Did The New Yorker Bring Back The Death Penalty Debate?
A little over a month ago, The New Yorker ran a little investigative story by David Grann about the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, who had been accused of setting fire to his house and killing his three daughters inside in 1991. Now The New York Times has taken up a Texas death sentence beat, and we have little doubt that Grann’s piece has something to do with it. The chilling tagline “Did Texas execute an innocent man?” made it pretty easy to toil through the 17-page feature. More chilling than the tagline was the actual story, which contained years of research on the case. Page after page, as more evidence was laid out, sympathy for Willingham heightened, while the Texas prosecutors were increasingly (and embarrassingly) discredited. The most poignant part of the five part piece is when Willingham’s petition for clemency is denied by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, four days before he was scheduled to die. The reader has (and we imagine Willingham had) high hopes that
