Seventeen-year-old Bobby Alcorn, who lived in the house across the street, was up before 5:00 a.m. getting ready for school. He heard his dog, which rarely barked, followed by a loud “boom.” At first he worried the animal had been shot. But then he heard his mother, Ruby Alcorn, cry out to her husband, “Michael, Michael, Shorty’s house is on fire!”

“Shorty” was what everyone called Claude Garrett, although he was tall and lean. Michael and Bobby Alcorn ran outside and saw Claude, dressed but barefoot. He had burns on his face and down his tattooed left arm. Claude picked up a lawn chair and started breaking windows, sending smoke billowing out. Ruby Alcorn later told police he was crying, “Lorie! Lorie!” “How did this happen?” “Why did this happen?” and “How did this start?”

The fire in progress at 114 Broadway in Old Hickory, Tenn., on Feb. 24, 1992.

Claude grabbed a hose and frantically sprayed water toward the fire, but it was no use. He then took an axe and started hacking at a boarded-up window. When firefighters arrived, Claude jumped on the running board of one of the trucks and yelled that Lorie was inside. They had to restrain him, repeatedly, from trying to get back into the house. After the blaze was extinguished, the firefighters entered and found Lorie lying in a smoke-filled utility room in the back of the house. She was unconscious, wearing only a T-shirt, underwear and socks, and wedged between a washing machine and the wall, a lounge chair and some children’s toys covering her body. Like Claude, she had burns on her face and on her left wrist. She was taken to nearby Donelson Hospital, where doctors tried to revive her. But at 6:36 a.m., Lorie was declared dead. The cause was smoke inhalation.

When the police arrived at the hospital, they found Claude pacing around, his left hand bandaged up past his wrist. “The hair on his face was singed, the hair on his arms was singed, and around the top of his head was singed,” Nashville Police Detective Mike Roland later testified. Claude’s fingers were dark with soot.

Claude Garrett, photographed on Feb. 24, 1992.

Claude drew a diagram of the house. The front door was the only way out; like the window on the side of the house, the utility room window was boarded up. “I don’t understand why,” he kept repeating. “I don’t understand why she didn’t follow me out the door.”

Claude agreed to take a polygraph test. He was asked several questions — including whether he had set the fire that killed Lorie. When he said no, the test registered signs of deception. According to the polygraph, Claude Garrett was lying.

The Nashville Metro Fire Department was on high alert for arson in the months leading up to the fire in Hopewell. Following a string of suspicious fires that had gone unsolved, the mayor had established a multi-agency arson task force in the fall of 1991, which included the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). It wasn’t just Davidson County under threat; throughout the state, The Tennessean would report, the percentage of fires deemed to be arson reached historic levels that year.

Fire Marshal Investigator Kenneth Porter entered the house at 114 Broadway St. around 6:30 a.m. the morning of the fire. Two things immediately grabbed his attention: a “strange burn pattern” running along the front door sill and the windows — a hallmark of arson scenes — as well as the strong, unmistakable odor of kerosene. As he walked toward the kitchen, the suspicious smell became more potent. There, between the refrigerator and the back room where Lorie Lance was discovered, Porter found a 5-gallon plastic container of kerosene, its top melted away.

Firefighters helped Porter clear debris from the living room and hose down the floor. This revealed a large, irregularly shaped burn reaching from the living room to the kitchen. “The depth and magnitude of this pour pattern suggested that a possible mixed liquid accelerant was used to create a very hot and fast burning fire,” Porter wrote in his report. Porter told the lead detective that this was “a possible homicide,” and the detective called the local field division of the ATF. From then on, the investigation belonged to Special Agent James F. Cooper.

A leading member of the mayor’s new arson task force , Cooper brought resources and prestige to the investigation. Tall and clean-cut, he had started investigating fires with the ATF in 1979, the year a U.S. Senate report declared arson-for-profit to be “a serious menace.” But Cooper knew that arson was not just about collecting insurance money. The deadliest fire he’d ever seen was an act of revenge, by disgruntled employees who burned down the Dupont Plaza Hotel in Puerto Rico on New Year’s Eve, 1986. That fire had killed 97 people.

At 6:20 p.m., roughly 13 hours after the fire, Agent Cooper met Detective Roland and an investigator from the Davidson County District Attorney’s office at 114 Broadway St. As Cooper led them through the house, they noticed several details absent from Porter’s report. The first was a bedspread, soaked and smelling like kerosene, partly wedged under the refrigerator. The second: a smoke detector with no batteries inside lying on top of the dryer inside the utility room. The third, and most critical: a sliding latch on the face of the utility room door, which could only be moved from the outside. The flames had evidently never reached that room. The door had apparently been shut. But was it locked? It was clear to Cooper that the fire had most likely been set on purpose, designed to travel via the accelerant-soaked bedspread, a “trailer,” to the back of the house. If Lorie was trapped inside the utility room — and he was beginning to suspect she was — then this was arson, and murder.

The Old Hickory Bridge.

By the time Claude walked out of the police station downtown, he knew he was in trouble. His jeans and shirt had been taken for testing, and he was dressed in jail clothes, tan and army green and emblazoned with the initials of the Davidson County Sheriff’s Department. A TV reporter asked him if he wanted to give his side of the story and he declined. From a pay phone, Claude called Lorie’s parents. Her stepfather, Sammy Jones, said his wife would find some fresh clothes for him, but did not offer to pick him up. Without a ride, Claude started walking back toward his burnt house, more than 12 miles away.

This was not his first run-in with the law. Growing up in nearby Madison, Tennessee, Claude dropped out of school in seventh grade and started drinking and committing petty crimes. When he turned 20, he moved to Indiana, fell in with a pot and burglary ring, and in the spring of 1977, was arrested for a robbery. While awaiting trial, Claude escaped, committed some burglaries while on the lam, and was caught. He spent the rest of his twenties in prison. He got out in 1986, and moved back to Tennessee. A few years later, Claude met Lorie at a bar. She was pretty, with long brown hair, and she worked hard — she was studying business and wanted to go into real estate. Lorie helped him find work framing houses with her uncle and brother.

An hour or two into his walk, Claude found another pay phone and called Lorie’s parents again. This time, Sammy was cold, telling him, “No one wants to talk to you.”

“I know they think I did it,” Claude told Bobby Alcorn when he finally got back to Hopewell that afternoon. He had never been close with his neighbors, but they seemed to feel sorry for him. Mike Alcorn had given him a pair of shoes to wear that morning, and they let him spend the afternoon in their home. But by evening, they too had grown standoffish. They had discovered Claude was a suspect and were unnerved by the way he was acting, paranoid and showing no signs of grief. Inventing a story about their daughter being sick, the Alcorns told Claude that they needed to go to the doctor. Instead the family drove to Burger King, expecting him to leave. He spent the night in a car in their front yard.

“He was trying to act like he was doing something. Trying to put on.”
– Bobby Alcorn

Over the next few months, rumor and speculation spread. Everyone knew that Lorie worked harder than Claude. He probably resented that she was trying to make something of herself. Some people had heard that she was planning to leave him. The bartender at Daisey Mae’s initially told police that the couple seemed fine the night before the fire. But later, she thought about something Lorie had said as she got more beer for Claude. Lorie “told us that she had to get back because she’d been away too long,” the bartender would later testify, adding that Lorie seemed “scared” of him. Before long, the family’s recollections would align with the state’s theory: Lorie’s death was the culmination of an abusive relationship. On June 2, 1992, Claude was arrested in Kansas. Three days later, he was picked up by Nashville police and brought back to Davidson County to face trial for first-degree murder.

Claude was tried the following August, with Assistant District Attorney General John Zimmermann, a former JAG lawyer and member of the Tennessee National Guard, representing the state. Trim and distinguished, Zimmermann was a God-and-Country man — a devout Christian who married his high school sweetheart, with whom he was raising several foster children. A profile in Legal Affairs described how he relished going after the “worst of the worst,” and boasted a bit of Southern swagger. After winning a death sentence in 1987 against a man named James Lee Jones, Zimmermann wrote to an FBI agent, a colleague on the case, “If there is anything these country boys down here in Nashville can ever do for a sophisticated Yankee federal agent, don’t hesitate to call on us.”

A 1992 crime scene photo of the back door and lock.

Jenkins’s recollections of the fire were sketchy. Fellow firefighters testified that it was Jenkins who had discovered Lorie Lance, yet he had no memory of this. (“A lot of things happen real fast in a fire,” he explained.) But he recalled having to “turn and move a knob to get the door open.” When Claude’s defense attorney pointed out that the door had no knob, Jenkins admitted he did not have “perfect recall.” Was it possible the door was “just jammed?” the lawyer asked. “I wouldn’t rule that out,” Jenkins said. But he said he was “ninety-nine” percent sure the door was locked.

Claude’s old neighbors testified for the state. Michael Alcorn said that when he first spotted Claude outside, he had been “squatted down” beside a tree, only springing into action when he saw Michael approach. When firefighters carried Lorie’s body off, Claude “wasn’t shedding no tears or nothing,” Michael said. “He was just cold.” One of the firefighters who brought her out of the house said his emotionless demeanor “struck me as real weird.” And Bobby Alcorn said he believed Claude’s panicked behavior earlier that morning had been an elaborate performance. “He was trying to act like he was doing something, that’s what he was doing,” Bobby said. “Trying to put on.”

The star witness was ATF Agent James Cooper. Zimmermann made sure the jury heard about his role investigating the Dupont hotel fire, as well as the bombing of the World Trade Center earlier that year. Cooper used slides to walk the jury through the signs of a deliberately set fire. There was the telltale “V” shape identifying the point of origin, in this case, in the living room near the front door. There was the charring, the irregular patterns that form after someone has poured a liquid accelerant on the ground. And there was the bedspread that had been used as a trailer, which tested positive for kerosene. Cooper was especially adamant about the pour patterns. “This is not a spill,” he insisted under cross-examination. “This is a pour and it was deliberately poured to get the fire going from the living room to the back of the house.”

Cooper was voluble and self-assured in his analysis. “These are signs that you can’t change,” he said. “They’re just waving at you, saying, here I am, look at me.” He explained that Claude could have sustained the burns to his face and hand while lighting the kerosene — like when “you’ve got a gas grill and sometimes it won’t ignite and you stick your head down there to see and you’ve got this open flame that comes back with a POOF!”

“I am totally satisfied that the cause of this fire was deliberately set and was set for the purpose of arson,” Cooper concluded. “It was not accidental, whatsoever.”

On August 20, 1993, after two and a half days of deliberations, the jury found Claude Garrett guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison.

THE FIRST PERSON EXONERATED for arson murder, according to the National Registry of Wrongful Convictions, was Ray Girdler Jr. in Arizona, in December 1991 — two months before the Hopewell fire. Girdler had been convicted of burning his wife and child to death in their trailer park home in 1981. He swore he was innocent, but his behavior the night of the fire had been bizarre. As firefighters battled the blaze, Girdler had gone to his neighbor and asked for a beer, which he drank on the couch with no sign of emotion. Yet 10 years later, the Los Angeles Times reported, “Advances in fire science have wrought a stunning turnabout, providing explanations for the fire that suddenly seem to justify Girdler’s version of events.”

