Science Casts Doubt on Arson Convictions

EAST STROUDSBURG, Pa. -- The firefighters could see the blaze flickering over the hill before they even reached the church camp.

By the time they got to the five-room cabin, it was already too late. Ji Yun Lee lay curled in a ball on the floor. Flames roared over and around her.

Her father, Han Tak Lee, sat silent, barefoot on the grass outside. The night sky above him glowed orange as electrical arcs sizzled and popped.

Investigators quickly sifted through the sooty ashes, the charred walls and floor, the melted roof and the buckled pipes and came up with an explanation: arson _ and murder. Lee, they said, had killed his daughter.

The clues were everywhere. From patterns on the cabin's floor to collapsed springs on the furniture, most of the lessons taught to budding fire investigators turned up in the cabin. The local experts _ the county fire marshal, a state-hired fire analyst, a chemist _ spoke without hesitation that the evidence proved arson.

No one questioned their conclusion. Not the jury _ not even the defense attorney disputed that the blaze was intentionally touched off with a flammable fluid.

It was a textbook case, and 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 _ an immigrant who worked six days a week to bring his wife and daughters from South Korea to America _ 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 and hair going gray, says through a translator during an interview at Rockview medium-security prison in central Pennsylvania. "This is not arson. This is an accident."