Execution of an Innocent Man

No, this post isn't about Troy Davis, the Georgia death row inmate I've written about many times before. This is about Cameron Todd Willingham, a Texas man who tried desperately to save his children in an accidental house fire back in 1991. On the night of the incident, firefighters had to physically restrain the 23-year-old Willingham with handcuffs to keep from going into the house to save his kids, as Bob Herbert writes in today's NY Times. Later, a state fire marshal concocted a theory that Willingham had started the fire that killed his young children. The local district attorney believed the fire marshal, some neighbors said that Willingham had acted "strange," a mentally unstable and drug-addicted jailhouse snitch testified against Willingham, and voila! Texas put an innocent man to death. Scientific research, commissioned by the state of Texas, has demonstrated unquestionably that the fire marshal had no basis on which to rule the fire an arson.

Craig Grann's phenomenal, thoroughly researched article in the current New Yorker tells the painful story of Willingham, who maintained his innocence until his final days.

For decades, opponents of the death penalty have pondered when this day would come — when a state would admit that it had sanctioned the killing of an innocent person. Today's the day.

I'll repeat the obvious question: Why on Earth do we have a death penalty?

UPDATE: Barry Scheck, co-director of The Innocence Project, has an excellent op-ed discussing Willingham's case and the array of problems with forensic science. Just this term in the Supreme Court, none other than Justice Antonin Scalia—someone not typically a fan of criminal defendants—described how unreliable these "sciences" can be.

Return of the blog?

For the last three months — since the exam period of spring semester, really — I have stopped blogging. There are three big reasons for this.

First, I'm living in Berkeley, California, this summer, and I have certainly not made finding time to sit at my computer and write a big priority. In the two minutes I have worked on this post, I have already thought about the other things I could (and probably should) be doing: mailing clerkship applications, walking to the Berkeley Farmer's Market, generally being outside.

Second, the internet generally and blogging particularly makes for less personal contact. My friend and former boss, Jake, first brought up this point to me more than a year ago. His point has stuck in my mind, and I believe I agree with him more now than I did then. I sympathize with the plight of people like Dorothy and Andrew Yankanich, members of the WWII generation who can no longer walk across the street to drop their handwritten letters in a blue "snail shell." The internet has done many positive things for our culture, made the world smaller and democratized information, but it has not, on the whole, made our connections more personal. Not yet. I say "not yet" because just this week, I video-chatted with my older brother, who lives approximately 2,000 miles away. We hadn't seen each other's faces in a couple of months. Video chat is great.

Third, the searchability of blogs has created problems for aspiring defense lawyers. Members of the defense community simply cannot blog about work without getting themselves, or much more importantly, their clients, in trouble. Because I hope very soon to be a defense attorney, I cannot blog about what I do. I have wanted to say many things about the work I see and do every day, but I can't.

So, as I prepare for the end of summer and a return to my third year of law school, I continue to think about the usefulness of personal blogs. I'll likely continue this one, in some form. But I would love some feedback about how to make it great.

In the meantime, check out this great podcast on an experiment at Slate: which is more useful, newspapers or the Web? (Newspapers, of course.)

The root causes of Somali piracy

Another group presented in my Post-Conflict Justice class yesterday, this time on Somalia. The country has led a lot of headlines lately, primarily because pirates off the coast captured an American ship and took Capt. Richard Phillips hostage. Now that Phillips has returned home and everyone is sure to stop paying attention, the Pentagon has announced that it plans aggressive military action against the pirates. We might as well declare war on sneezing in spring.

Somali piracy is merely a symptom of the massive problems Somalia faces. Despite sharing a common language and ethnicity, the country's rival clans have warred with each other for decades, a trend perpetuated by the western European countries that colonized the Horn of Africa. This didn't get much attention until the 1990s, when the U.S. and U.N. intervened, with good intentions and horrific results. Now, there is anarchy, and a clan formerly known as the Islamic Courts Union, now Al-Shabaab, has moved in to exploit it and place the entire country under Sharia law.

The people of Somalia had not been fed, and we gave them guns. Then other countries, recognizing Somalia's weakness, stole their fish and used their coastline as a toxic waste dump. What, honestly, did we expect? Before we start attacking Somalians again, we would do well to learn from our mistakes. We don't need another Black Hawk Down. Piracy is wrong, and stopping it would be nice, but it won't happen until we address the real causes. These pirates are viewed as heroes in Somalia because they're the one group who can put food on the table. If we go after them now, history will repeat itself and no one will come out ahead.