Today, 23 years after the fire in Hopewell, Claude Garrett, too, maintains his innocence — and there are a number of people who are convinced he is telling the truth. Chief among them is a veteran Tennessee fire investigator who insists the conviction was a miscarriage of justice — “and there are others besides Claude in jail for things they did not intentionally do.” Indeed, the same advances in fire analysis that exonerated Girdler more than 20 years ago in Arizona have continued to expose fires once believed to be intentional or “incendiary” as most likely accidental. Numerous people have been freed from prison after spending years behind bars for arson crimes that were never crimes at all. Garrett’s case contains hallmarks of such wrongful convictions — pervasive myths that guided arson investigations for decades, which still haunt the criminal justice system.

In the summer of 1992, seismic changes were taking place in the field of arson investigation.

Garrett’s case has a number of striking parallels with Willingham’s. The house fires took place just two months apart, in working-class neighborhoods. Like Garrett, Willingham drank too much and had an explosive temper. Like Garrett, Willingham, too, was described as hysterical the morning of the fire by witnesses who would later change their minds, saying “things were not as they seemed.” And, like Garrett, Willingham’s claims of innocence were undermined by his criminal record and bad reputation. In Willingham’s case, prosecutors pointed to his tattoos and heavy metal posters as proof that he had morbid — even satanic — tendencies.

Most significantly, as both men awaited trial in the summer of 1992, seismic changes were taking place in the field of arson investigation. Based on new research into fire behavior, experts were questioning longstanding techniques for determining the origin and cause of a fire. Classic arson “indicators” were revealed to be no such thing. The investigators in both Willingham’s and Garrett’s cases relied on longstanding fallacies that were just beginning to be exposed.

Among the most prevalent false indicators were “burn patterns” like the ones found in the homes of both Willingham and Garrett. For decades, fire investigators called such marks “pour” patterns, based on the belief that a liquid accelerant had been spilled wherever they appeared, in order “to create a very hot and fast burning fire,” as Kenneth Porter would observe. But this scenario was a myth. It was rooted in ignorance of a phenomenon now known as “flashover” — the point at which radiant heat building up in a room causes a space and its contents to combust. Or as some fire experts put it, the moment “a fire in a room becomes a room on fire.” As researchers would discover, fires that reach flashover (or “post-flashover” fires) often leave such so-called pour marks behind. Similarly, the V-pattern once believed to reveal a fire’s point of origin was also found to be a false indicator — and a common feature of post-flashover fires.

The implications are hard to overstate. The National Registry of Exonerations lists only a relative handful of arson convictions among its tally of more than 1,550 innocence cases, yet, like wrongful convictions as a whole, the number of people who have been falsely accused of arson is likely much higher. The registry does not, for example, include Andrew Babick, a Michigan man freed on February 4, 2015 after more than 18 years behind bars. Babick agreed to a plea deal rather than face retrial for a 1995 fire that killed two children, which he swore was caused by a cigarette. Nor does the exoneration database include James Hugney Sr., freed in Pennsylvania on January 23, 2015 after nearly 36 years. Hugney, now 72, was convicted of setting a 1978 fire that killed his own son. He also took a plea deal in order to be released. Others are absent from the database due to ongoing challenges from the state. They include Han Tak Lee, in Pennsylvania, and Victor Rosario, in Massachusetts, both freed last summer after their arson convictions were overturned. Between the two of them, Lee and Rosario spent 56 years in prison. The judge who freed Rosario blamed “misconceptions the investigators had at the time with respect to fire science.”

The convictions of Babick, Hugney, Lee and Rosario all relied, at least in part, on the same kinds of burn patterns identified by Special Agent Cooper as telltale signs of arson in 1993. The fire investigative community has since acknowledged such flaws in its old methodology and, although it was slow to do so, has revised its literature and practices. Yet within the criminal justice system, even as the same junk science reappears over and over again in wrongful convictions, there has been no systemic reinvestigation of old arson cases.

Even as the same junk science reappears over and over again, there has been no systemic reinvestigation of old arson cases.

The failure to account for junk science goes far beyond arson prosecutions. While court rulings have significantly raised the bar for admissible scientific evidence in criminal trials — excluding, for example, polygraph tests like the one failed by Garrett at the Nashville police station — convictions continue to be won and upheld on the basis of dubious forensic evidence. In 2009 the National Academy of Sciences released a landmark report that raised doubts about a wide range of prevailing forensic techniques. Of particular concern were methods relying primarily on “observation, experience, and reasoning” rather than science or data — a good description of how professional fire investigators have traditionally operated. Citing burn patterns specifically, the NAS warned that some investigators still draw conclusions about whether a fire was arson based on such evidence, “despite the paucity of research” into its legitimacy.

Recent experiments have yielded troubling results. In one 2005 test, ATF researchers asked 53 professional fire investigators to pinpoint the origin of a series of post-flashover fires. Only three were able to do so accurately — most drew false conclusions based on burn patterns. In 2011, a test conducted by  the California-based Arson Research Project asked professional fire investigators to assess 12 post-flashover burn patterns and distinguish between those that involved a liquid accelerant and those that did not. In reality, there is no way to tell the difference based on visual evidence alone. Yet out of 33 investigators, only three responded that such a conclusion could not be determined based on this evidence.

In a subsequent report, the Arson Research Project warned that between their subjective methodology and close identification with law enforcement, fire investigators are “uniquely positioned” to be susceptible to the affects of cognitive bias — in which one’s perception is colored by preexisting knowledge or assumptions. In a criminal investigation, the more contextual details a forensic analyst is given by police, the more likely he or she is to unconsciously reach conclusions that support the state’s theory. To mitigate this, the NAS report argued that forensic analysts should operate as independently from law enforcement as possible. But fire investigations involve the opposite approach, the Arson Research Project report said, instead embracing arson task forces in which “the lines between fire scene examiner and criminal investigator are not just blurred but are obliterated.”

I VISITED THE ATF’s Nashville field division last spring, in the manicured suburb of Brentwood. Special Agent Michael Knight told me that James Cooper had been his supervisor years back. He would pass along my interview request.

Knight emphasized that the training and qualifications to become a certified fire investigator are “quite extensive” compared to Cooper’s day. He introduced me to a young trainee who said that determining the origin and cause of a fire “ain’t just about going in and saying, ‘Hey, there’s a burn, that’s where it started.’” Instead, investigators are taught to test different hypotheses by a process of elimination. “And if we can’t disprove everything, then we call it ‘undetermined.’”

Most investigators, he told me, “would rather call it ‘undetermined’ than call it wrong.”

Special Agent in Charge Jeff Fulton, a 30-year ATF veteran, was unfamiliar with the fire at 114 Broadway St. But he agreed that fire investigators are held to a much higher standard today. He gave an example. “It used to be that if you see a black mark, if you see concrete burning in one area more than others, then that was automatically a pour pattern,” he said. Fulton emphasized that arson prosecutions relied on an array of factors — and that pour patterns were just one piece of evidence. But “in the early days,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “people probably went to prison on that.”

“In hindsight,” Fulton said, this “might have been poor science. But it was the science of the day.”

CLAUDE WAS A couple of years into his sentence, in a remote part of West Tennessee, when he received a letter from Nashville. It was dated October 13, 1995 and it came from a man named Keith “Brian” Nicholson, a juror from his trial. “Not a week has gone by that I have not thought of the deliberations, the impropriety that occurred during the deliberations, the ‘questionable’ defense you received, and the evidence that the prosecution presented during trial,” Nicholson wrote. He said he had “found several discrepancies” in the state’s case, which he offered to expose, with Claude’s cooperation. In exchange, he would split the proceeds 50-50, minus expenses. This “would include movie, video tape, syndication and television rights as well.”

Claude resented the offer, particularly the notion that this man should profit from Lorie’s death. He filed the letter away, unanswered.

A few years later, Claude got another surprising piece of mail. He had filed an open records request for the police files in his case. These included an 11-page report authored by the lead police investigator, Nashville Homicide Detective David Miller. The report contained a full, first-person narrative of his case, beginning from the moment Miller was dispatched to 114 Broadway St. and culminating in his arrest. Claude had never seen the report and sat down to read it. He reached the part where Miller described his conversation with Otis Jenkins about finding Lorie’s body. “As best as Captain Jenkins remembers,” Miller wrote, “the door to the store utility room was not locked.”

Claude was startled. This directly contradicted what Jenkins had said at trial, when Zimmermann asked whether he had told police that the door was locked. “Yes, sir,” Jenkins had answered. Claude was certain Miller’s report had never been shown to his defense attorney.

“I’ve done some really stupid things in my life. But I didn’t do this.”
– Claude Garrett

Claude had researched the law while in prison. He knew that under the Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland, prosecutors were obligated to turn over such potentially exculpatory material to the defense. Claude filed a pro se post-conviction brief arguing that Zimmermann had violated his constitutional rights. He also found someone who corroborated what was in Miller’s report, a retired Nashville judge who offered to help with his appeal. “I spoke to David Miller this morning,” the judge wrote to him in March 1998. “He recalls Captain Jenkins telling him that the door to the storage room … was not locked.” But, the judge added, Miller did not believe this exonerated Claude.

Nevertheless, a few years after Claude received Miller’s police report, on March 22, 2001, a judge overturned his conviction, writing that he was “extremely troubled” by Zimmermann’s withholding of the police report. The state announced it would retry him — but the task would fall on a different prosecutor. In a rare move, the Tennessee Supreme Court’s Board of Professional Responsibility formally censured Zimmermann, noting that he had a history of bad behavior. Later, in 2002, six former Tennessee prosecutors would file a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court accusing Zimmermann of “egregious” misconduct in the case of James Lee Jones, the man he sent to death row in 1987. (Jones, now known as Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman, still faces execution.)

In the meantime, Claude was preparing for his retrial. He was determined to hire a fire expert who he knew could go up against ATF Agent James Cooper: Gerald Hurst, the Texas scientist who would later reinvestigate the Cameron Todd Willingham case. Claude had seen Hurst in a TV special about a woman who had been imprisoned for arson on junk science. Hurst had helped win her release. Claude’s mother paid for his new lawyer, Dwight Scott, to fly to Austin and, after a review of the facts, Hurst offered to take the case for free. But Scott decided to hire a different expert instead, one who lived closer to Nashville. In the fall of 2001, Scott called veteran fire investigator Stuart Bayne.

Stuart Bayne.

The year 2001 had been the worst of Bayne’s life. His wife of 25 years had died that January, succumbing to a lifelong heart condition. He was struggling financially, having spent much of the previous year taking his wife to medical appointments after being laid off by a Department of Energy contractor. In Oak Ridge, where he lived and worked, the September 11 attacks had put the emergency response community on edge; some feared the Y-12 National Security Complex would get hit next. Although he was investigating fires on a freelance basis, by the time Dwight Scott called in October, Bayne’s daughter was starting college and he had been without a full-time job for a year and a half.

Bayne was relatively new to criminal trials. Most of his work had been done on behalf of insurance companies in civil cases. But when he heard that the Hopewell fire dated back to 1992, it caught Bayne’s attention. That was the year that his profession had started to transform.

