New Science Challenges Arson Convictions
Pa. Man Among Those Appealing Verdicts Based on Now-Repudiated Beliefs

By Robert Tanner
Associated Press
Sunday, December 31, 2006

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 too late. Ji Yun Lee, 20, lay curled in a ball on the floor. Flames roared over and around her.

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

Investigators sifted through the sooty ashes, the charred walls and floor, the melted roof and the buckled pipes and quickly 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 do not prove anything more than an accident.

And some of the leading U.S. experts on arson said 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 said.

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, said through a translator at Rockview medium-security prison in central Pennsylvania. "This is not arson. This is an accident."

The same discredited arson science, according to leading fire investigators across the country, may have led to hundreds of mistaken arson prosecutions. So far, 186 men and one woman have been freed because of the new technology.

Yet, critics said, some investigators are resisting the new science and continue to prosecute cases based on repudiated methods.

"How do you know someone's guilty if you don't know a crime has been committed?" said Richard Custer, principal architect of a pivotal document on arson.

John J. Lentini, a widely known fire expert who has worked with national arson investigation groups to unravel the old misconceptions, 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."

* * *

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.

"There were a lot of rules of thumb but very little scientific understanding," said Jonathan R. Barnett, a professor of fire protection engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a leader in the investigation of the World Trade Center collapse.

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

A major revelation came from greater understanding of a phenomenon known as "flashover." When a fire burns inside a structure, it sends heat and gases to the ceiling until it reaches a certain temperature. Then, in a critical transition, everything combustible in that space will catch fire. Instead of a fire in a room, now there is a room on fire.

When that happens, it can leave any number of signs that investigators earlier thought meant arson, such as the burn holes on the floor that used to prove multiple starting points. It can cause a fire to burn down from the ceiling, not up, as investigators had been taught.

Significantly, flashover can create very hot and very fast-moving fires. It can occur within a few minutes, dashing the concept that only arson fires fueled by accelerants can quickly rage out of control.

As for the crazed glass? It comes from water being sprayed on hot glass, not a hot fire. The collapse of bedsprings and the "alligatoring"? They can't say anything definitive about a fire's cause.

The studies began to chip away at the old beliefs, but it took years. Through the 1980s, texts at the National Fire Academy in Emmitsburg, Md., still taught the traditional techniques.

It wasn't until 1992, when a guide to fire investigations by the National Fire Protection Association clearly laid out, in a document relied upon by authorities nationwide, that the earlier theories were wrong.

"It's not that they're bad investigators or there's been any conspiracy to promulgate erroneous conclusions. It's just the way it was," said Custer, the former associate director of the national Building and Fire Research Laboratory and one of the principal editors of the 1992 guide.

"How many years did we think the Earth was flat?"

* * *

In the calm, cool hours before daybreak on July 29, 1989, firefighters carefully put the charred remains of Ji Yun Lee's body onto a blue sheet. Investigators quickly became suspicious.

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 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. later held Lee's demeanor against him.

"Helping her up wouldn't be an admission of emotion, would it, ladies and gentleman?" 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 acknowledged how much that swayed them.

But Koreans said that men traditionally don't express much emotion, and never in public.

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 Lee 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 Lee's death that she was alive when the fire started and was killed in the blaze. Another of the state's arguments -- that her father 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.

Han Tak Lee's attorneys never disputed the conclusion of arson. He argued instead that Ji Yun Lee, suffering from manic depression, had started the fire to commit suicide.

The family has never accepted that. She was a quiet and troubled girl, they said, 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 Han Tak Lee of murder.

* * *

Lee's attorneys appealed his conviction last spring, seeking a new trial on the argument 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," said David M. Smith, a former city bomb and arson investigator in Tucson, 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.

There are 500,000 structure fires a year; 75,000 are labeled suspicious. Lentini, who has campaigned widely to improve investigators' knowledge, said 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.

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