In 2005 after many years of complaints the State of Texas formed a commission to study the use of forensic evidence in murder trials. Willingham was one of the first cases to be studied by the commission. The Commission hired Craig Beyler, a noted arson expert to review the case.

In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. . . . . What’s more, Beyler determined that the investigation violated, as he put it to me, ‘not only the standards of today but even of the time period.

A panel appointed by the Innocence Project found that “each and every one” of the indicators of arson [used at Willingham's trial] had been “scientifically proven to be invalid.”

At Willingham’s trial Douglas Fogg the assistant fire chief of Corsicana, Texas, where Willingham lived with his family and Manuel Vasquez a deputy fire marshal testified that the cause of the fire was a liquid accelerant. But all of the scientific evidence indicates that each of the factors used by Fogg and Vasquez to prove that the fire was caused by a liquid accelerant actually proves the contrary. all of the evidence when examined in light of scientific tests indicates that the fire was accidentally started, probably by a heater that was in the children’s room.