Nearly six years before before Navarro County prosecutor John Jackson used a jailhouse snitch to help send Cameron Todd Willingham to his death, Jackson made similar use of an inmate informant in a different death penalty trial.
In both cases, the informants later said their testimony resulted from secret deals they made with the prosecutor, which were withheld from defense lawyers.
Jackson had strong evidence in the December 1986 trial of Ernest Baldree for murdering a husband and wife as he stole cash and jewelry. But Jackson also bolstered his case with testimony from Kyle Barnett, a convicted drug user and burglar, who told the jury that Baldree confessed to the crime while they were both inmates in the Navarro County Jail. Baldree was executed in 1997.
On September 10, 1991, 11 months before Willingham went on trial, Barnett signed a sworn affidavit for lawyers working on Baldree’s appeal. Barnett said that Jackson, along with Navarro County District Attorney Patrick Batchelor, pressured him to testify against Baldree in exchange for favorable treatment in his own case.
The scenario that Barnett described echoes allegations later made in the far more famous case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for the arson murder of his three young daughters.
Last March, the Texas State Bar filed a formal accusation of misconduct against Jackson, accusing him of obstruction of justice, making false statements and concealing evidence favorable to Willingham. The bar action accused Jackson of failing to disclose to Willingham’s defense a deal with Johnny Webb, a jailhouse informant who testified that Willingham confessed to the crime while they were both in the Navarro County Jail.
Webb now says his testimony was false—that Willingham never confessed—and that Jackson threatened him with a lengthy jail term if he did not help the prosecution, so the two made a secret deal.
Jackson has denied making any deal with Webb, and says he helped Webb because he was facing death threats because of his testimony.
A now-retired Texas prosecutor struck secret deals to secure key testimony in more than one death penalty case, according to a new report.
After uncovering evidence last summer that Navarro County prosecutor John Jackson arranged such a deal in one death penalty case, The Marshall Project, a news nonprofit focused on criminal justice issues, reported Tuesday that Jackson did the same in another, earlier case. In both instances, the report says, defense attorneys were not told about the deals and those testifying reported feeling pressured into doing so and guided in what to share.
The new story alleges that Jackson bolstered a 1986 case against Ernest Baldree—who was charged with murdering a husband and wife during a robbery—with testimony from Kyle Barnett, who was an inmate with Baldree.
But Barnett says he never wanted to testify against Baldree: “The prosecutors there had me in a position where it would be real hard on me if I refused,” he said, according to the report. Barnett said Baldree admitted to the murders, but was also remorseful, saying he was high on speed and didn’t know what he was doing—a fact, he says, prosecutors were uninterested in hearing.
“The scenario that Barnett described strongly echoes allegations later made in the far more famous case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for the arson murder of his three young daughters,” Maurice Possley and Maurice Chammah write.
Jackson had, for more than 20 years, denied making a deal in that case, too, but a story by Possley republished by The Washington Post last summer cast doubt on his denial.
The former inmate who provided testimony against Willingham in that case, Johnny E. Webb, told Possley that he had been coerced and his testimony that Willingham confessed was a lie. Jackson at the time called the allegation a “complete fabrication.”
Jackson has also alleged that he and Barnett have never had contact. But Barnett says Jackson and his prosecution team told him that they needed his testimony.
“They told me that, if I would testify, they would allow me to the Cenikor Drug Rehabilitation program in Fort Worth for violating my probation,” Barnett explained in an affidavit, according to the new report. “They said if I didn’t testify, I’d be going back to the prison for a long time.”
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles has voted not to recommend a posthumous full pardon for Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed a decade ago after being convicted of setting a house fire that killed his three young daughters.
“This whole process is, unfortunately, typical of this board, where they don’t demonstrate that they’ve actually considered the substantial evidence that we’ve put before them,” said Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, which has led the charge to clearn Willingham’s name in the case.
In the 10 years since Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham after convicting him on charges of setting his house on fire and murdering his three young daughters, family members and death penalty opponents have argued that he was innocent. Now newly discovered evidence suggests that the prosecutor in the case may have concealed a deal with a jailhouse informant whose testimony was a key part of the execution decision.
