“Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”

The United States is virtually the only Western democracy that still has the death penalty on its books. Many other democratic nations, including Great Britain, Canada and France, even have laws barring the extradition of alleged criminals to the U.S. for trial if there is a possibility the individual will face a sentence of death if he or she is found guilty.

This week, the ultimate tragedy of retaining the death penalty was driven home. The current issue of the New Yorker magazine has an excellent investigative article by David Grann on Texas’ execution of an apparently innocent man, Cameron Todd Willingham.

On the morning of 23 December 1993 a fire broke out in Willingham’s house. Willingham was at home with his two-year-old daughter, Amber, and his one-year-old twin girls, Karmon and Kameron. Willingham was sleeping and the mother of the poor family, Stacy, had gone to the Salvation Army to pick up a Christmas present for the children.

Willingham was awakened by Amber’s crying to discover the house engulfed in flames. He managed to get out of the house, but he was unable to rescue his children. According to Willingham, he tried to get to his children but as the fire grew in intensity, he was driven back by the smoke and flames. At one point as he tried to reach his children, his hair caught on fire. Then the windows of the children’s room exploded and he had to be restrained from trying to get into the burning room.

Initially, there was no reason to suspect this was anything other than a horrific tragedy. But local fire officials investigating the incident somehow managed to come to the conclusion the fire was the result of arson and charged Willingham with capital murder. Officials could not determine any motive, but, they decided, who but Willingham could have set the fire?

Willingham turned down a proffered guilty plea deal because, he protested, he was innocent. The case went to trial and, suddenly, eyewitness testimony began to change. Initially neighbors described Willingham’s actions on the scene as screaming and hysterical — “My babies are burning up!” — and desperate to have the children saved. At his trial, though, he was described as behaving oddly, and not having made enough of an effort to get to the girls.

Willingham was found guilty and sentenced to death. He spent 12 years on death row.

In the weeks leading up to his execution convincing scientific evidence of his innocence began to emerge. Gerald Hurst, a renowned scientist and arson investigator, educated at Cambridge and widely recognized as a brilliant chemist, reviewed the evidence in the Willingham case and systematically eliminated every indication of arson that had been used to convict Willingham.

The authorities, though, were unmoved and Willingham was executed by lethal injection on 17 February 2004.

Recently, Texas, the state with the highest execution rate, established a commission to review errors and mishandling of forensic evidence. The commission hired a noted scientist, Craig Beyler, who reviewed the evidence in Willingham’s case. According to Beyler, there was absolutely no scientific basis for determining that the fire was arson.

Beyler even went so far as to state that the state fire marshal that 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 compared it to the practices “of mystics or psychics.”

Hurst’s and Beyler’s conclusions should send a gut-wrenching tremor through everyone’s conscience. That the fire took the lives of three small children was a tragedy of horrific proportion; that an innocent man was deliberately, almost maliciously, put to death after suffering the loss of his children is beyond reason.