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View Full Version : NY man convicted in Monroe County murder free after 24 years




aGameOfThrones
08-22-2014, 11:51 AM
By Peter Hall, Of The Morning Call
12:48 pm, August 22, 2014
HARRISBURG — Two weeks after a federal judge threw out Han Tak Lee's 1990 conviction for murdering his daughter in a Monroe County church camp fire, the former New York clothing store owner is a free man.

U.S. District Judge William J. Nealon on Aug. 8 threw out Lee's conviction and sentence after two decades of appeals in which fire investigation expert John J. Lentini said prosecutors in Monroe County put a spin on evidence that led jurors to wrongly convict Lee.

New tests of the evidence used to convict Lee combined with an admission by prosecutors that conclusions on the cause and origin of the blaze were based more on superstition than science show Lee was denied a fair trial, Lee's attorneys say.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Martin C. Carlson agreed and in June issued a recommendation that Lee be granted a new trial, which Nealon adopted. "The verdict in the matter rests almost entirely upon scientific pillars which have now eroded," Carlson wrote.


Lee had taken his daughter, Ji Yun Lee, to Camp Hebron, a Korean Christian retreat in Stroud Township, the day after she suffered a breakdown and began hurling objects from the family's third-floor Queens apartment.

The fire was reported about 3 a.m. July 29, 1989, and police and firefighters first on the scene found Lee sitting calmly on a bench with his luggage beside him. His daughter's badly burned body was found in a hallway near their cabin's bathroom.

An autopsy revealed she had burned to death rather than succumbed to smoke inhalation, but also noted the presence of small bruises on her neck that could have been signs of strangulation.

Lee testified through an interpreter that he awoke to find the cabin filled with smoke and ran outside, assuming his daughter would do the same. He re-entered the building twice to search for Ji Yun Lee, retrieving his luggage and retreating from the smoke and flames only after finding the bathroom door locked, according to transcripts filed in the case.

Lee's case is one of dozens across the country in which convictions for arson and murder have been called into question by a revolution in fire science, said Lentini, a veteran of more than 2,000 fire investigations.

The Monroe County district attorney's office has conceded that many of the observations by investigators held out as proof that the blaze was intentionally set are meaningless. Burn patterns on the floor, crazed glass and collapsed bedsprings — once widely accepted and taught as signs of an intentional fire — have now been discredited, Lentini said.

Carlson also wrote that the original tests on Lee's clothing and debris from the fire scene — which Christine cited in his closing argument as proof he had used a flammable liquid to start the fire — have also been rendered unreliable by Lentini's new testing.

Without scientific proof, the state's case rests on "thin and equivocal reeds" of evidence, Carlson said.




http://touch.mcall.com/#section/1742/article/p2p-81152474/