Entries tagged with “Cameron Willingham”
Apr 24, 2026
New Resource: Forensics, “Junk Science,” and the Death Penalty
Saturday April 25th is National DNA Day, marking the anniversary of the 1953 discovery of DNA’s double helix structure and the 2003 completion of the Human Genome Project. Today, the Death Penalty Information Center is pleased to present a new resource examining the controversial role of “junk science” in capital cases. When DNA testing became one of the most rigorously validated tools in forensic science, its development also prompted greater scrutiny of other forensic techniques. Many…
Issues
Nov 03, 2020
Ohio Judges Acquit Capital Defendant in Alleged Arson Deaths of His Family
A three-judge panel in Madison County, Ohio has acquitted a man prosecutors charged with capital murder for allegedly setting his car on fire to burn down his house with his wife and children inside. The judges rejected prosecutors’ arguments that Peter Romans (pictured with his family) had poured gasoline on the driver’s side of the family’s SUV and set the car ablaze with the intent that the conflagration spread to the house to kill his wife Billi and their two children, Ami and Caleb.
Issues
Jun 16, 2010
DNA Evidence Could Show If Texas Executed an Innocent Man
Texas Judge Paul C. Murphy recently ordered prosecutors to hand over key evidence from a 1989 murder case to the Innocence Project and the Texas Observer for DNA testing. In 2007, the Innocence Project and the Observer filed suit to obtain a one-inch strand of hair that allegedly implicated Claude Howard Jones (pictured) in the killing of a liquor store owner in San Jacinto County. Other than vague eyewitness accounts and questionable testimony from Jones’s two friends who were also at the…