Just weeks before the fire, the Massachusetts-based National Fire Protection Association released NFPA 921: Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations. Despite its innocuous title, the guidebook was a grenade tossed into the field of fire investigation. Based on years of joint research by fire investigators and engineers, NFPA 921 debunked longstanding beliefs about the indicators of arson, holding for the first time that fire investigators should base their work on the scientific method, rather than their individual training and judgment. Practically, this meant investigators needed to collect data from a fire scene, test hypotheses about how the blaze began, and reach a firm conclusion only if there was a lone surviving theory that could pass these tests.

This was a radical departure from the way professional fire investigators operated. Most were former firefighters or law enforcement with no scientific background — and many regarded the NFPA task force behind the guide as elitist and academic, far removed from the gritty reality of fire-scene work. Their own training had come from accompanying veteran fire investigators on the job, as they exercised their powers of observation. “There is no substitute for this experience,” wrote John R. Carroll, the head of the National Association of Fire Investigators, in a 1979 textbook. The best fire investigators seemed to possess a mysterious sixth sense that made them preternaturally powerful detectives. In a noir-style 1976 memoir titled Arson! Exciting True Cases From a Fire Marshal’s Notebook, New York fire investigator John Barracato described fire marshals as “guys [who] could pick a deliberately set fire as easily as a doctor could read a bone break in an x-ray film.” The image was so deeply ingrained that more than 20 years later, in 1997, Barracato told The New York Times that through observational powers alone, “a properly trained fire investigator, before he leaves that fire scene, should be able to determine if a male set it, a female, if it was revenge motivated, juvenile, arson for profit.”

A manuals used by Bayne for investigating fires.

Bayne, too, had been trained according to the old methods. But during a period teaching fire investigation in the 1980s, he had begun questioning these techniques. He became a firm believer in NFPA 921, keeping up with each new edition, which made him an exception — and not particularly popular — among his colleagues.

As Bayne reviewed the medical records for both Claude and Lorie, one detail leaped out. The two had similar burns on the left sides of their bodies; photographs clearly showed that they both had smaller, similar burns on their faces as well. To Bayne, this meant that they must have been exposed to the same degree of heat, in the same place, for about the same amount of time. Although Claude had told police he thought he had been burned when he broke the windows of the house, the burns fit his description of how he and Lorie had turned right from the bedroom together, through the living room and toward the front door. Lorie had additional burns on her front and right side — which also supported a scenario where she would have turned around in the other direction.

Bayne turned to the trial testimony of the state’s medical expert, Gretel Harlan, who conducted the autopsy on Lorie. To Bayne’s surprise, Harlan said she had visited the house alongside the fire marshal and determined that Lorie could have gotten the burns on her face and other parts of her body while locked inside the utility room, even though flames never reached the area. “Everyone is familiar with the process of sunburning,” Harlan testified. “All the skin requires to sustain the burn is too long exposure in too high a heat.” This struck Bayne as absurd. By that logic, Lorie would have been burned all over her body. Instead, she had spot burns, which indicated more direct exposure to intense heat. Yet no defense expert had challenged this.

Bayne then read the testimony of ATF Agent Cooper. He immediately recognized the bogus claims about pour patterns — typical pre-NFPA 921 junk science. Bayne read the portion of the transcript where Cooper compared lighting an accelerant to lighting a gas grill — the “open flame that comes back with a POOF.” The notion that Claude Garrett could have burned his face and hand this way was ludicrous. Kerosene is not volatile like gasoline. It has a flashpoint of about 100 degrees. On the morning of the fire, the weather temperature was 50 degrees. Under those conditions, Bayne would later explain, “You could throw cigarettes and matches into that pool of kerosene all day long and you wouldn’t ignite it.”

Had a cigarette accidentally been left smoldering in the love seat — a common cause of house fires?

Bayne couldn’t be sure. But he was certain the state’s case was wrong. He went to meet Claude in prison. “I’ve done some really stupid things in my life,” Claude told him. “But I didn’t do this.” Bayne believed him.

In the 18 months before the retrial, Bayne became consumed with investigating the fire at 114 Broadway St. He visited the house and took steps Cooper testified he’d never taken: interviewing the firefighters who suppressed the fire, and asking Claude detailed questions about the house’s contents back in 1992. It turned out that kerosene heaters were not uncommon in Hopewell. Like many of their neighbors, Claude and Lorie couldn’t afford propane, and the house had no electrical heating system. As Bayne reread the trial transcripts, he emailed his findings to Scott. It was clear that Cooper had drawn his conclusions despite having “no clue” about what furniture, exposed surfaces, or flammable materials were present, Bayne wrote. Cooper’s testimony was filled with speculation. Relying on the burn patterns alone was “like reading something that is taken out of context.”

Based on the patterns and the kerosene, Bayne believed, Cooper had leaped to conclusions. Cooper himself had testified that the container of kerosene “was squirting out” liquid when he picked it up. And Fire Captain Nickens had described feeling his way through the dark, smoke-filled house on his hands and knees, moving “tables, chairs, whatever, cabinets, or whatever I’d get ahold of.” Bayne had done this himself as a firefighter in the 70s and 80s. He knew the kind of mess left behind by a search-and-rescue team, and by firefighters’ powerful hoses. “We’re generally bad about tearing a place up,” Nickens had testified. Bayne concluded that the kerosene container — and the bedspread — had probably been jostled the morning of the fire, moved randomly, and leaving kerosene on the floor.

But Bayne was especially fixated on the burns on Claude and Lorie. As the retrial approached, he urged Scott to call as a witness the man who had examined Lorie at the hospital, Dr. Robert Roth, to challenge Dr. Harlan. In a 1:30 a.m. email on the eve of the trial, Bayne wrote, “Lorie could not have sustained such burns in the utility room, period. I would stake my life on it.”

But at the retrial, which began on July 21, 2003, nothing went according to plan. Scott did not call Dr. Roth. The projector equipment Bayne planned to use to demonstrate fire behavior to the jury malfunctioned — and Scott took him off the stand before he could thoroughly explain fire behavior. Aside from a cursory mention in Scott’s opening statement, the jury heard almost nothing about NFPA 921 — and very little about modern developments in fire science. Defending his theory that the fire was accidental, Bayne said during cross-examination that if Lorie had dropped a cigarette in the love seat, “Lorie created this tragedy.” The poor turn of phrase was seized upon by prosecutor Jon Seaborg as suggesting she had been “responsible for her own death with her cigarette smoking.”

Meanwhile, testifying for the state, Fire Captain Otis Jenkins said he had no memory of telling police that the utility room was unlocked. (“I’ve said the whole time that the door was locked,” he said.) But most significantly, Cooper, who had stopped investigating fires in the mid-90s, continued to swear by the same theories about pour patterns that had been exposed as myths more than a decade before. His conclusions, he said during cross-examination, were reached “[j]ust through my training and experience.” He added, “If I’m proven wrong I will admit I am wrong. But on this one, no sir. I was there. I saw it with my eyes.”

It took the second jury less than five hours to send Claude back to prison.

I first met Claude Garrett in the summer of 2013, in a noisy visiting room at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, a 15-minute drive from downtown Nashville. Approaching 60, he is bald, with intense blue eyes, a graying goatee and tattoos all over his body. His favorite is a cartoon worm on a fishing line, wearing boxing gloves. “He’s on the hook,” Claude explained, “but he’s still fighting.”

Garrett at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.

Claude first got arrested as a teenager after breaking into a house and stealing some antique guns. “I don’t know why,” he said. “I had no role models that were leading me into crime.” His mother and stepfather, Cordell, had a solid marriage and did not smoke, drink or even curse. “I’ve told people in the past,” Claude said, “if you are a product of your environment, I should be the governor of Tennessee.”

While serving his earlier prison sentence in Indiana, Claude met a woman through a pen pal program. They corresponded for four years, and when he got out, he moved back to Tennessee, married his pen pal and fathered a baby girl. He was a doting father — his daughter, now 27, still visits him in prison — but the marriage didn’t last. “I was trying to relive my twenties,” Claude said, while “she was probably ready for children and a life.” He began drinking heavily during his divorce and was arrested on a DUI and for reckless driving. A more serious charge, for aggravated assault following a confrontation with his ex-wife’s neighbor, was later dismissed.

In the summer of 1990, Claude met Lorie, at a bar in Madison. “I was playing pool and she came over and wanted to play, too.” Claude described Lorie as having “a fiery personality.” She liked her cigarettes and smoked some pot, and although she did not drink as much as Claude did, “we just clicked.” Soon the couple moved in together.

“Our relationship was fun until both of us got intoxicated,” Claude recalled. That’s when his anger would emerge — over his divorce, over his stepfather Cordell’s recent death. The December before the fire, Claude threw the couple’s Christmas tree onto the front yard in a rage. But he insisted that he never laid hands on Lorie and cannot explain, for example, the cousin who testified at the first trial that she had once seen bruises where Claude had reportedly “jerked [Lorie] around a little bit.” Or, far more damning, testimony from Lorie’s former supervisor at Uno’s, who said that Lorie came to work around that Christmas holiday with a black eye and marks on her body from where, Lorie said, Claude had hit her with an electrical cord after ripping the TV from the wall.

Garrett and Lorie Lee Lance.

Claude had detailed explanations for much of the other circumstantial evidence that helped convict him. For example, he said he was painting the interior of the house in the period leading up to the fire — the reason why the smoke detector was not on the wall. Not that it even mattered; he and Lorie never put batteries in it. In fact, he said, the smoke detector had been a Christmas gift for Claude’s mother, but she had given it back. At the first trial, she testified that she was concerned about the fact that Lorie and her son used kerosene to heat their home.

Another example: the pair of boarded-up windows. Lorie’s family came to believe that they had been designed to trap Lorie inside the house. But Claude said that the bathroom window had always been broken. The landlord — “basically what people would consider a slumlord” — refused to fix it. After Claude accidentally broke the window in the back, he said, he took leftover plywood from his construction gigs and boarded both windows up.

Finally, and most importantly: the utility room door. There was no lock on the door when the couple moved in, and it sometimes swung open on its own. Claude said he used to wedge a butter knife between the door and the frame to keep it closed. Then one day while running errands at Big Lots, he saw the latch, “for like 99 cents.” It was rectangular, just a couple of inches long and made of “pot metal” — a cheap aluminum alloy. Claude bought it and affixed it to the face of the door. “It was a flimsy thing,” he said, demonstrating how anyone could have used a shoulder to break through the door with his or her body weight, even if it had been locked.

The lock has dwelled in Claude’s mind. Had it been properly examined, he said, smoke residue — or lack of it — could have hinted at the position of the latch during the fire. In the run-up to his retrial, Claude constructed a wooden replica of the lock and sent it to Stuart Bayne. Last year, after returning to New York following a visit with Claude, I opened my mailbox to find another replica, newly constructed and painted gold.

Stuart Bayne’s replica of the lock made by Garrett.

In 2005, Bayne came to see Claude out of the blue. He remained filled with regret at the outcome of the retrial and vowed to keep fighting to clear his name. In the 10 years since, Bayne has contacted public officials, fellow fire investigators and anyone else in a position to help. “The purpose of this correspondence,” one recent letter began, “is to bring to your attention a grave error committed by our justice system; one that has continued for more than 20 years.”

