A must read: “Trial by Fire,” by David Grann, published in this week’s New Yorker, about the persecution and state-sanctioned homocide of Cameron Todd Willingham in Texas for the deaths of his three children in a fire at his home in 1991. Time, clearly, was not on his side, as new evidence that may have exonerated him was submitted too late for the appeals process to wind its way through the courts. Then again, lack of money did him no favors either:
[M]ost indigent inmates, like Willingham, who constitute the bulk of those on death row, lack the resources to track down new witnesses or dig up fresh evidence. They must depend on court-appointed lawyers, many of whom are “unqualified, irresponsible, or overburdened,” as a study by the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit organization, put it. In 2000, a Dallas Morning News investigation revealed that roughly a quarter of the inmates condemned to death in Texas were represented by court-appointed attorneys who had, at some point in their careers, been “reprimanded, placed on probation, suspended or banned from practicing law by the State Bar.”
