that Baird received earlier this year from the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. The coalition recognized Baird — who exonerated Tim Cole in a court of inquiry, based on DNA evidence that the convicted rapist was innocent — for his “constant and courageous voice of opposition to the death penalty.” Cole was sentenced to 25 years in prison, where he died in 1999.

Thompson also argues that Baird has already taken steps, illegally, to begin the court of inquiry before a hearing to examine whether evidence indicates that one is necessary. If Baird or another judge determines that a court of inquiry is needed, then the law requires a separate judge to preside over that process.

When Baird dealt with Willingham’s case in 1995 — lacking evidence that would be uncovered later — the lawyers’ arguments centered on whether the venue was appropriate; on questions about the testimony of jailhouse snitch Johnny Webb, who told jurors that Willingham confessed; and on whether the evidence supported the death penalty in his case.In the days leading up to the court-of-inquiry hearing, Baird says he reviewed the appellate case for Willingham. “You have to make decisions at a time certain, with the evidence before you and the arguments before you, and that’s all in the world you can do,” Baird says. “I still think I was right, based on what issues raised were on appeal.”

Previous courts of inquiry have led to broader policy changes. In the Tim Cole case, the court of inquiry resulted in Perry eventually issuing the first-ever posthumous exoneration. It also spurred lawmakers to create the Timothy Cole Advisory Panel on Wrongful Convictions, which has made recommendations to the Legislature about new laws that could help prevent cases like Cole’s. In the 1990s, lawyers from El Paso launched a court of inquiry to examine whether state agencies were shortchanging communities along the border. No criminal charges came from the case, but state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, who was one of the lawyers who worked on the court of inquiry, says the process led to legislative and agency changes that meant more money for mental health, transportation and other public services in border communities. “It is a way to gather evidence on what really happened,” Shapleigh says of courts of inquiry. 

Should the court of inquiry rule that Willingham was innocent, Baird says he’ll be saddened that he played a role in a process that led to the execution of a wrongfully convicted man. “Life is full of mistakes, but my thinking has always been, if you make a mistake, you ought to be man or woman enough to admit it,” he says. “And you go on down the road and try not to make the same mistake twice.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://trib.it/96aJnC.