Excerpts from the ChicagoTribune.com:
Adam Gray has long pinned his hopes of freedom on the chance that Cook County prosecutors one day would agree that an evolution in fire science raised too many troubling questions about his conviction for setting a fire that killed two people in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood.
Now, two decades after his mandatory sentence of life without parole, it appears that day has finally come.
Prosecutors in State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez’s Conviction Integrity Unit concluded in recently filed court papers that Gray deserves a new trial because dramatic advancements in fire science have partially invalidated expert testimony that was crucial to Gray’s arson and double murder conviction in 1996.
“Therefore, Gray’s original conviction is based, to an unknown degree, upon scientific testimony that is no longer valid or accepted by the relevant scientific community,” Assistant State’s Attorney Celeste Stewart Stack wrote in agreeing to Gray’s request for a new trial.
The turnabout in Gray’s fortunes has been slow in coming. Although advancements in fire science date to the early 1990s — the time of the fire that Gray was convicted of setting — investigators took years to embrace them. Instead, they continued to probe fires with methods they learned from more veteran colleagues or gathered from their own experience, even though the practices had no foundation in science.
Today, those new rules are widely accepted by fire investigators, and prosecutors and defense attorneys around the country have evaluated old convictions to determine if the fires at the center of them were, in fact, arsons. Many convictions have been set aside.
Perhaps the best known re-examination involved the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas in 2004 for setting a fire that killed his three young daughters. A Tribune investigation of the case that year showed that Willingham’s conviction was based on faulty science.
A state forensic science commission in Texas later agreed that the conviction was flawed, and Willingham is seen by many as the first person proved by science to have been wrongly executed. However, Willingham’s prosecutor still stands by the conviction.
In Gray’s case, the fire occurred in March 1993 when Gray was 14 and allegedly angry with a girl who lived in a two-flat in the 4100 block of South Albany Avenue because she had rejected him. Police and prosecutors said the eighth-grader ignited an accelerant he poured on the enclosed back porch of the second floor and the stairs. While the girl and her parents escaped, the second-floor tenants, Peter McGuiness, 54, and his sister, Margaret Mesa, 74, died.
At trial, prosecutors focused on two elements — the evidence that the fire had been intentionally set and a confession from Gray. Two fire investigators said they found alligator charring and deep burn patterns at the scene and concluded they were evidence of a hot fire set with an accelerant. A milk jug found in the alley behind the home contained what police believed was an accelerant, and a gas station clerk said Gray bought gas shortly before the fire.
Gray, in the statement to police, admitted buying gasoline to set the fire, but he later denied the admissions, saying he confessed only due to pressure from the officers questioning him — pressure he said he could not withstand. He said that he was sleeping at a friend’s home when the fire was set.
Gray’s lawyers began to build momentum after they turned to two of the nation’s leading fire scientists, John Lentini and Gerald Hurst — both of whom the Tribune had asked to evaluate the arson investigation in the Willingham case. Hurst concluded the initial investigation had been undermined by the determinations that the alligator charring and burn patterns indicated arson, saying they were not indicators of arson. Hurst said, too, that the fire investigators at the time had failed to do a thorough enough investigation to rule out accidental causes.
While it was known at trial that the substance in the milk jug was not gasoline — it was what is known as a petroleum distillate — Lentini determined that it was different than the substance in wood at the scene, something commonly found in treated wood products. Neither, he determined, was an effective accelerant.
A year ago, faced with information from Lentini and Hurst, prosecutors said they were confident in Gray’s conviction and were not at the time willing to agree to a new trial. In court documents, they pointed to Gray’s confession as a reason to stand by his conviction.
thanks Dan
