A leading UK fire expert has uncovered serious errors in an investigation that led to the execution of a man convicted of causing the deaths of three children in a house fire in America.
The findings came in an independent expert's report to the Texas Forensic Science Commission, the state's equivalent of the UK Criminal Cases Review Commission.
The expert, Craig Beyler, chairman of the London-based International Association for Fire Safety Science, concluded that the original state investigation was flawed and did not have the evidence and analysis to back up a finding of arson against Cameron Todd Willingham.
Mr Beyler said that the opinions of the state fire official were "nothing more than a collection of personal beliefs that have nothing to do with science-based fire investigation."
He went on to say that the deputy state fire marshal, Manuel Vasquez, who originally investigated the Willingham case, was: "wholly without any realistic understanding of fires and how fire injuries are created". He said witnesses contradicted the marshal's arson hypothesis and reported an admission by Mr Vasquez that he had not eliminated other possible causes.
Eric Ferrero, spokesman for the Innocence Project, a New York-based organisation dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people, said Mr Beyler's findings on the Willingham case "confirms what several experts have found over the last five years after reviewing thousands of pages of evidence". He added: "Every expert who has looked at this case has determined there was no reason to call it arson".
Willingham, 36, was executed in 2004. He was convicted of setting the fire that killed two-year-old Amber and one-year-old twins Karmon and Kameron two days before Christmas 1991 in their Corsicana home. He said before his execution that he was innocent, calling his 1992 trial "a joke". He added "The most distressing thing is the state of Texas will kill an innocent man and doesn't care they're making a mistake".
Ben Gonzalez, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Insurance, of which the State Fire Marshal's Office is a part, said he had no comment on the report, adding that officials there had not yet seen it. He said Vasquez died in 1994.
The case came to light after the State Commission, created in 2005 to review allegations of forensic misconduct, requested the independent analysis after the Innocence Project submitted claims of questionable evidence in the cases of Willingham and another man who was convicted in a similar case but was later released.
Mr Beyler said that, in both cases: "The investigators had poor understandings of fire science", adding that: "Their methodologies did not comport with the scientific method or the process of elimination."
Source - The Expert Witness Society