Maurice Possley of The Marshall Project, writing in The Washington Post, reports that new evidence has emerged showing that Texas wrongly executed Cameron Todd Willingham in 2004 for killing his three daughters. Willingham is widely considered to be the first known case of an innocent man being put to death by the U.S. justice system.
The forensic case against Willingham — he was accused of setting fire to the house where his daughters were sleeping in 1991 — fell apart long ago. (Debunking the accusations of arson was a key aspect of a famous New Yorker profile of Willingham.) That left the testimony of Johnny E. Webb, a felon who had shared a prison cell with Willingham and who had testified that Willingham had confessed to the crime.
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