She had never visited a prison before. “It is a systematic method,” Vasquez later testified, adding, “I’m just collecting information. The walls were painted green, and in the center of the room, where an electric chair used to be, was a sheeted gurney. One day in January, 2004, Dr. Gerald Hurst, an acclaimed scientist and fire investigator, received a file describing all the evidence of arson gathered in Willingham’s case. But she didn’t think that her former husband should be on death row. “Got to get things in order.”, He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in December, 2003, he was notified that it had declined to hear his case. In fact, when liquid accelerant is poured under a threshold a fire will extinguish, because of a lack of oxygen. “He just likes skulls and snakes. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. The two houses were virtually identical, and the investigators refurbished the condemned one with the same kind of carpeting, curtains, and furniture that had been in Lewis’s home. On the evening of October 15, 1990, a thirty-five-year-old man named Gerald Wayne Lewis was found standing in front of his house on Lime Street, in Jacksonville, Florida, holding his three-year-old son. Even a former judge named Bebe Bridges—who had often stood, as she put it, on the “opposite side” of Willingham in the legal system, and who had sent him to jail for stealing—told me that she could not imagine him killing his children. You see, we are not living in here, we are only existing.” In 1996, he wrote, “I just been trying to figure out why after having a wife and 3 beautiful children that I loved my life has to end like this. The police began to piece together a disturbing profile of Willingham. But he said that he had loved his children and would never have hurt them. A neighbor said that he once heard Willingham yell at her, “Get up, bitch, and I’ll hit you again.”, On December 31st, the authorities brought Willingham in for questioning. Click is a 2006 American comedy-drama film directed by Frank Coraci and starring Adam Sandler. In the byzantine appeals process of death-penalty cases, which frequently takes more than ten years, the writ is the most critical stage: a prisoner can introduce new evidence detailing such things as perjured testimony, unreliable medical experts, and bogus scientific findings. Check out our gallery of the 2021 Oscar nominees in the leading and supporting acting categories, as the characters they so brilliantly played and in real life. It explained why there had never been a motive for the crime. Later, at Willingham’s request, they cremated his body and secretly spread some of his ashes over his children’s graves. “If Willis was guilty, I’d be retrying him right now. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Makeup. Arson investigators have always been considered a special breed of detective. The children had life-insurance policies, but they amounted to only fifteen thousand dollars, and Stacy’s grandfather, who had paid for them, was listed as the primary beneficiary. Seeing that the floor had some of the deepest burns, Vasquez deduced that it had been hotter than the ceiling, which, given that heat rises, was, in his words, “not normal.”. He insisted, fancifully, that he had been abducted by a band of criminals and sold into slavery. He followed the “burn trailer”—the path etched by the fire—which led from the hallway into the children’s bedroom. Willingham.”. For Mill, there was one counterargument that carried weight—“that if by an error of justice an innocent person is put to death, the mistake can never be corrected.”, The modern legal system, with its lengthy appeals process and clemency boards, was widely assumed to protect the kind of “error of justice” that Mill feared. And the firemen and police on the scene had described Willingham frantically trying to get into the house. Take a look ahead at some of our most anticipated superhero series arriving in 2021 and beyond. He had written a poem: “Do you want to see beauty—like you have never seen? “I ain’t gonna plead to something I didn’t do, especially killing my own kids,” he said. Born in Ardmore, Oklahoma, in 1968, he had been abandoned by his mother when he was a baby. Reaves told him that the fifteen members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which reviews an application for clemency and had been sent Hurst’s report, had made their decision. . Hurst next examined a floor plan of Willingham’s house that Vasquez had drawn, which delineated all the purported pour patterns and puddle configurations. Gene, who was in his seventies, had the Willingham look, though his black hair had gray streaks and his dark eyes were magnified by glasses. Willingham, refusing to assist the process, lay down; he was carried into a chamber eight feet wide and ten feet long. If something was bothering him, I would have known.”, Gene and Eugenia got up to go: they didn’t want to miss any of the four hours that were allotted for the visit with their son. . Grigson had previously used nearly the same words in helping to secure a death sentence against Randall Dale Adams, who had been convicted of murdering a police officer, in 1977. If the floor had been soaked with a liquid accelerant and the fire had burned low, as the evidence suggested, Willingham could not have run out of the house the way he had described without badly burning his feet. “So long ago, so far away,” he wrote in a poem. DNA testing, which was developed in the eighties, saved seventeen of them, but the technique can be used only in rare instances. But, based on the evidence, he had little doubt that it was an accidental fire—one caused most likely by the space heater or faulty electrical wiring. He was wearing his customary outfit: black shoes, black socks, a black T-shirt, and loose-fitting black pants supported by black suspenders. 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