Han Tak Lee, 79, was released Friday after spending 24 years behind bars in a Pennsylvania prison for a wrongful arson-murder conviction. A federal judge ruled this month that the conviction was based on faulty fire science and ultimately overturned…
It was a dreary morning on Treasure Island on Thursday, August 14th, 2014, as a group of curious public defenders, detectives, and prosecutors came together for arson investigator Paul Bieber’s showcase event: a live burn of two furnished mockups, one…
The Marshall Project, a newly formed nonprofit criminal justice journalism group, wrote a story published in the Washington Post today revealing new evidence of misconduct by a Texas prosecutor that may have led to the wrongful execution of Cameron Todd…
Victor Caminata, a Michigan man convicted of arson in 2009, was officially exonerated on Wednesday after serving more than four years in prison. Caminata was released in July, but the case wasn’t formally dismissed and Caminata cleared until Judge William…
In a recent opinion piece entitled “How ‘Sloppy’ Fire Science Sends Innocents to Prison,” Paul Bieber, founder and director of the Arson Research Project, speaks out against wrongful convictions caused by faulty fire science. There have been several cases in…
Faulty fire science has contributed to another wrongful conviction. Louis Taylor, who spent 42 years in prison wrongfully convicted of setting a hotel fire in 1970 that killed 29 people in Tucson, Arizona, was released last Tuesday. New methods of…
Kristine Bunch was recently released on $5,000 bail after she was granted a new trial earlier this month. (Read more here.) Bunch was convicted in 1996 of setting a fire that killed her 3-year-old son. However, new fire science suggested…
Kristine Bunch will get a new trial in the death of her three-year-old son after the Indiana Supreme Court refused to overturn a lower court decision. Bunch was convicted in 1996 after prosecutors argued that she used kerosene to start…
At the request of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, Jeff Blackburn, chief counsel for the Innocence Project of Texas is examining over one thousand arson cases to weed out any that might be based on the same bad forensic science…
David Lee Gavitt, 54, walked out of prison last week after 26 years in prison. Gavitt was wrongly convicted of the arson murders of his wife and two daughters. Fire investigators suspected the fire was arson due to the burn…