Bayne is admired by those who have worked with him. Claude’s post-conviction lawyer, Catherine Brockenborough, called him “one of the most ethical people” she knew. “He is not a bleeding heart liberal,” she added. “I don’t know if he’s liberal at all, actually.” But she said he was “tremendously offended by what happened in Claude’s case.” A colleague of Bayne’s who is a private investigator in Nashville told me that the first time he heard Bayne tell the story of the fire, Bayne had almost cried.

When I first asked Bayne to meet, in July 2013, he drove two and a half hours from his home in Oak Ridge for a brief interview at a Nashville café. He arrived in a red truck advertising his services — he calls himself “The Fire PI” — and sat down with a stack of documents, diagrams and autopsy photos, which he spread out on the table. He had gray hair, bags under his eyes and an air of weary determination. Bayne told me unequivocally that he believes Claude is innocent. “The people that matter have turned a blind eye to really looking again at this thing,” he said. “And it’s not right. It’s wrong. It’s wrong.”

When Bayne explained concepts like flashover, he lit up, confident and eager to point out the newest findings about fire behavior. But when he talked about Claude and Lorie, he could become gripped with emotion, his indignation so palpable he was almost at a loss for words. Lorie, Bayne often said, was “the love of Claude’s life.” To lose a soul mate so traumatically and then be sent to prison was an injustice he could not abide.

Oddly, Claude said he had never described Lorie as the love of his life. He said he did not understand why Bayne did, or even why he had been so invested in his case for so long. Claude loved Lorie, he said — they had planned to marry, on May 7, 1992 — but he never used those words. Discussing this in the prison visiting room the last time we met, he acted surprised upon learning that Bayne had lost his own wife months before taking his case. Bayne had never told him. Looking back, Claude told me, “maybe he was mourning for both of us.”

Bayne puts out a fire after a test as part an investigation.

I saw Bayne again last spring, this time in a large seminar room at the Oak Ridge Public Library. Bayne was fighting a cold, but he was game to demonstrate his theory of the fire. He got down on the floor with a tape measure, then configured the chairs in the room to recreate the layout of Claude and Lorie’s home. Three chairs represented the overstuffed couch. Across from it, two chairs were the love seat. In between, an overturned chair served as a coffee table, with a carpet underneath. Near the love seat, in the corner of the room, stacked chairs represented a tall decorative arrangement that Lorie had kept in the home, made of feathers and fake flowers.

This was a perfect setup for a cigarette fire, Bayne explained. If the fire began as a smoldering spot in the love seat, the flowers and feathers would have quickly caught fire as well.

“When fire occurs in a room, heat radiates up and out, grows up and out, convective heat grows up and out, hits the ceiling, begins to spread,” Bayne said, gesturing dramatically. “And so much heat is generated in this one chair, and given the geography of the compartment … the radiant heat eventually causes this chair and that table and that carpet to ignite. If—if—there’s enough air to feed it.” When Claude broke the windows to the house, he had only fed the flames.

A photograph of the floor plan of the house on 114 Broadway.

Bayne walked me to the back of the seminar room, where he’d placed two chairs to mark the utility room door. Once the living room reached flashover, Bayne explained, the house became a death trap. Smoke would have filled every room in minutes. “This is what killed Lorie,” he said.

“Claude needs to understand,” he said, his voice breaking, “he couldn’t have saved her.”

The house at 114 Broadway St. is still standing, looking much like it did in 1992. Ruby and Mike Alcorn still live across the street. The city of Nashville is in the midst of a major renaissance, with luxury condos and new developments transforming the skyline. But in its shadow, the neighborhood of Hopewell seems mostly untouched.

Claude’s guilt for setting the fire is a question long laid to rest among those who remember it. Bobby Alcorn, now in his forties, responded to emails with a request that I leave him alone. “I do not want any part in helping this man get out of prison,” he wrote. After two trials and 23 years, even those who were not there at the time harbor strong feelings. The current resident of 114 Broadway St. never met Claude or Lorie, but has no doubt that he killed her. In a brief conversation outside the house last spring, the woman choked up, recalling a friend who was stabbed to death by her abusive partner — she knew how women could hide signs that they were being hurt until it was too late.

But no one is more passionate that Claude is a murderer than Lorie’s siblings. Those who were willing to speak to me described him as a con artist and a dangerous man. Her sisters wished to remain anonymous, saying they were fearful of what he might do if he got out of prison. “Everyone’s afraid of him,” one sister said.

In a family photograph, Lorie looks fashionable in a wide-brimmed hat and a polka dot top. Her youngest sister pops up next to her, her smile revealing a gap where she recently lost a tooth. A different sister explained that their mother had a history of mental illness. She had been institutionalized when they were young and was often “incapacitated,” so Lorie would take care of them. “She is the one who taught me how to brush my teeth, how to wear my seatbelt,” the sister recalled. If Lorie had lived longer, “she would have been the one getting me ready for prom.”

Lorie Lee Lance, second from left.

Like the trauma of the fire, hatred and fear toward Claude is deeply woven into the family’s psyche. Once sister remembered him as “very scary looking, tattoos all over him, rough.” They recalled a barbecue where he lost his temper and threw potato salad on Lorie’s car. No one in the family ever saw him hit Lorie — “He knew better than to do that in front of us,” one of her siblings said — but when Lorie’s little sisters would visit the house at 114 Broadway St., he “drank all the time and was very, very abusive toward her — and to us.” One time, Lorie’s sister said, the two were watching “The Golden Girls” on TV when Claude came in and changed the channel. When the younger sister protested, he “grabbed me up off the couch by my hair and poured Budweiser beer all over my head,” she said. “I mean, he was vicious, cruel.”

Claude is adamant that he would never have harmed Lorie’s sisters. She had been with a number of abusive men — “Someone in [their] childhood may have done that,” he said, and “associated that with me.” It’s true that Lorie’s younger sisters were too young — eight and eleven at the time of the fire — to have the most reliable recollections. But a different sister who was the same age, Tina, said that while Lorie was indeed briefly married to a man who beat her, Claude was just as bad. She said she would visit Uno’s for lunch and see bruises on Lorie’s body, but Lorie denied that anything was wrong. The summer before she died, Tina said, Lorie walked out on Claude and briefly stayed with her. She recalled that the two baked a birthday cake for Tina’s son. Lorie talked about going to Florida to stay with her dad and stepmom, Tina said. But instead, she went back to 114 Broadway St. Tina believes that if she hadn’t, her sister would still be alive.

The family has a range of theories for why Claude would have killed Lorie. He had been questioned in connection with a bank robbery months before the fire — maybe Lorie knew something she wasn’t supposed to. There were rumors he was seeing a stripper who lived next door — perhaps Lorie had confronted him and made him angry. Neither Lorie’s mother or stepfather, Sammy Jones, wished to speak to me. But via a sibling, Mr. Jones said something he has often repeated about the night at Daisey Mae’s. Claude had been bitter and glaring at Lorie all night, he said. Whatever the reason, “he knew exactly what he was gonna do to her.”

THE STATE OF Texas never exonerated Cameron Todd Willingham. Defending his execution some years ago, Governor Rick Perry called Willingham a “monster” and rejected the scientific findings that claim to exonerate him. “This is a bad man,” Perry said, reminding people that Willingham once beat his pregnant wife. Of course, even the most abusive behavior does not equal proof that Willingham burned his children to death in a fire. Whatever is true about Claude’s treatment of Lorie, the same applies to him. “Claude wasn’t an angel,” said Patrick Wells, a retired police veteran hired as a defense investigator for the retrial. “But I just didn’t see him as a murderer.”

John Zimmermann, the man who first sent Claude to prison, disagrees. Now a prosecutor in a neighboring county, he reiterated that Claude was a classic abuser who killed his lover rather than letting her leave: “If I can’t have you, no one can,” is how he put it over the phone. Zimmermann was defensive about the overturned conviction, saying that the evidence he was accused of suppressing would have been inadmissible. And while he said he did not recall the details of the fire, he specifically cited the “pour patterns” at the scene as clear proof that it was arson. When I told Zimmermann that a local ATF agent had acknowledged pour patterns to be false indicators — and that “people probably went to prison” on the basis of such junk science — he acted astonished. “I’m appalled that a federal agent would be so cavalier as to suggest that there are innocent people in prison like that,” he said.

In an email, the ATF’s Fulton clarified that he has “no personal information on any fire scene investigation that may have played a role in the conviction of an innocent person.” As for Cooper, the former ATF agent ultimately declined my interview requests, but Agent Knight agreed to forward questions on my behalf. I asked for his thoughts on NFPA 921, pour patterns and the properties of kerosene. I asked what he might do differently if he were tasked with investigating the Hopewell fire today. Knight soon wrote back on Cooper’s behalf. “Unfortunately his position has not changed and would rather not speak or write on the case.”

In the spring of 2010, an influential Florida-based fire scientist named John Lentini came to Nashville for an evidentiary hearing. Claude was seeking a third trial, based on ineffective assistance of counsel. Lentini, a famed debunker of the myths that once guided arson investigations, had studied the case at Bayne’s urging and concluded that Cooper’s investigation had been fatally flawed. “I don’t know if he’s guilty or not,” Lentini told The Tennessean about Claude before testifying pro bono. “What I do know is the state used junk evidence to convict him.”

Claude’s appeal was denied. “The state’s experts were convinced that this guy was guilty,” Lentini recalled. “And once they’re at that point, there’s no shaking them.”

Today, Claude has few avenues left for challenging his conviction. His state appeals are exhausted and he is awaiting a response to a federal habeas petition filed in 2013. It argues, in part, that scientific evidence shows he is innocent. The same stance will be risky when he goes before the parole board, which he is scheduled to do in 2020. Parole is granted largely on the basis of remorse — and Claude will not apologize for a crime he says never happened.

Yet the parole board may be his best shot. Years ago, a woman named Sonia Cacy, serving a 99-year sentence in Texas, was freed when a renowned fire expert convinced the state parole board that she had been convicted on the basis of junk science. That expert was Gerald Hurst, the same fire scientist who would later try to save the life of Cameron Todd Willingham — and who offered to take Claude’s case for free back in 2001.

Arson specialist Gerald Hurst.

I met Hurst last May, at his home in West Austin. Nearing 80, he is pale and thin, with long wispy hair, a grayish white beard and glasses that give his eyes a slightly intense, owl-like quality. Dwight Scott told me that he had decided not to hire Hurst for the retrial in large part because of his eccentric appearance and demeanor — “he had a huge mane of hair and a really long beard,” Scott recalled. “I didn’t think he would convince the jury.” Hurst sat deep in a recliner next to scattered tins of Longhorn chewing tobacco and spoke gently and matter-of-factly. He endorsed Bayne’s theory about the origin of the fire. Between the love seat and the couch, he said, “you have an ideal scenario for a cigarette fire.” But the investigation into the Hopewell fire, he said, had been “a typical piece of crap.”

“They immediately called those patterns ‘pour patterns,’” Hurst said. “And they immediately called the kerosene they found an accelerant. You’ve already prejudiced the case beyond redemption when you do that.” This bias led to a sloppy investigation, he said. He pointed to the utility room lock, which should have been the state’s principal piece of evidence. “Logically, you would have taken it off the door, or taken the whole door. And you would have had the laboratory look at it. And they didn’t do any of that.”

