Editorial: Perry's actions increasingly suspect in Willingham case (Dallas Morning News)

[struggle4progress]

07:59 PM CDT on Monday, October 12, 2009

Gov. Rick Perry's Saturday night massacre of the Texas Forensic Science Commission has extended into Sunday and beyond.

When the governor abruptly unseated three commission members, including the chairman, he derailed a hearing about a flawed arson investigation that led to an execution. Little more than a week later, the governor has replaced a fourth member of the forensic science panel.

Perry has insisted that this was standard operating procedure, all part of the regular cycle of appointments. But troubling comments from the deposed chairman suggest that the governor's efforts to change the course of this inquiry began months ago.

The commission is examining the arson-murder case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was sent to his death in 2004. Fire science experts have emphatically rebuked the arson investigation, but the governor has attempted to plug his ears and push aside accumulating evidence that Texas might have executed an innocent man on his watch ...

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/editorials/stories/DN-willingham_13edi.State.Edition1.34c797e.html

[GTurck]

1. Pressure...

must be kept on Perry for all the venial things he has done to Texas. He spits out un-American diatribes such as threatening to secede from the United States as if Texas, where I live now but was not born here, was still a frontier state of southern emigrants. He is a Bush buddy and has ruined this state financially, socially, and politically and made it the laughing stock of the world. Now he wants to cover-up judicial malfeasance.
Fie on you, MR Perry.

[Canuckistanian]

2. The Commission should be out of the Governor's reach

It doesn't make sense that the person who signs the final death warrants gets to choose the commission that's investigating the justification for those warrants.

But then again, I guess the words "conflict of interest" aren't heard very often in Texas.

[Doctor_J]

3. Sounds like the Fed needs to intervene.

Perry is quite clearly engaged in a criminal conspiracy.