Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

More justice, Texas style

A renowned scientist and arson investigator, Gerald Hurst, educated at Cambridge and widely recognized as a brilliant chemist, reviewed the evidence in the Willingham case and began systematically knocking down every indication of arson.

The authorities were unmoved. Willingham was executed by lethal injection on Feb. 17, 2004.

Now comes a report on the case from another noted scientist, Craig Beyler, who was hired by a special commission, established by the state of Texas to investigate errors and misconduct in the handling of forensic evidence.

The report is devastating, the kind of disclosure that should send a tremor through one’s conscience. There was absolutely no scientific basis for determining that the fire was arson, said Beyler. No basis at all. He added that the state fire marshal who investigated the case and testified against Willingham “seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires.” He said the marshal’s approach seemed to lack “rational reasoning” and he likened it to the practices “of mystics or psychics.”

via nytimes.com

Also from the above op-ed: "Cameron Todd Willingham, who refused to accept a guilty plea that would have spared his life, and who insisted until his last painful breath that he was innocent, had in fact been telling the truth all along."

Black firefighters, political correctness and facts

Back in the aftermath of 9/11, plans for a memorial statue in honour of firefighters was abandoned after it turned into a political controversy that drew protest signatures from more than a thousand firefighters. The reason? The statue depicted three firemen, with white, black and Hispanic features respectively. This was found to be an act of "political correctness" misrepresenting the "reality", since the statue drew upon a photographs of three firefighters, all white, raising an American flag in the rubble of the twin towers.

Tony Marden, a firefighter opined that the change was "an insult to those three guys to put imaginary faces on that statue. It's not a racial thing. That shouldn't even be an issue". Carlo Casoria, father of one of the many firefighters who died on 9/11, observed that "they're rewriting history in order to achieve political correctness".

These arguments are premised on the notion that a memorial statue should be (and typically is) of particular individuals (in this case, the statue is derived from a photograph of actual firemen), not symbolic. But apart from statues specifically celebrating an individual (such as a political or military leader), statues, especially memorials, are symbolic and for understandable reasons should be. After all, the men and women who perished on the day are more deserving of memorialisation than the actual three individuals who erected the flag. Why then the insistence that a symbol duplicate the real event from which it draws inspiration?

A more troubling aspect is the facts behind the arguments surrounding the depiction of non-white firefighters in a 9/11 memorial. Two bits of fact stand out: One, black firefighters did lose their lives in the events of 9/11. Twelve of the 343 firemen who died on that day were black. Or about 3.5%. The second fact is the unsurprising correspondence of this number to the percentage of black persons in the New York Fire Department: 3%.

But it is another fact makes the real history of the issue apparent: 27% of the city's population is black (or approximately 13% are black men, ignoring for the moment the equally difficult matter of the representation of women in the fire service). What the token symbolism of the statue cannot change, or redress, is in fact not so much the reality seen in the photograph it is modelled on, but discriminatory hiring within the FDNY -- a finding of a federal judge (in a recent lawsuit against the city of New York) who held that the city used tests that discriminated against black and Hispanic applicants, and thus "unfairly excluded hundreds of qualified people of color from the opportunity to serve as New York City firefighters".