“I’ll tell you what’s really outstanding in this case,” Hurst went on, “And an amateur should know it.” He repeated what Bayne has insisted upon for years: Lorie “didn’t get the burns in the closet. She couldn’t have.” Hurst believed Dr. Harlan’s perspective was corrupted by her visit to the fire scene.

Trying to reach Dr. Harlan, I learned that she remarried and changed her surname to Stephens after divorcing her husband and longtime professional partner, former Davidson County Medical Examiner Charles Harlan. He lost his medical license after it was revealed that he had botched countless autopsies, including in murder cases. Stephens herself would be reprimanded by the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners on unrelated — and far less serious — violations. Currently employed as a forensic pathologist in Ohio, Stephens spoke to me over the phone. She recalled her visit to the house at 114 Broadway St. — she had even taken photos of the lock with a cheap little Fuji camera, she said, which had been useful at trial. She stressed that the utility room door could only be opened from the outside and maintained that Lorie “must have” gotten her injuries while inside. The uneven burns could be explained by “whatever was keeping the heat from touching her,” she said.

“Medical examiners,” Hurst said wryly. “The cause of death is whatever the police say it is.”

I asked Hurst why Lorie would do something so seemingly irrational as run to the back of the house instead of following Claude out the front door to escape the fire. Hurst looked bemused. “Rational? During a fire? There is no ‘rational’ during a fire.”

“Nobody walks through a room like that without becoming totally disoriented,” Hurst said. “People do not think logically.” It is not uncommon for fire victims to be found in closets, he said, echoing part of the transcript from Claude’s first trial. “Someone who is being suffocated by smoke,” a firefighter testified, “will go as far as they can” or dig under things to get away from it.

In fact, Lorie had gone to “a logical place,” Hurst said. An enclosed room can provide protection from fire. “And it did. If they had found her earlier, they might have saved her life.”

“People always look for rational behavior during the fire and rational behavior after the fire,” Hurst went on. This was partly human nature. But it also went back to training. Fire personnel had been taught to scrutinize the demeanor of fire survivors. One 1978 instruction manual, Arson Investigation, said that a homeowner who seemed too calm was a potential arsonist. But so was an “eager beaver” — a person who might be “very anxious to lead [firefighters] to the exact location of the fire.”

“Everybody becomes a psychologist,” Hurst said. “Every time. ‘He was much too calm.’ Or ‘too excited — he was probably faking it.’”

It is only recently that some states have begun to take steps to address the consequences of junk science in arson cases, Hurst said. Texas is an unlikely leader. Largely thanks to the furor over the Willingham case, the state fire marshal is doing something unheard of: he is reviewing old arson cases, in collaboration with the Innocence Project. In Tennessee, where there is no Innocence Project, old convictions as a whole remain unexamined. The Tennessean has found that fires deemed to be arson have dropped precipitously in the past 10 years.

Hurst was unsurprised that ATF Agent Cooper declined to discuss the case. “I imagine he keeps it out of his mind,” he said. After all, if a prosecutor like Zimmermann has little professional incentive to admit his mistakes, for a fire investigator of Cooper’s generation, the implications are arguably far worse. On the stand in 2003, Cooper testified that he had investigated 183 fires since 1979. Out of those, he said, 123 were deemed to be arson. It’s not clear how many led to convictions.

“If they officially admitted, ‘we screwed up,’ — if they do that, then the next question is how many other cases have they screwed up?” Hurst said.

“If you open the floodgates, there are going to be thousands of cases.”

The prosecutor from Claude’s second trial, Jon Seaborg, is now retired and living in Mexico. He acknowledged the problem of wrongful convictions and outdated forensics. “As the science changes somebody needs to pay attention to it,” he told me, adding “I don’t know how you do that.” But he defended the legal outcome in the Garrett case, saying jurors may have been swayed by the circumstantial evidence, no matter what the science said. David Miller, the police detective who provided the contradictory statements from Captain Jenkins about the locked door, is retired and living in Florida. In a Facebook message, he wrote that Claude “has been tried and convicted of the offense in a court of law. A thorough investigation was completed and I feel the sentence was appropriate. I have no further comment.”

But there is one person who wishes desperately he could go back and do things differently. Brian Nicholson, the trial juror who wrote the letter to Claude almost 20 years ago told me via Facebook, “I think about this court case at least twice a week.”

In a lengthy email, Nicholson elaborated on what happened. He said that “the other jurors hated [Claude], even before his testimony.” Zimmermann capitalized on this — he “made sure that emotion controlled the courtroom, not evidence.” Nicholson had tried to argue for a not guilty verdict, he said, but only one other person took his side. As deliberations went on, he was becoming exhausted from working his overnight shift at work and then coming to court. His income was in jeopardy and he did not want to forgo his scheduled visitation with his daughter. So Nicholson finally gave in, even though “no juror could give a motive” for why Claude would have attacked Lorie, “and then lock(ed) her in a laundry room to die from a fire,” he wrote. For all the emphasis on the pour patterns, in the end, the fire science had not been discussed among the jurors. It had simply come down to “a picture of a drunken redneck that did not deserve a woman like her.”

Nicholson regrets sending the letter to Claude in 1995. He said he was drunk himself at the time, and never started the project he had proposed. “I’d probably do him more harm than good.” But more than anything, he is sorry for the role he played sending Claude to prison.

“I have always felt shame for voting to convict him.”

The post How Junk Science Sent Claude Garrett to Prison For Life appeared first on The Intercept.

I wanted to talk about an old arson case he investigated in 1992: a fatal fire at a small, one-story house in Old Hickory, Tennessee, just outside Nashville. A 24-year-old woman named Lorie Lee Lance had died in the blaze. Her boyfriend, Claude Francis Garrett, was arrested for setting the fire. He swore he was innocent. But two separate juries convicted Garrett of murder, first in 1993 and then again in 2003. Cooper was the star witness for the state.

Cooper recalled the case. He also remembered my previous attempts to reach him about it, for a story I published in 2015. The case was fairly unusual, Cooper said. As a federal agent, he did not generally work local arson cases, but he’d been called by the Nashville Metro Police Department about a suspected homicide early in the morning. It was February 24, 1992. Cooper could still describe the scene, along with most of the story told by Garrett: After a night of drinking with Lance and her stepfather at a local bar, he had awoken to the house on fire. Garrett yelled for Lance and ran with her toward the front door, he said, but she turned back toward a room at the other end of the house, where she was later found dead from smoke inhalation.

At trial in 1993, Cooper gave expert testimony to bolster the state’s theory against Garrett: that he was an abusive boyfriend who locked Lance in the back room, poured kerosene throughout the house, lit it on fire, and left her to die. The jury found him guilty and sent him to prison for life. But it would not take long for doubts to emerge. Garrett’s original conviction was overturned when he discovered that the trial prosecutor had concealed a police report in which a key witness said the back-room door had been unlocked.

The investigation into the fire was looking increasingly like a relic from another age.

More significantly, in the decade between the first trial and the retrial, the field of fire investigation had radically transformed. Old assumptions about arson and fire behavior were debunked and new investigative methods were adopted. The so-called pour patterns found at the scene would come to be regarded as junk science. By the time of Garrett’s 2003 retrial, the investigation into the fire was looking increasingly like a relic from another age, resting on techniques that had long been discarded. Nevertheless, Cooper defended his findings on the stand and the jury sent Garrett back to prison.

Cooper did not wish to revisit the case when I first sought to interview him in 2014. Neither did the two prosecutors who tried Garrett, although both were at least willing to briefly discuss the case. One of them — Jon Seaborg, who handled the retrial — acknowledged the challenge of outdated forensics. “As the science changes somebody needs to pay attention to it,” he said, adding “I don’t know how you do that.”

Regardless, Cooper was the person I had been most anxious to reach. Although he retired before the 2003 retrial, it was unfathomable that he would have remained unaware of the sea change in fire investigation since 1992. Yet he had repeatedly rebuffed my attempts to speak to him, even rejecting a list of questions sent via a colleague at the ATF. Now, as we spoke on his doorstep in Alabama, I repeatedly offered him an envelope containing a pair of scientific reports on the fire in Old Hickory. Written in 2016 by a group of renowned fire scientists who had reviewed Cooper’s investigation, the reports were firm in their conclusions: There was no evidence to support a determination of arson in Garrett’s case. “The central piece of evidence of the use of an accelerant is now recognized as a myth,” one of the authors explained. “A modern fire investigator would not find that this fire was incendiary.”

Cooper did not want the envelope. “I stand by my report,” he told me. He did not appreciate other experts second-guessing his work — especially people who had not worked the scene themselves. “My rule of thumb is ‘Were you there?’” he said. It echoed Cooper’s testimony during cross-examination in 2003. “If I’m proven wrong, I will admit I am wrong,” he said. “But on this one, no sir. I was there. I saw it with my eyes.”

Convictions Stuck in Time

In the 3 1/2 years since I first wrote about Garrett’s case, several people have been exonerated in old arson cases. Their cases are included in the National Registry of Exonerations, which tracks cases involving false or misleading forensic evidence. William Amor was acquitted in an Illinois retrial earlier this year, more than two decades after being convicted of killing his mother-in-law in a 1995 fire. Adam Gray was exonerated in 2017 for setting a fire that killed his upstairs neighbors in Chicago in 1993. And Herbert Landry was exonerated last year of trying to burn down his apartment complex in 2006; investigators found “pour patterns” like those at the scene in Garrett’s case. Other arson defendants have had their convictions overturned or reduced without being declared innocent. They are not included in the registry, making a tally hard to come by. Among them is Leticia Smallwood, who was finally released in Pennsylvania this year, after more than four decades in prison on dubious arson charges.

Despite the inescapable reality that flawed fire investigation methods once sent innocent people to prison, most states have taken no systematic steps to revisit old arson cases. A more common response has been to sweep wrongful convictions under the rug. In the case of Angela Garcia, which I wrote about in 2017, the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office spent months delaying an evidentiary hearing that would likely have dismantled their case against her, only to suddenly offer her a deal if she pleaded guilty right then and there. Despite swearing her innocence for the fire that killed her two daughters, Garcia tearfully took the deal. She is slated for release in 2022.

Now Garrett, too, has a shot at release. This year marked his 25th in prison, making him eligible for a parole hearing. On October 8, he will go before the Tennessee Board of Parole at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. In theory, he has a decent chance: Garrett has been what is often described as a “model inmate,” with a clean disciplinary record and a long list of people willing to vouch for his character. But such things can only take Garrett so far. In Tennessee, as in most states, parole hearings are often little more than a referendum on the original offense, no matter how much a person may have changed behind bars. For those who insist upon their innocence, there’s another dilemma: the expectation that there be a display of remorse for their crime.

Garrett has always said he will not apologize for a crime he did not commit. But forcefully invoking his innocence before the board could backfire.

