Depressing story out of Texas - the state executed a man, Cameron Todd Willingham, for killing his three children by setting his house on fire. There was initially evidence of arson, but all the supporting evidence was highly faulty - witnesses who changed their statements to describe him as not caring about his children after he was accused of murder; doctors declaring him a "sociopath" who'd never talked to him and had no expertise in sociopathic behavior, based on the crime he was accused of and the presence of a skull tattoo and an Iron Maiden poster. Even more troublingly, his state-assigned lawyer has publicly stated that he believes his client guilty and seemed to put little effort into his defense. (Quoted from the New Yorker article: "'There were no grounds for reversal, and the verdict was absolutely the right one.' He said of the case, 'Shit, it’s incredible that anyone’s even thinking about it.'"

In January 2004, an expert who consulted on arson cases reviewed the evidence, and was shocked by the hugely faulty conclusions the arson investigators had reached. (Another disturbing quote from the article: "Still, many arson investigators believed that what they did was more an art than a science—a blend of experience and intuition. In 1997, the International Association of Arson Investigators filed a legal brief arguing that arson sleuths should not be bound by a 1993 Supreme Court decision requiring experts who testified at trials to adhere to the scientific method. What arson sleuths did, the brief claimed, was 'less scientific.'")

The expert, Dr. Gerald Hurst, quickly wrote up a report on his conclusions, as Willingham was set to be executed only weeks after he began looking at the case. A copy of his report was sent to the Board of Pardons and Paroles, who denied the request for clemency; there was no record of anyone taking note of the new evidence or responding to it. A member of the board defended this by saying "We get all kinds of reports, but we don’t have the mechanisms to vet them." Willingham was executed in February of 2004.

After years of continued attention and inquiry into the scientific flaws of the prosecution's case, Texas established a commission to address forensic science errors in the justice system. An expert hired by the commission excoriated the arson investigators, and there was some speculation that Texas could officially acknowledge that it had put an innocent person to death. That didn't happen - Governor Perry, under whose watch the man was executed, replaced members of the commission before they could issue their report.

If you want to *really* depress yourself today, watch an interview with Willingham's defense attorney, who still thinks his client was an unambiguously bad guy who got a fair trial.