Fatal Flaws In American Justice

Picking cotton at sunrise in a hot field in Mississippi. It's someplace that a lot of men wouldn't want to be. But Ernest Willis doesn't mind. He is a free man. Free at last after 17 years on Texas' death row. After thousands of days trapped in a nightmare, working out in the hot sun feels like a dream Willis never dared to have. He was waiting for his execution not for a crime he didn't commit but for something that wasn't even a crime at all. He says he was railroaded. Now the real experts agree that bogus testimony caused him to be wrongly convicted. There are other cases too, where overly zealous prosecutors used distorted evidence and relied on junk science to damage lives and send innocent men to their deaths. This is a story about Fatal Flaws in American Justice.

This is also a story about how dedicated attorneys are using new evidence to get those convictions overturned. Back in 1986, Ernest Willis was just trying to make a few bucks when he traveled from Odessa Texas down to a tiny town called Iran out in the middle of nowhere. He was supposed to pick up a car, drive it back and sell it but the car wasn't running so he had to wait a couple of days until the auto repair shop got the parts in to get the car fixed. So Willis stayed over until the car was fixed, or at least that was the plan. He and his cousin were spending the night at a friends house. Two young women, friends of the owner, came over. They were having a party that night and sat around and drank a few beers eventually everyone went to bed in separate parts of the house. Willis laid down on the couch. At around three or four o'clock in the morning a fire broke out. Willis ran around the house and tried to get the girl in the back but he couldn't get to her because of the fire.

So he then ran out the front door and ran around the side of the house breaking the windows and hollering for everyone to get out. But the two girls did not get out. Willis was shaken and only slightly burned and glad to be alive after the harrowing incident. He thought that it was just a cruel accident. He also thought that either someone had fell asleep with a cigarette or it was an electrical fire. In fact there had been a rash of electrical problems in the house for some time where it was cutting on and off. At that time no one thought it was anyone's fault. But police and prosecutors decided to make it Ernie's fault. A few weeks later he was charged with murder. Willis was so sure he would be acquitted he drove himself back to Iran. Up until that time he thought the system worked. But the system had worse in store for Ernie Willis. He doesn't remember much about his trial because he was dazed and drugged throughout his trial.

He thought he was getting pain medication for a back problem but he was actually getting pumped full of anti psychotic drugs. The prosecutor used the fact that he was in a drug stupor against him, telling the jury that he was a monster that needed to be put away forever. The core of the prosecutions case was that the house fire that killed the two women was arson, a contention that was bolstered by testimony of fire investigators. They claimed that Willis had poured 15 gallons of gasoline throughout the house and presented photographs of what they called "pour patterns". That was enough evidence to send Willis to death row. At one point he was just hours away from a lethal injection. And Willis probably would have been put to death had it not been that his case grabbed the attention of a high powered defense attorney from a New York firm. A firm, Lathem & Watkins, that poured 12 years and $5,000,000 into Willis' appeal.

His attorneys hired fire expert and scientist Dr. Gerald Hurst who proved that the photographs were just wrong. Dr. Hurst said that most arson investigators get it wrong because they lack scientific training, relying instead on outdated folklore. He says that the typical fire investigator has never had any chemistry of physics, has usually been to the military, has gone to somewhere between two weeks and two months of basic training where he has been taught if you see this it means that. And, Hurst says, there is a lot of incentive to brand any suspicious fire as arson. He says if you are working for the police you are trying to stamp out crime so if you are a police fire investigator or Fire Marshall you can get a lot of accolades for catching an arsonist but an accidental fire gets them nothing. Dr. Hurst's findings helped Ernie Willis win his freedom. Ernie says he never tires of watching the video of him walking out of Death Row into the waiting arms of his wife Sarah Lynn.

He met and married her while in prison. But Hurst's testimony came too late for Todd Williams. He was on death row at the same time as Ernie and was also convicted of setting a fatal fire. Todd William's Mother treasures the pictures of her son and his wife with their three Daughters. She says Todd called her the night before the fire happened and said he had gotten the pictures and that was going to be her Christmas present. On the morning of December 3rd, 1991, Todd's wife left their house in Corsicana Texas to go Christmas shopping. Todd and the girls were sleeping in. He said he woke up and he heard one of the girls hollering "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy" and the house was black and full of smoke. By then he was gasping for air so he thought he would go out and get a breath of air and then go back in to get the girls. But then he couldn't get back in. All three of the children died in the fire. William's cousin, Pat Cox, says everyone was devastated.