Garrett has always said he will not apologize for a crime he did not commit. But forcefully invoking his innocence before the board could backfire. A safer route would be to rely on the numerous letters sent on his behalf, which argue that Garrett is a worthy candidate for release who has served his minimum sentence and deserves a chance to thrive on the outside. Still, he wants the parole board to understand the injustice of his case. Among the people Garrett has asked to speak at the hearing will be one of his most passionate advocates, Stuart Bayne, a veteran fire investigator based in East Tennessee. Bayne was the defense expert at Garrett’s 2003 retrial. For him, the hearing is a chance to correct an egregious wrong that has plagued him for over 15 years. In his letter to the parole board, Bayne called Garrett’s case “a classic example of injustice.”

“Tremendous advances in the understanding of fire behavior have occurred since 1992,” Bayne explained. Enclosed with his letter were seven flash drives, one for each member on the board. They contained his own reports on the case, a statement from Garrett, and the pair of expert reports I tried to show to Cooper at his house. If anyone is in a position to take them seriously now, it’s the board. “Please, please Mr. Chairman, distribute one to each member,” Bayne wrote. “Please, please, review the files.”

“Seeking Justice Through Fire Science”

From the moment I began looking into the Garrett case in 2013, it was impossible to miss the parallels to a more famous case — that of Cameron Todd Willingham, executed in Texas in 2004. The fires in their respective cases had occurred just two months apart — and both men were convicted largely on circumstantial evidence. In both cases, neighbors who initially described panicked behavior at the scene would later come to believe that it was just a larger deception. But most compelling was the fact that the evidence in both cases included “pour patterns” that had been disastrously misinterpreted.

I knew from Willingham’s case that burn marks once associated with arson could actually be the result of a long-misunderstood phenomenon called “flashover” — a transition phase during which a room’s contents simultaneously ignite. The physical evidence left by a “post-flashover fire” includes burn marks and patterns that form depending on factors like oxygen and ventilation, but which were once believed to be evidence of an ignitable liquid. After meeting Bayne in 2013, he gave me repeated lessons in such fire scenarios. At one meeting, he had me watch a clip from a short film by the National Fire Protection Association called “Countdown to Disaster.” It showed how quickly and dramatically something like a smoldering cigarette dropped on an upholstered chair could lead to a conflagration. It also illustrated his own theory of how the fire in Garrett’s case started — a cigarette left unattended on a loveseat in the living room after a night of drinking.

Like Willingham’s case, the fire in Old Hickory had occurred at a moment when fire investigation was on the cusp of a revolution. In 1992, the National Fire Protection Association published “NFPA 921,” which set forth a new set of guidelines for fire investigators, applying the scientific method to fire scenes rather than relying on investigators’ observations and experience. At first, “nobody accepted it,” Hurst said. Instead, professional fire investigators spent the next several years looking for ways to get around it. If Garrett’s 1993 trial was too early for the teachings of “NFPA 921” to have been absorbed, by 2003, they were more firmly established. Cooper would have known about them by then — “if he wanted to know,” Hurst said.

“It’s a case in which the investigation was a typical piece of crap.”

Hurst’s own foray into criminal cases came in the mid-1990s, when he testified in the trial of a woman named Sonia Cacy. She had been convicted of murdering her uncle in a fire and was facing a retrial. Like Bayne in Garrett’s case, Hurst was unable to sway the jury, and he was scarred by the outcome. “I had to get her out,” Hurst said. When Cacy went up for parole, Hurst gave a presentation to show that the fire scenario had been impossible. The parole board granted her parole and she was released, although it would take another 20 years for her to be exonerated.

Cacy’s case was highly publicized. But it was the Willingham case that broke into mainstream consciousness, Hurst said. “Every fire investigator in the country knows Willingham didn’t do it. Everyone,” he told me. It helped attract new fire experts to his cause, including chemists and engineers — a rarity among fire investigators, most of whom come from firefighting or law enforcement backgrounds. It also helped shift the perception of defense experts in arson cases, who were generally dismissed as “high-priced defense whores,” according to Hurst. “It was an unsavory sort of profession. How dare you work against the noble police? The noble fire marshals? The noble ATF?”

Hurst passed away just a few weeks after The Intercept published my story about Garrett. By then, the article had reached a group of experts who review old fire cases pro bono. They convened remotely under the banner of the Tetrahedron Committee, a loose consortium of fire scientists and veteran investigators started in 2007. The title is a reference to the four factors that combine to generate fire: fuel, heat, oxygen, and a chemical reaction. The committee’s motto is “Seeking Justice Through Fire Science.”

In April 2016, Craig Beyler, a respected Maryland-based fire engineer — and the author of a famed report on the Willingham case — produced an assessment of Garrett’s case on behalf of the Tetrahedron Committee. It echoed what Bayne had explained to me over and over again beginning in 2013: The investigation had been fatally flawed. The house was filled with furniture, paneling, and materials that were critical to explaining how the fire started and spread. Yet Porter, the fire marshal investigator who was first on the scene, did not bother to note this evidence. “As was common in the day, he simply removed all the contents of the room and hosed out the room to display the floor damage pattern,” Beyler wrote. “He treated the remains of the room contents as an obstruction to viewing the floor, rather than as evidence to be studied. All the contents were simply thrown out into the yard.”

The same month, a renowned fire scientist named John Lentini submitted an affidavit to Garrett’s federal public defender. Lentini drew from the history he lays out in his textbook, “Scientific Protocols for Fire Investigation,” to show how Cooper was emblematic of the initial resistance to “NFPA 921.” Though there had been a marked shift around 2000, “when this case was tried in 2003, some fire investigators, including Agent Cooper, still believed that by looking at the shape and texture of burning on the floor, they could infer the presence of ignitable liquids, even if subsequent laboratory analysis failed to reveal the presence of any such residues,” Lentini explained. Indeed, while “Cooper repeated the phrase ‘pour pattern’ over and over in his testimony,” no kerosene residue had been found in the flooring samples.

Lentini’s affidavit also contained evidence that was a revelation to Garrett — and which he believes should exonerate him once and for all. In 2013, researchers published a study called “Forensic Analysis of Ignitable Liquid Fuel Fires in Buildings,” sponsored by the National Institute of Justice. “What they learned is that ignitable liquids only burn for a very short time in fires, and do not cause the kind of charring found on the floor in the Garrett residence,” Lentini wrote. The photos from the scene showed the charring to be too deep, Lentini explained. In other words, it “could not have been caused by an ignitable liquid. Agent Cooper’s testimony on this point was scientifically unsupportable and erroneous.”

Tunnel Vision

As I listened to Cooper’s recollections of the fire in Garrett’s case, I was struck by his remarks about pour patterns, which sounded far less cavalier than what I recalled from the trial transcripts. On the stand in 1993, Cooper had not only insisted that the marks were proof of a liquid accelerant, he had also claimed to be able to tell the difference between a deliberate pour and a spill. Now Cooper explained the need for caution. He recalled a different fire scene where he discovered what he believed to be pour patterns, only to be told by a forensic chemist that the marks were the result of a varnish that had been applied to the floor. Regardless, Cooper remained confident about the ones in the Garrett case. “I don’t make my determination by one thing, like pour patterns,” he told me. He looked at the totality of the evidence.

Cooper retained a trait that is a trademark of certain old-school fire investigators: a deep belief in his own instincts. “Can you tell from looking at a house where a fire started?” he asked me. No, I said. “See, I can,” he responded. “I have the advantage.” In reality, determining a fire’s point of origin requires far more than visual analysis. But as with any expert witness, the credentials of an ATF agent can impress a jury no matter how flawed their testimony. In the Angela Garcia case, Cleveland prosecutors struggled to win a conviction — her first two trials ended in hung juries — until they bulked up their witness list at her third trial, adding an ATF agent who insisted he could see a pour pattern in a photograph. “I don’t care what the NFPA says.”

“Agent Cooper was shockingly uninterested in the fact that the fire left carbon deposits on the sliding bolt showing that the bolt was slid to the right.”

Tunnel vision would certainly help explain Cooper’s sloppy investigation. “I don’t remember if I ever interviewed Garrett,” he said. He didn’t. Nor did he speak to the firefighters at the scene. It was not even clear how he became convinced that the latch to the back door had been locked. Neither the door nor the lock was removed or studied, let alone presented to the jury as evidence. If Cooper had scrutinized this crucial piece of evidence, Lentini wrote in his affidavit, he would almost certainly have found that the latch had been in an unlocked position. “Agent Cooper was shockingly uninterested in the fact that the fire left carbon deposits on the sliding bolt showing that the bolt was slid to the right at the time of the fire,” he wrote.

Cooper offered no explanation for why he did not study the latch or the door. And he flatly denied saying something that had jumped out at Bayne when he first started studying the case: that Garrett likely singed his face from leaning down to light the kerosene in the living room. Cooper had compared it to lighting a gas grill, according to transcripts of his trial testimony — “sometimes it won’t ignite and you stick your head down there to see and you’ve got this open flame that comes back with a POOF!” Such a “flash back” of kerosene vapors was “impossible,” Lentini wrote.

“He’s right,” Cooper told me. He could not imagine having made that claim, he said. I told him it appeared in the transcripts, but he protested that he did not remember. “I would be crazy to say that.”

The Dilemma of Remorse

The last time I saw Garrett was in early August, in the large visitation room at Riverbend. He looked the same as when I’d last seen him, perhaps a bit sunburned — he recently traded his maintenance job for work doing landscaping on the grounds of the prison. Like his last job, it pays 50 cents an hour. In his 60s, Garrett does what he can to stay healthy. He lifts weights and runs a 5K every week, he says, and tries to buy food from the commissary. “I eat a lot of tuna,” he said.

Directly behind us in the visiting area was a conference room where the parole hearing would take place, Garrett told me. I had been told that participating board members would attend via video conference, if a member attends at all. Sometimes it is only a representative who comes on the board’s behalf.

When we met, Garrett was still considering the dilemma of remorse. It’s not that he has no regrets — he has many, he told me. The man he was in 1992 was a different person — and certainly far from perfect. When it came to the night of the fire, “there are so many things I regret,” he said. If they hadn’t been drinking or smoking, he said, maybe Lance would still be alive.

Garrett hoped that Lance’s family might be swayed by the new reports from Lentini and the Tetrahedron Committee. It seemed unlikely. When I spoke to Lance’s sisters in 2014, they remembered Garrett as very abusive and remained convinced that he was guilty, no matter what the science said. So did other relatives, at least one of whom was likely to attend the parole hearing to argue against Garrett.

Should Garrett win his freedom, he has already been offered a place to stay. He is optimistic that he can find work. Decades ago, before he went to prison, he spent time as a trucker hauling drywall. Maybe he could go back to driving a truck, he told me. He may not have a traditional resume, but his inmate file is filled with certificates and letters marking his completion of educational programs. In 2010, he completed a 30-week curriculum on “Developing and Improving Life Skills.” “As a graduate, you have accomplished a great goal that will assist you in your future endeavors,” reads a 2010 letter signed by then-Gov. Phil Bredesen, who is now running for Senate. “The state of Tennessee is proud to call you a Tennessean.”

To those who have gotten to know to Garrett in recent years, the sentiment is more than just a line in a form letter. Jeannie Alexander, the former prison chaplain at Riverbend, describes him as a positive influence. “I’ve seen this often, but I think a lot of people would not expect to find someone [in prison] who is genuinely compassionate and who has just a great deal of concern about the community that they live in,” she said. “He mentored a lot of young guys coming in with life sentences.”

