Science casts cloud over arson convictions

Conflicting scenarios
Lee’s story didn’t convince investigators. He claimed to have fallen asleep exhausted after praying and woke to the smell of smoke. Fire was in the small cabin’s other bedroom, his daughter’s bedroom. He ran out. She wasn’t outside. He ran back, called for her, didn’t hear or see her, thought she had already escaped. He threw the luggage out the door. He banged on the bathroom door and, overcome by smoke and fire, went out the back door.

With a crime already suspected, the pieces soon fit into place.

They found pour patterns on the floor that indicated multiple points of origin, “alligatored” charring, crazed glass, damaged furniture springs. Investigators had their evidence.

Lee’s lawyer never disputed the conclusion of arson. He argued instead that Ji Yun had started the fire herself to commit suicide.

The family has never accepted that. She viewed suicide as a sin, they say.

Jurors didn’t accept the defense attorney’s argument, either. They believed the experts.

On Sept. 17, 1990, they convicted Lee of murder. Several appeals before Pennsylvania courts have won him no relief.

Christine, still Monroe County’s district attorney, did not return repeated phone calls. An assistant argued before the court that the new science was, in effect, simply “two expert witnesses that have opposing views.” A Pennsylvania state court agreed and rejected Lee’s claim.

Lee’s attorneys appealed that decision on Nov. 27 to the state Supreme Court.

‘A system run amok’?
Other experts have looked at Lee’s case and agreed with Lentini’s conclusions. “That’s a perfect example of a system run amok,” says David M. Smith, a former city bomb and arson investigator in Tucson, Ariz., who retired to start his own investigation firm.

How many could be wrongfully convicted of arson?

There are 500,000 structure fires overall a year; 75,000 of them are labeled suspicious. Lentini, who has campaigned widely to improve investigators’ knowledge, says most experts he talks with believe the accuracy of fire investigators is at best 80 percent — meaning as many as 15,000 mistaken investigations each year, and who knows how many convictions.

The hardest part is that there’s often no clear guilty party or explanation, as DNA can provide. In the Lee case, another defense investigator argued that it started from a short in an electrical cord, but Lentini says the hard evidence either burned up or was ignored by the county investigators.

For the Lees, there’s no getting past the tragedy that took Ji Yun. But they still want one more chance from the justice system.

In prison, Han Tak Lee exudes a kind of desperate hope as he meets with a reporter and translator. For the lone Korean speaker at the 2,061-inmate prison, it is a rare chance to hear his native language. “I never regret,” he says. “I have very strong faith. I will get out as a free man.”

AP Interactive Designer Jenni Sohn contributed to this story.

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