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)

When the first responders arrived at 3:22 a.m., Han Tak Lee seemed calm. He didn't cry. He sat on a bench across from the burning cabin with two bags of luggage at his feet. He "remained complacently seated throughout," Patrolman James D. Leigh-Manuell wrote in his police report at 9 p.m. that night.

State Trooper Thomas Jones, doubling as county fire marshal, wrote in his report a week later: "Mr. LEE remained almost emotionless and while in view of this officer made no attempts to console his wife (when she arrived from New York later that day). Mrs. LEE on the other hand was being escorted to the scene and upon nearing the burnt building almost collapsed and had to be physically assisted from the scene."

Prosecutor E. David Christine Jr. held Lee's demeanor against him.

"Helping her up wouldn't be an admission of emotion, would it, ladies and gentlemen?" he asked during his closing arguments. "That is what a husband does to his wife when their daughter is dead, and only a few hours dead?"

Several jurors later acknowledged how much that swayed them.

But Koreans say that men traditionally don't express much emotion, and never in public. And Lee is nothing if not traditional, his wife and surviving daughter say.

"Koreans don't go crazy with emotion like Americans," adds Dr. Louis Roh, a Korean-American deputy medical examiner in Westchester County, N.Y., who briefly was involved in one of several appeals.

Lee says now that, watching the cabin burn, he was overwhelmed and stunned into silence.

"I found that I just lost my spirit and my mind there. It felt like all the blood drained out of my body," he says. "In Korea, men are not allowed to cry. If your daughter is suddenly found dead, there's nothing you can do. You just lost your soul. You can't even think."

When authorities interviewed Lee through a translator that morning (he speaks very little English), his story didn't convince them:

He had fallen asleep exhausted after praying and woke to the smell of smoke. Fire was in the other bedroom in the small cabin, 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.

Jones, who was called to the scene before dawn, had his mind made up by 8 a.m. That was when he received word from the coroner that Ji Yun had only a small amount of carbon monoxide in her blood _ too little, he instantly concluded, to have died from smoke inhalation.

"It tripped a red flag to me. ... This girl was probably dead when the fire started," he testified in court. "At that point in time, instead of being at a fire scene, I was now at a crime scene."

The coroner, however, concluded in his documentation of Ji Yun's death that she was alive when the fire started and was killed in the blaze. Another of the state's arguments _ that Lee had poured 60 gallons of fuel oil to start the fire _ was never scientifically challenged. It doesn't stand up, Lentini argues now, because it would have flooded the cabin, turned up in chemical tests and burned the arsonist.

But the morning of the fire, with a crime already suspected, the pieces soon fit into place, lining up neatly with the lessons the investigators had been taught at the National Fire Academy.

Pour patterns on the floor that indicate multiple points of origin? Check.

"Alligatored" charring? Check.

Crazed glass? Check.

Damaged furniture springs? Check.

Investigators had the evidence to back up their suspicions. Han Tak Lee was a killer.

Lee's lawyer never disputed the conclusion of arson. He argued instead that Ji Yun, suffering from a mental illness, had started the fire herself to commit suicide.

The family has never accepted that. She was a quiet and troubled girl, they say, but also an innocent and religious one who viewed suicide as a sin.

The jury didn't accept the defense attorney's argument, either. They believed the experts.

On Sept. 17, 1990, they convicted Lee of murder.

___

Lee's case was largely forgotten, but not by the Korean-American community or by people in his homeland.

Koreans here bristled at what was seen as cultural prejudice, convinced he was viewed with little sympathy in small-town Pennsylvania.

Lee had been a respected businessman in New York and, back in Seoul, a high school teacher with many admirers. His students, and even former classmates, raised money for lawyers. They won support in their fight from the South Korean government, though it led to naught.

An appeal on inadequate counsel won him a hearing, but no change in the outcome.

An appeal last spring sought a new trial, arguing that scientific advances in arson investigation essentially created new evidence.

Christine, 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.

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.

If successful, Lee's case could become one of a few opening the door to scrutiny of arson convictions nationwide.

Another is the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, executed in Texas after courts there refused to consider his claims of innocence. A panel of experts hired by The Innocence Project, known for its work using DNA to expose wrongful convictions, concluded that the fire that killed Willingham's children was accidental.

It's a nightmare, where a defendant's truthful account is held up as lies because the court's accepted expert is scientifically wrong, says Barry Scheck, an attorney and co-founder of The Innocence Project. "We need a systemic re-examination, an audit, of these old arson cases," he says.

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.

Convictions are far fewer, but it's naive to imagine some juries aren't convinced, he says.

"Even though we've made enormous advances in the past 15 years, I keep getting all these cases that might as well have been done in the '70s or '80s," says Gerald Hurst, a fire investigator in Austin, Texas.

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

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."

Back in New Jersey, his wife can't shake her sorrow.

She doubts the justice system. She questions her own anger after her daughter's death, guilty that it may have convinced investigators to charge her husband. And she is unsure about coming to this country at all, given what befell her family.

"We had American dream," she says. "We dreamt about a better life. But the better life didn't happen."

Still, a small dream remains.

If Han Tak could be free, she would like to bring her husband a meal. Something simple _ some rice, some kimchi, some barbecued meat. A meal that tastes like home.

___

AP Interactive Designer Jenni Sohn contributed to this story.