In late September, Bayne met with two of Garrett’s longtime advocates at a Panera on Nashville’s West Side. The three strategized around the hearing and shared their expectations and concerns. Dozens of letters have been sent to the board on Garrett’s behalf, and the hearing was shaping up to be well-attended. Dwight Scott, Garrett’s old defense attorney, plans to speak, along with Bayne. “I’ve never had a verdict which so undermined my confidence in the jury system, or which so depresses me to this day,” Scott wrote Garrett in a letter earlier this year. Garrett’s mother, who is 83, insisted she would make the nine-hour drive from Hiawatha, Kansas, even putting new tires on her truck. But Garrett asked her to write a letter instead.

On September 28, Bayne sent out two last letters. The first went to the chairman of the parole board. Rather than discuss the fire, he described Garrett as a person, a man with whom he has “exchanged more than 100 personal letters” over the years. “He has earned my trust and respect,” Bayne wrote. He is eager to help Garrett find a home and a job, particularly if he moves to East Tennessee.

The second letter was addressed to Cooper. Bayne had enclosed a flash drive containing the reports from Lentini and the Tetrahedron Committee, along with additional materials. He urged him to look at them. “Were I in your shoes, sir, I would not want to,” he conceded. But he would also realize he had no choice. “I ask you to revisit the event and re-evaluate the evidence while answering the question all we investigators ask ourselves, ‘Did I make the right call?’”

Top photo: Claude Francis Garrett.

The post Junk Arson Science Sent Claude Garrett to Prison for Murder 25 Years Ago. Will Tennessee Release Him? appeared first on The Intercept.

It was a Monday in October 2018. The hearing had started at 10:30 a.m. “Mr. Garrett, what is your inmate number, sir?” Montgomery asked. Garrett recited it: #225779. “You were born on November 17, 1956, and you’re 61 years old?” Yes, Garrett said. Montgomery thanked everyone in attendance. “The more testimony we hear, the more facts we hear from each and every one of you, the better decision we can make,” he said.

Montgomery summarized Garrett’s record dating back to the 1970s: a handful of misdemeanors, followed by felonies, the most serious of which were some burglaries in Indiana. He then reviewed Garrett’s disciplinary write-ups in prison. There were only five, total. Four dated back to the mid-’90s. Finally, Montgomery asked the question Garrett had been pondering for more than 25 years.

“Tell me, on February 24, 1992, what happened?”

Garrett told the story as he had countless times. How he and his girlfriend, Lorie Lee Lance, had been out drinking at a local bar the night before; how they came home late and dozed off in the living room, then moved to their bedroom. “Sometime later I was woken up,” Garrett said. “I don’t know what woke me up. I recall looking into the living room and seeing a light flickering on the wall.” It was a fire. “I yelled at Lorie. She got up behind me and I had ahold of her wrist. We went toward the front door, which was to the right of our bedroom.” But then Lance “pulled back,” Garrett said. “She didn’t follow me through the door.”

For more than 25 years, Garrett has maintained his innocence. He has also gained the support of numerous people on the outside, who wrote letters to the board on his behalf. His most vocal advocate is a veteran fire investigator, Stuart Bayne, the defense expert at his 2003 retrial. A tall man with a formal air, Bayne was one of four supporters who spoke at the hearing. He wore a dark suit and carried prepared remarks. “As a representative of the fire investigation community, I owe allegiance to only one thing, and that is the truth,” Bayne began. Garrett’s conviction was “fundamentally unjust,” he said — and there was scientific evidence to prove it.

Like all fire investigators of his generation, Bayne explained, he had lived through a sea change that began in the 1980s. Until then, “I believed in arson pattern indicators that have since then been proven untrue,” he said. In 1992, the same year as the fire in Garrett’s case, the National Fire Protection Association published “NFPA 921,” a groundbreaking guide that would transform the field. Rather than rely on instinct, experience, and visual interpretations of fire scenes, it held that fire investigators should follow the scientific method: using all evidence from a scene to test a hypothesis before making a determination about a fire’s origin and cause.

The investigators in Garrett’s case had done no such thing. Instead, they discarded the furniture and other contents of the house and zeroed in on false indicators. At trial, the state’s key witness, James Cooper, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, swore by “pour patterns” on the floor, which supposedly proved an accelerant had been spread throughout the home. He continued to insist upon the evidence at the 2003 retrial, despite the fact that “pour patterns” were widely understood to be unreliable junk science by then. To Bayne’s distress, Garrett’s retrial attorney took him off the stand before he could explain the vast changes in fire investigation over the previous decade.

In the weeks before the October parole hearing, Bayne had mailed each parole board member a set of reports. “The information I sent you are the result of systemic analysis of the fire,” he told Montgomery. One report came from renowned fire scientist John Lentini, who first reviewed Garrett’s case in 2010 and concluded it was based on junk science. Another came from a group of international fire experts called the Tetrahedron Committee, who also found that the arson determination in Garrett’s case was fatally flawed. “Today’s fire investigation standards reject the non-scientific methods used at the Lance-Garrett fire in 1992,” Bayne explained. It was not the kind of evidence parole boards usually hear. But Bayne urged Montgomery to consider it.

Opposing Garrett’s release were members of Lance’s family. In emotional statements, they described Garrett as an abuser who had killed Lance because she planned to leave him. The family shared stories of his volatile behavior that they also told me when I first investigated the case, for an article published in 2015. “He’s conned every one of these people in this room,” Lance’s younger sister, Hayley, said. They were not swayed by the explanation of outdated fire investigations. “All this about the junk science, that may be true in some cases,” Lance’s aunt said. But not in this one.

Just before noon, it came time for Montgomery to announce his decision. “The board does not try cases,” he said. “We do not determine whether a person is innocent or guilty.” What mattered now was that Garrett had served the sentence required by the state of Tennessee. “I look at your record and I see a person that is trying to improve his life,” Montgomery told Garrett. His vote would be for Garrett to be released in March 2019.

Garrett was stunned. But the outcome was still far from certain — he needed three more votes in his favor for release. Montgomery said the board members would make their decision within seven to 10 days.

About a week later, Garrett got the news. The board had denied his parole application. He won’t have another chance until 2022.

“I’m disappointed but not discouraged,” Garrett told me a few weeks later. It is rare for anyone to get paroled their first time before the board, he said. In fact, compared to many people in his position, Garrett was lucky to face the parole board at all. Not long after he was convicted, legislators doubled the amount of time lifers with parole eligibility in Tennessee had to serve before their first hearing, from 25 to 51 years.

For Bayne, however, the denial was an intolerable blow. In a six-page letter last November, he urged the board to reconsider its decision. He reminded members of the seven flash drives he had sent them earlier that fall, which included affidavits and reports from leading fire experts. “There are reputable fire investigators/scientists who are trying to tell you that this whole matter is fundamentally unjust,” Bayne wrote. He did not hear back.

February 24 marks the 27th year since the fire that took Lance’s life and sent Garrett to prison. As he continues to fight his conviction, Garrett is trapped in a kind of paradox. Even as decades of scientific advancements have debunked old forensic techniques and provided more tools to identify wrongful convictions, the legal architecture that surrounds him has made it harder to win relief. The same tough-on-crime era that gave rise to the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act — which has shut defendants out of court even when they have compelling innocence claims — brought a wave of state-level reforms shortly after Garrett was first convicted. In 1995, Tennessee Gov. Don Sundquist signed sweeping legislation “designed to make convicting criminals easier and keep them in prison longer,” as The Tennessean reported at the time.

The tough-on-crime overhaul included major revisions to the state’s Post-Conviction Procedures Act, imposing a one-year deadline for people to challenge their convictions in state court. While in theory it also included a safeguard to address wrongful convictions — allowing for the reopening of a state post-conviction petition based on new scientific evidence — the limitations were rigid. In 2017, Garrett filed such a motion in state court, based on the reports of Lentini and the Tetrahedron Committee. Prosecutors protested on several grounds: The motion had been filed too late; it revealed no new evidence; and it did not prove Garrett’s “actual innocence” as required by the law. The court swiftly ruled for the state.

Until very recently, the Davidson County CRU had shown similarly meager results. In January, Nashville Public Radio released the results of a two-year investigation into the office. It revealed that while 38 cases had been submitted to the unit for review, not a single one had been ordered to be reinvestigated. Part of the problem was the structure of the unit. Cases were screened by a seven-member panel of prosecutors, which bred inevitable intransigence. As Nashville defense attorney Daniel Horwitz pointed out, it also created conflicts of interest; in the case of his client Joseph Webster, whose application was rejected in July 2018, the panel included the same prosecutor who sent Webster to prison in the first place.

The attorney general’s office announced an overhaul of the unit’s protocol. On February 8, news broke that the CRU would take on the Webster case after all, the first to move forward since Funk launched the unit. All of this is potentially good news for Garrett. But there is one major obstacle keeping him from applying. The unit’s rules dictate that it “will not consider requests for review while any appeal, petition, or writ is pending in court.” For Garrett, whose federal appeal has been winding its way through the courts since 2013, it is a wait he can ill afford.

Although Davidson County is not unique in this requirement, it’s not even clear why it exists. “As a general rule, we stay out of it while it’s in the courts,” Assistant Attorney General Robert Jones, who leads the unit, explained over the phone earlier this month. But he insisted that such language would not foreclose on a deserving application. He pointed to the next line in the unit’s protocol: “The CRU retains the discretion to review the case if it is in the interest of justice.” If there is compelling evidence of innocence, he said, “we’re not gonna sit here for years and wait for the case to go through the courts.”

Even so, the language of the unit’s official protocol suggests the bar for relief will be high. In order for the CRU to recommend that a conviction be vacated, an applicant must show “clear and convincing evidence” of “actual innocence,” as defined by the Tennessee Supreme Court. In a case like Garrett’s, where the physical evidence was discarded almost immediately, there is no new testing that can establish such clear proof of his innocence, let alone something like DNA.

If there is one thing that might help Garrett between now and whenever he submits his case for review, it would be a willingness on the part of the state’s main expert to admit he was wrong, at least in his methodology, which would never pass muster today. But until now, this has proven impossible. When I went to see Cooper last year, he defended his work and refused to consider the reports by Lentini or the Tetrahedron Committee. Although he backed away from certain evidence he once emphasized on the stand, he reiterated his belief in Garrett’s guilt and reminded me of a crucial piece of evidence: the lock on the utility room door. “That was key,” he said.

In court rulings upholding Garrett’s conviction, reviewing judges have relied on Cooper’s recounting of what Jenkins supposedly told him: that he “had to use two hands to slide the bolt on the latch to the other side to open the door.” But at the retrial, Jenkins said he did not even remember Cooper. In its 2016 report on the fire, the Tetrahedron Committee found that his testimony should be “viewed very skeptically.” For one, there was the “near-zero visibility, high heat, and confusion” of a fire scenario. Then there was the fact that firefighting gloves are designed for protection and not conducive to operating a latch as small as the one on the door. “The difficulties of opening a latch in firefighting gloves was never addressed and demonstrated at trial,” the report noted. Finally, it flagged the exculpatory statement attributed to Jenkins and withheld by the state at the first trial: that the door was unlocked. “Given what we know from memory research, the original recollection is the most credible source [of] information,” the experts said. “That is not to say that Capt. Jenkins was knowingly lying about the latch position. However, we must be cognizant of the effect of potential suggestion by investigators and prosecutors on a witness’s recollection.”

