Trial by Fire

On 23 December 1991 a fire in a house in Corsicana, Texas killed Cameron Todd Willingham's three small daughters. Willingham was asleep when it started and survived. Fire investigators called it arson and the court sentenced him to death. Years later a teacher named Elizabeth Gilbert began writing to him, read the file and found that none of the evidence stood up. Edward Zwick directed. Jack O'Connell plays Willingham and Laura Dern plays Gilbert. It opened in the United States on 17 May 2019. The source is David Grann's article published in the New Yorker on 7 September 2009. The piece, around sixteen thousand words, takes the case apart: the forensic fire analysis, the informant's testimony, the witness statements and the circumstantial evidence were all invalid. Zwick listed the problems in one sentence: withheld exculpatory evidence, junk science, jailhouse snitches testifying for reduced sentences and a piss-poor public defender. Willingham was executed in 2004. Who it is for: anyone interested in capital punishment and wrongful conviction cases. Who it is not for: viewers wanting distance. The film shows the children's deaths and the execution directly and offers relief nowhere.