As a family she says they got together and tried to help financially since Todd was in the hospital as a result of having tried to save his children. She says she never expected that within two weeks he himself would be arrested. Like Ernie Willis, Todd Williams was charged with Arson and murder. Unlike Ernie Willis, Todd had no high powered law firm working for free to overturn his conviction. After almost a dozen years his appeals went nowhere. Then his cousin, Pat Cox, was able to contact Dr. Gerald Hurst who reexamined the evidence. He concluded that the fire was accidental and was a combination of junk science and old wives's tales. He says there was absolutely no evidence of Arson whatsoever. Four days before Todd Williams was scheduled to be executed for a crime he swore he did not commit, his attorney filed a plea with the Texas court of appeals, a plea he said that contained new evidence. The court, however refused to grant a stay.

Their last hope was that Texas Governor Rick Carey would act on Dr. Hurst's expert opinion that the fire was an accident and not arson. Governor Carey said he didn't see the appeal until fifteen minutes before the execution. Dr. Hurst doesn't believe that. Todd Williams was executed on February 17th 2004 just eight months before Ernie Willis was released from the same Texas prison. There is no doubt in many people's minds now, including Todd's mother and Dr. Hurst, that the State of Texas executed an innocent man. But there is some hope. A new District Attorney has taken the reigns. The state of Texas executes more people than other state in this country. Dallas the quintessential Texas city has a new lawman. Craig Watkins, the first ever African American to hold the office of District Attorney says that his county has sent more innocent people to prison than any other and the criminal just system there has failed them. He has made plenty of changes since the year he was elected.

His first order of business was to get rid or prosecutors who conducted business in the old way. He says that the old prosecutors only cared about getting convictions not about guilt or innocence. Since he took office, reexamination of DNA evidence of some 35 cases has exonerated 13 inmates none of whom were death row inmates. However, Watkins believes Texas has executed innocent men. Watkins says he's pursuing Justice not just convictions. Hank Skinner probably wishes Craig Watkins probably had been the District Attorney overseeing his case. Unfortunately, the murder he was convicted of didn't happen in Dallas but rather in Pampa, a little town in the Texas panhandle. Skinner and his appellate attorney believe that attitude of convict no matter what is why he remains on death row today. All he knows is that he was asleep on the couch and somebody came in the house and killed everyone but him. He says not only had he been drinking that night but he had ingested a large dose of codeine which he is allergic to.

According to a witness he wasn't just passed out, he was comatose. The murder scene was a bloody one and there was lots of DNA evidence. Rob Owen is one of Skinner's attorneys. He says that the girlfriend was found beaten and strangled to death and the investigators took samples from her with an eye towards testing for DNA. Testing for DNA can mean the difference between freedom and death for the accused. But in Texas the authorities refuse to do those tests. And that is what happened to Hank Skinner. He says they never tested the rape kit, the murder weapon, the jacket she was wearing, the towel that was wrapped around one of the knives, or the fingernail scrapings from his girlfriend who was known to have organic material under them. Rob Owens thinks he knows why. He thinks that they don't want to undermine their own case especially if the DNA turned out to be someone else's.

Hank Skinner and his attorney is asking the 5th circuit court of appeals to reverse his conviction so that he can get the testing done. There is one person who could prevent all this legal maneuvering if they wanted.. The District Attorney, Lynn Switzer. After a dozen years in the shadow of the death chamber the kind of reversal set Curtis McCarty free after 22 years. McCarty was convicted of murdering a young woman, a police officer's Daughter who had just moved into the home of a friend of his. The case against McCarty was based solely on the testimony of the Oklahoma City Crime Lab forensic scientist, a woman named Joyce Gilcrest. She testified that his DNA matched the semen that was taken from the victim and therefore he had to be present at the time of the crime. As it turns out it wasn't his semen after all and in addition, there was some sort of a palm print found at the crime scene. They printed McCarty right in the courtroom and came back and said that there was a footprint.

So they compared it with McCarty's, again in court. It didn't match McCarty's and was withheld form the defense for 22 years. Over the years the trumped up testimony of Joyce Gilcrest has sent many other people to death row. Lawyer's made Joyce Gilcrest's conduct a centerpiece of their appeal. They forced the testing of DNA evidence that proved he did not commit the murder. After McCarty's conviction was overturned she was fired. The method she used, matching hair samples, was discredited as well. There is now a growing movement to reexamine the so called scientific evidence for many convictions. Just last month a Judge in Baltimore Md. threw out fingerprint evidence in a murder trial. Hair comparison, bite mark comparison, and now even fingerprint evidence are being scrutinized. Modern science is beginning to supersede older assumptions but it is 22 years too late for Curtis McCarty. And in the process he has lost it all. But unlike so many others he, at least, didn't lose his life.