If you murder in Texas, you take the chance you yourself will be killed...

[Subdivisions]

even if maybe you didn't actually do the killing you're being killed for.

Citing an article at the New Yorker, KansasVoter http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=6482093">posted the other day about a man it now seems may have not actually killed his two children by arson after all, though he was nonetheless summarily executed by the Texas Death Sentence Machine:

he fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky.

Buffie Barbee, who was eleven years old and lived two houses down, was playing in her back yard when she smelled the smoke. She ran inside and told her mother, Diane, and they hurried up the street; that’s when they saw the smoldering house and Cameron Todd Willingham standing on the front porch, wearing only a pair of jeans, his chest blackened with soot, his hair and eyelids singed. He was screaming, “My babies are burning up!” His children—Karmon and Kameron, who were one-year-old twin girls, and two-year-old Amber—were trapped inside.

Willingham told the Barbees to call the Fire Department, and while Diane raced down the street to get help he found a stick and broke the children’s bedroom window. Fire lashed through the hole. He broke another window; flames burst through it, too, and he retreated into the yard, kneeling in front of the house. A neighbor later told police that Willingham intermittently cried, “My babies!” then fell silent, as if he had “blocked the fire out of his mind.”

Diane Barbee, returning to the scene, could feel intense heat radiating off the house. Moments later, the five windows of the children’s room exploded and flames “blew out,” as Barbee put it. Within minutes, the first firemen had arrived, and Willingham approached them, shouting that his children were in their bedroom, where the flames were thickest. A fireman sent word over his radio for rescue teams to “step on it.”

...snip...

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann">More»

I was telling a relative about this earlier tonight and we wondered about it. How does a state like Texas, that has a conveyor system of killing, atone for itself becoming the thing it is killing? It would seem to me that the State of Texas is itself now a murderer that has not been made to pay the ultimate price it expects its own citizens to pay if they do the murdering.

Should Texas be tried for the murder of Cameron Todd Willingham and then made to pay the ultimate price? And, if not, why should Texas be allowed to get away with murder when justice in Texas for same can result in the death penalty?



PS: Of course I realize that an entire state cannot realistically be sentenced to death. I just wonder how Texas can now justify its penchant for an eye-for-an-eye regarding the crime of murder.

[zbdent]

1. This is what happens when the Governor of the state pays about as much attention to

a "Death Sentence appeal" as his sober future wife would a stop sign on a clear night in Texas ...