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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

A few decades ago, I was involved in the Neidorf hacking case [1] as an expert witness. One minor item in evidence was something marked "Tomobiki High School Torture Research Club". That's an anime reference.[3] It's an allusion to the Japanese tendency to have organized school clubs for everything, and in that anime, this is the bullies' group. The prosecution logged the item as an exhibit, as an indication of something bad, but never actually brought it up in court, so it didn't matter.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/102868.102869

[2] https://uruseiyatsura.fandom.com/wiki/Tomobiki_High_School

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Reminds me of the Cameron Todd Willingham case—an innocent man Texas wrongfully convicted and executed. The prosecutors brought his Iron Maiden poster into evidence in that trial, to paint a picture to the (very conservative 1990's Texas) jury that his heavy metal music interest was an indication of "satanic" evil.

- "At one point, Jackson showed Gregory Exhibit No. 60—a photograph of an Iron Maiden poster that had hung in Willingham’s house—and asked the psychologist to interpret it. “This one is a picture of a skull, with a fist being punched through the skull,” Gregory said; the image displayed “violence” and “death.” Gregory looked at photographs of other music posters owned by Willingham. “There’s a hooded skull, with wings and a hatchet,” Gregory continued. “And all of these are in fire, depicting—it reminds me of something like Hell. And there’s a picture—a Led Zeppelin picture of a falling angel. . . . I see there’s an association many times with cultive-type of activities. A focus on death, dying. Many times individuals that have a lot of this type of art have interest in satanic-type activities.”"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/trial-by-fire (2009)

It doesn't seem at all clear that Willingham was innocent. While his trial maybe shouldn't have happened because of flawed evidence, there has never been another explanation of what happened to leave his children dead under his care and allow him escape relatively unscathed.

In fact, while he, in hindsight, probably shouldn't have been executed for murder, he absolutely belongs in jail if for no other reason than the refrigerator positioning which doomed his children as much as anything else.

It is undisputed that Willingham's kids slept in the room where the fire broke out, while he slept in a different room. This is a pretty solid explanation for what happened.

I'm not following - explanation for his innocence or guilt?

It's a very simple explanation why the fire killed his children and not him.

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