Bad Arson Science Frees Mom After Serving 16 Years

By Jeralyn, Section Innocence Cases
Posted on Wed Aug 22, 2012 at 10:12:28 PM EST
Tags: Kirstin Burch (all tags)

Share This: Digg!

What a nightmare. In 1996, Kristin Bunch was 21, pregnant and living in a mobile home with her three year old. A sudden fire engulfed the trailer, killing her three year old. The police said it was arson and claimed she went into her son's bedroom, doused it with a liquid accelerant like kerosene or diesel fuel and set it on fire. She was charged and convicted of felony murder and arson and sentenced to 60 years in prison. Arson investigators testified at her trial that burn patterns indicated the fire was arson.

After 16 years in prison, she was released on bond today pending a retrial, and went home with her jubilant mother and now 16 year old son (whom she gave birth to in prison.) In March, the Indiana Court of Appeals set aside her conviction, finding it was based on invalid, outdated science and the prosecutor had withheld critical evidence at her trial. (Great work by Kristin's post-conviction team, including the Center on Wrongful Convictions.)[More..}

The opinion is here. The court bases its ruling on both new fire victim toxicology evidence and the state's withholding of evidence.

We conclude the fire victim toxicology evidence does constitute newly-discovered evidence and the post-conviction court clearly erred in denying Bunch relief on this claim. We also conclude the State‟s failure to turn over a report from the ATF testing of floor samples violates Brady and the post-conviction court also clearly erred in denying Bunch relief on this claim. Because either of these two errors warrants a new trial, we need not address the remaining issues. We reverse and remand for a new trial.

The opinion is 48 pages, here are the highlights:

At the jury trial, no witness testified to seeing Bunch set the fire or hearing her talk about doing so; there was no evidence Bunch had purchased a liquid accelerant and no evidence of flammable liquid on the clothes she was wearing; and there was no testimony regarding a motive for her setting the fire. The State‟s case relied largely on expert testimony describing two points of origin for the fire from visual inspection and testing of floor samples showing evidence of a liquid accelerant.

...There was no direct evidence at Bunch‟s trial that she set multiple fires in the mobile home through use of an accelerant. No one saw her set the fire or heard her refer to setting the fire, there was no evidence she had purchased a liquid accelerant, and there was no motive offered for