Incendiary The Willingham Case Analysis

The movie screening of “Incendiary: The Willingham Case” shed new light on several topics that I feel like I have overlooked in the past. This screening presented a film about a man named Cameron Todd Willingham who was thought to be wrongly convicted for the murder of his three children. Willingham was charged with arson and then later executed without any further investigation on the large amounts of evidence that suggested his innocence. This case is significant in that it helped fuel the anti-death penalty movement and emphasized how flawed our legal system truly is.
While watching this film, I learned that things may not always appear as they initially seem. When the investigators searched Willingham's home, they almost immediately thought that he was responsible for the fire despite having no motive because they found evidence of char patterns in the shape of a puddle, suggesting that he used accelerants to speed up the fire. With the little evidence the authorities had, they believed that Willingham was guilty; however, further investigation proved that it was unlikely that Willingham set the house on fire intentionally. Unfortunately, that evidence was ignored and authorities held their claim that Willingham was
This issue seems to be an imminent problem that is growing in today's society because of the increasing number of people who are wrongly convicted each year. Recalling the lecture Brian Stevenson had given us in the fall, there are still many individuals who are tragically executed for crimes that they did not commit. As St. Edward’s commits to stressing the importance of social justices, showing the screening of “Incendiary: The Willingham Case”, along with many other films, will help to spread the awareness of the amount of people who are wrongfully convicted and