Science Casts Doubt on Arson Convictions

This photo, provided by the Lee family, shows Ji Yun Lee when she was in the 12th grade during a visit to Washington, DC. Lee's father, Han Tak Lee, a Korean immigrant, is serving a life sentence in a Pennsylvania prison for setting a fire at a cabin that killed Ji Yun in 1989. Many fire investigators now believe that the evidence used to convict him is scientifically inaccurate. (AP Photo/Lee Family) (AP)

Manic depression had surfaced a year or so after they immigrated. Medication had helped, so well that she got into a prestigious art college to paint, but things were unraveling again.

"She didn't eat. She didn't sleep. She couldn't be still," says Esther, sitting in her quiet apartment in Fort Lee, N.J. A painting by Ji Yun _ flowers, a blur of purple, white and green _ sits next to the lone couch. "I was exhausted."

Their Pentecostal pastor thought prayer might help. It seemed like a respite: a trip out to the countryside, hours from the city, a quiet, cool retreat with preachers and prayer.

So Lee woke early on that summer Saturday and father and daughter set off. They drove across the bridges out of New York, out on the interstate to rural Pennsylvania, to the church camp and its small, wooden cabins. And they prayed, with one and then two pastors, until the wee hours of the morning.

That's when everything went much, much worse.

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Up until the 1990s, this is what fire investigators were taught:

_ 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 an effort that began in the 1970s and continued through the 1980s.