Science casts cloud over arson convictions

By Robert Tanner

updated 11:24 p.m. ET Dec. 9, 2006

Across the country, prosecutors have won convictions in arson cases by relying on outdated science — and as a result, uncounted people may be imprisoned for crimes that were never committed, including a man who lost his daughter and his freedom to the flames.

EAST STROUDSBURG, Pa. - The clues were everywhere. A young woman lay dead in a burned cabin at a church camp, while her father survived.

Most of the lessons taught to budding fire investigators stood out at the scene. The local experts — the county fire marshal, a state-hired fire analyst, a chemist — spoke without hesitation that it all proved arson, and murder. No one questioned their conclusion. It was a textbook case, and the father, Han Tak Lee, was dealt a guilty verdict and a life sentence.

Except the textbooks were wrong. Within a few years of Lee’s conviction, scientific studies smashed decades of earlier, widely accepted beliefs about how fires work and the telltale trail they leave behind.

Today, fire investigators are taught that the clues relied upon in the 1989 investigation of the cabin fire don’t prove anything more than an accident.

And some of the leading U.S. experts on arson say that Lee was the victim of a horrible tragedy, not a criminal. There could be hundreds more like him, people wrongfully convicted of arson, these experts say.

Pennsylvania courts have repeatedly rejected the argument that the prosecution’s case was built on bad science.

“I never killed my daughter. I never set the fire. I’m not the right person to be here,” Lee, now 71, says through a translator at Rockview medium-security prison in central Pennsylvania. “This is not arson. This is an accident.”

Hundreds of mistaken prosecutions?
A definitive count isn’t possible, but leading fire investigators across the country estimate that there could be hundreds of mistaken arson prosecutions, all built on the same ideas that were uprooted more than a decade ago.

The new arson science could become the most powerful tool to reveal wrongful convictions since DNA testing began overturning rape and murder cases in 1989. Critics also say it’s still happening, because some investigators continue to prosecute cases based on discredited methods.

“How do you know someone’s guilty if you don’t know a crime has been committed?” says Richard Custer, a principal architect of a pivotal document on arson that helped bring the changes to light.

Another widely known investigator, John J. Lentini, has been a consultant on Lee’s case, analyzing evidence and testimony.

His conclusion: “While the Commonwealth’s witnesses may have believed that they were testifying truthfully, the fact is that the jury was misled by objectively false testimony.”

A church retreat gone wrong
The Lees were in Pennsylvania that morning 17 years ago because Han Tak Lee and his wife had hoped to heal their oldest daughter’s mental problems.

Han Tak had come to New York City from South Korea and started a clothing business, working six days a week until he could bring his family over to join him.

Manic depression had surfaced a year or so after his oldest daughter, Ji Yun, had immigrated with her mother. Medication had helped. But things were unraveling again.

The family’s Pentecostal pastor suggested the church retreat. Father, daughter and preacher prayed until the wee hours of the morning.

Then, the fire — one that, to investigators, pointed clearly to Lee. Part of the reason is what they were taught about arson in those days:

• Fires always burn up, not down.
• Fires that burn very fast are fueled by accelerants; “normal” fires burn slowly.
• Arsons fueled by accelerants burn hotter than “normal” fires.
• The clues to arson are clear. Burn holes on the floor indicate multiple points of origin. Finely cracked glass (called “crazed glass”) proves a hotter-than-normal fire. So does the collapse of the springs in bedding or furniture, and the appearance of large blisters on charred wood, known as “alligatoring.”

Firefighters and investigators arrived at these conclusions through decades of observation. But those beliefs had never been given close scientific scrutiny, until the 1970s and 1980s.

Once researchers began to apply the scientific method to beliefs about fire, they fell apart.

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