The battle to clear Mr. Willingham’s name has symbolic value because it may offer evidence that an innocent man was executed, something opponents of the death penalty believe happens more than occasionally. By contrast, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote seven years ago that he was unaware of “a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit.”
Mr. Willingham was convicted on charges of setting the 1991 fire in Corsicana, Tex., that killed his three children, and was sentenced to death the next year. The conviction rested on two pillars of evidence: analysis by arson investigators, and the testimony of a jailhouse informant, Johnny Webb, who said that Mr. Willingham had confessed the crime to him.
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Mr. Willingham was convicted and executed in the killings.Credit Associated Press
The arson investigation has since been discredited; serious questions were raised about the quality of the scientific analysis and testimony, which did not measure up to the standard of science even at the time. But the prosecutor who led the case shortly before Mr. Willingham’s execution argued that even though the arson analysis had been questioned, the testimony of Mr. Webb should be enough to deny any attempt for clemency.
In recent weeks, as part of an effort to obtain a posthumous exoneration from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and Gov. Rick Perry, lawyers working on Mr. Willingham’s behalf say they have found evidence that Mr. Webb gave his testimony in return for a reduced prison sentence. Evidence of an undisclosed deal could have proved exculpatory during Mr. Willingham’s trial or figured in subsequent appeals, but Mr. Webb and the prosecutor at trial, John Jackson — who would later become a judge — explicitly denied that any deal existed during Mr. Webb’s testimony.
In September, lawyers from the Innocence Project in New York filed an official request with the board to exonerate Mr. Willingham, citing the flawed fire science and Judge Jackson’s subsequent actions in the Webb case: efforts to cut Mr. Webb’s prison time and to downgrade the charges after the Willingham trial. The Innocence Project also contends that prosecutors suppressed an effort by Mr. Webb to recant his testimony.
But recantations in criminal cases are relatively common, said Walter M. Reaves Jr., a criminal defense lawyer who has worked on Mr. Willingham’s case, so the biggest open question has been whether Judge Jackson and Mr. Webb had made a deal. Judge Jackson, who has retired from the bench, continued to insist there was no deal, even in an interview last year.
What has changed is that investigators for the Innocence Project have discovered a curt handwritten note in Mr. Webb’s file in the district attorney’s office in Corsicana. The current district attorney, R. Lowell Thompson, made the files available to the Innocence Project lawyers, and in late November one of the lawyers, Bryce Benjet, received a box of photocopies.
As he worked through the stack of papers, he saw a note scrawled on the inside of the district attorney’s file folder stating that Mr. Webb’s charges were to be listed as robbery in the second degree, not the heavier first-degree robbery charge he had originally been convicted on, “based on coop in Willingham.”
Mr. Benjet recalled a “rush of excitement,” he said, and thought, “This is what we’ve been looking for.”
The Innocence Project submitted the note, which is not dated or signed, in a new filing to the board asking that it be included as part of its September request for a pardon.
Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, called the note a “smoking pistol” in the case.
“We’re reaching out to the principals to see if there is an innocent explanation for this,” he said. “I don’t see one.”
Judge Jackson did not respond to several requests for comment.
Mr. Thompson, the district attorney, said that while he willingly complied with the request for the Webb files, he had no opinion as to what happened during the Willingham trial in 1992. “I wasn’t even a college graduate yet,” he said.
As for Mr. Webb, he said, the robbery that put him in a cell with Mr. Willingham was not his only brush with the law. “I’ve also prosecuted him,” he said. “The D.A. before me prosecuted him, and the D.A. before him prosecuted him.”
Mr. Scheck said that the Willingham case suggested a fundamental weakness in the justice system: If Mr. Webb’s testimony “was really based on a deal and misrepresentation, then the system cannot be regulated,” he said. Under those circumstances, “you cannot prevent the execution of an innocent person.”
Even if the board ultimately agrees with Mr. Willingham’s advocates, the final decision will rest with Governor Perry (who has called Mr. Willingham “a monster” who killed his children) or with his successor in 2015.
Mr. Willingham’s stepmother, Eugenia Willingham, said: “I’m real thrilled that all this has come to light. We’ll see what happens. I can’t help but be hopeful.”
His cousin Patricia Cox said that if an exoneration does occur, the family has no plans to press for damages. “We’re not asking compensation,” she said. “We’re asking justice.”
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