Jenkins, who is long since retired, has not responded to numerous messages or a note left at his home. Nor has he acknowledged the expert reports from Lentini and the Tetrahedron Committee, which I mailed to him last fall. While there is no reason his memory would be sharper decades after the fire, there is very good reason to revisit the question of the door. Should the CRU eventually take up the case, it would do well to consider a key finding in Lentini’s report, one that only recently reminded me of something Garrett told me years ago: the reason he bought the cheap latch in the first place was because the door had a tendency to swing open. A photo included in Lentini’s report shows heavy smoke deposits on the edge of the door — the part that would presumably have been shielded by the door frame had it been closed during the fire. Garrett’s conviction rests on the claim that he locked Lance inside that room and left her to die. But the smoke deposits debunked this, according to Lentini. Not only was the door unlocked, he wrote, “it was not even closed.”

The post Fire Scientists Say the Arson Case Against Claude Garrett Was Fatally Flawed. Will Anyone Listen? appeared first on The Intercept.

Bayne wore glasses, dark coveralls, and brown work boots. It was a frigid Tuesday in December, the week before Christmas. He’d driven to the house in Old Hickory, Tennessee, just north of Nashville, in a Jeep 4×4 advertising his business: The Fire PI: Confidential Origin and Cause Investigations. The vehicle was filled with supplies — hard hats, flashlights, and a portable generator. On the passenger’s seat was the 2017 edition of the National Fire Protection Association’s seminal handbook, “NFPA 921: Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigators.”

The first edition of “NFPA 921” was published in 1992, just weeks before the fire at 114 Broadway. In the years to come, it would revolutionize Bayne’s profession. Until that point, fire investigators had been taught to rely on instinct and their interpretation of visual evidence at the scene to determine a fire’s origin and cause. But “NFPA 921” replaced this approach with the scientific method: gathering evidence to test a hypothesis to figure out how a fire began. Critically, the text also dispelled long-standing myths about fire behavior, debunking the visual clues that experts once associated with arson. Irregular burn marks known as “pour patterns,” for example, long seen as evidence of a liquid accelerant, were actually produced by a phenomenon called flashover — the moment a fire in a room becomes a room on fire.

But these revelations came too late for the fire that killed Lance. When investigators arrived at the house on February 24, 1992, they seized on a large “pour pattern” on the living room floor, along with a container of kerosene found in the kitchen. Lance’s boyfriend, 35-year-old Claude Garrett, who survived the fire, insisted that he did not know how it started, explaining that the couple used kerosene to heat their home during the winter. But he soon fell under suspicion. Prosecutors said he locked Lance in the laundry room at the back of the house, poured kerosene onto the living room floor, and left her to die.

Views of the utility room nearly three decades after the 1992 fire, on Dec. 17, 2019. Photos: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

There should have been doubts about this theory from the start. After being convicted of murder and sentenced to life in 1993, Garrett won a new trial after uncovering evidence withheld by the state, which indicated that the door to the back room had not been locked at all. But in 2003, a new jury sent Garrett back to prison, much to the distress of Bayne, who was hired as an expert witness for the retrial. He was convinced the case was a miscarriage of justice — a conviction based on junk science that had long since been debunked. For nearly 20 years Bayne has been trying to explain this to anyone who will listen. Nevertheless, as we stood inside the house that day, Garrett was facing yet another Christmas behind bars.

As we stood inside the house that day, Garrett was facing yet another Christmas behind bars.

I first met Bayne for an investigation into Garrett’s case published in 2015. After our initial meeting, he tried to visit the house but was turned away by a resident. He’d been inside only once before — in 2002, thanks to a renter who gave him brief access — and was desperate to return. Although Bayne had pored over the evidence in the case countless times, he wrote to me, “a fire investigator needs to stand in the very spot (a.k.a., the room of origin) and revisit the event in his mind’s eye.”

The one-story cinderblock home remained standing after the fire, its basic structure intact. Now the owner was preparing to sell it; like many of the old houses in Nashville’s rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, it would likely be torn down. Bayne had one last chance to look at the house up close, to consider what, if anything, it could tell him about the fire.

Although he cannot prove it for sure, Bayne’s theory has always been that a burning cigarette started the fire. Garrett and Lance were both smokers; they had gone out drinking the night before, then returned and watched TV in the living room. A loveseat had been fully consumed in the blaze, which Bayne believed was the point of origin. Today, a qualified investigator would clear out the debris at the scene and then reconstruct the room as accurately as possible, returning surviving furnishings to their original locations in order to study how the fire progressed. But this didn’t happen in 1992: Investigators discarded the furniture onto the front lawn.

Bayne stepped into the living room and rattled off its former contents. “Loveseat. Couch. Fish tank. Entertainment center.” Then he turned right, into the bedroom. He recounted Garrett’s account of the fire, a scenario he had been replaying in his mind for years. How Garrett awoke in the early morning hours, smelled smoke, saw a glow in the living room. How he woke up Lance, ran with her toward the front door. Bayne reached for my hand as he turned right from the bedroom and walked me toward the front door. He opened it. But, “she turns, heads for the back. He goes out the front only to realize that she’s not with him.”

It all happened so fast, Bayne said. With the front door open, oxygen fed the fire, devouring the living room’s cluttered contents, consuming the wood paneling on the walls. It would have taken almost no time at all for the room to reach flashover. By the time Lance got to the back room, “this house was charged with smoke. And in a few breaths, she’s collapsed.”

Inside the laundry room, Bayne shoved the back door open, a gust of cold air entering from the backyard. That door was not there in 1992. There was a boarded up window, instead. Garrett has explained that he’d accidentally broken the window months before the fire, and the landlord would not fix it. But prosecutors said Garrett had covered the window on purpose — all part of the plan to kill Lance.

Bayne did not believe this. He believed in Garrett’s innocence. He paused and sighed again. “If only there was a door.”

The Long Shadow of Junk Science

This week marked the 28th year since the fire in Old Hickory. For Garrett, now 63, the anniversary comes at a particularly painful time. His stepfather died suddenly last year, and in early February, his mother was admitted to the hospital for heart surgery, only to be told that she would likely only survive another six months.

In the meantime, exonerations in old arson crimes continue. Last year, Robert Yell was exonerated in Kentucky after 15 years behind bars for a fire that killed his two children. Like Garrett, Yell was initially described as responding hysterically to the fire — and like Garrett, his clothes tested negative for any liquid accelerants. Although Yell’s arson prosecution took place well after Garrett’s initial conviction, it rested on the same kind of junk science once used to charge people for arson. Meanwhile, not a single U.S. state apart from Texas has undertaken a systematic review of old arson cases.

Nevertheless, there are some new reasons for optimism for Garrett. A TV special reexamining the Old Hickory fire is set to air soon on the network Investigation Discovery, which promises to bring scrutiny to the case. More importantly, an application to the Davidson County District Attorney General’s Conviction Review Unit, filed by Garrett’s attorneys last summer, is pending in Nashville. Although the application guidelines dictate that the CRU will only examine cases in which appeals have been exhausted — something that has not yet happened in Garrett’s case — the office seems open to revisiting the case.

There has also been a series of important legal victories. In 2016, Garrett challenged his conviction in state court based in part on new reports by leading fire experts who concluded that there was no reliable evidence of arson in his case. One affidavit, by renowned fire scientist John Lentini, further debunked the so-called pour patterns as proof that kerosene had been used to start the fire. A 2013 study revealed that ignitable liquids burn up quickly in fires, Lentini wrote, “and do not cause the kind of charring found on the floor of the Garrett residence.” The state court rejected Garrett’s challenge, but last fall, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to Tennessee — a chance to litigate claims that have not received a hearing in court.

Finally, in December 2019, a federal district court authorized evidence-gathering on a nagging question: whether lead investigator James F. Cooper, a special agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the state’s star witness against Garrett, misrepresented his credentials on the stand. At the 1993 and 2003 trials, Cooper testified that he was certified with the International Association of Arson Investigators. But in a March 2019 letter to Garrett’s new appellate attorney, the organization showed certification only from 2007 to 2012. If Cooper misled the court about his qualifications, it could be grounds for a new trial.

It may well be that Cooper was, in fact, certified at the time of the trials — and that the issue lies with the IAAI’s record-keeping. But even if he did not commit perjury on this point, it would not make Cooper’s testimony any less flawed. When it comes to his analysis of the fire, the central question is not whether his official credentials were valid but whether his conclusions were scientifically sound. Among every reputable expert who has looked at the fire, the answer to the latter is a resounding no.

The problem of expert witnesses who peddle junk science is hardly unique to fire cases. It cuts across virtually all areas of forensic analysis, from bullets to bite marks. Among such disciplines, fire investigation is in many ways a success story — a field that has spent the past decades getting on firmer scientific footing. Yet, for those people imprisoned for old arson crimes based on flawed methodology, there is no clear path to exoneration.

By the time of Garrett’s retrial, there should have been a way to effectively challenge flawed forensic evidence before Cooper ever took the stand. A landmark U.S. Supreme Court case — Daubert v. Merrell Dow Chemicals — had created new parameters for expert testimony in federal trials, which Tennessee adopted along with other states. But Garrett’s case shows how lawyers and judges were ill-equipped to apply it.

For people imprisoned for old arson crimes based on flawed methodology, there is no clear path to exoneration.

In a transcript from the 2003 retrial, Garrett’s trial attorney Dwight Scott asks Davidson County Criminal Court Judge Seth Norman for permission to question Cooper “both on his qualifications and his ability to render a scientific opinion that there was a pour pattern in this house.” In such a pretrial proceeding, known as a Daubert hearing, the judge is supposed to act as a “gatekeeper” to decide whether evidence is admissible at trial. But Norman was immediately skeptical — and seemingly unaware of what Daubert allowed. “You’re just wanting a preview of what the man’s gonna say,” he said, grudgingly allowing Scott to briefly question Cooper.

Scott asked Cooper to explain the scientific method. “Right now I don’t want to answer that,” Cooper replied, adding that he would have to get into too much research. “Well, would you agree that it’s simply just formulating, gathering data and then hypothesis?” Scott asked. Cooper deflected. His process was to take what he saw at the scene and consider it alongside witness interviews and other circumstantial evidence. “A lot of experts try to reduplicate the fire,” he added. But he preferred to look at the whole picture. In this case, “the most important thing that I needed to know,” he said, came down to the door to the room where Lance was found.

“You needed to know where the victim was in the storage room in order to make a determination about where the origin of the fire was?” Scott asked. “It’s part of the puzzle, Mr. Scott,” Cooper replied.

When I met Cooper outside his home in 2018, he reiterated the importance of the lock. But he could not answer why, if it was so central to the case, he had not bothered to preserve or study it more closely. As the late fire scientist Gerald Hurst told me in 2014, “Logically, you would have taken it off the door, or taken the whole door. And you would have had the laboratory look at it. And they didn’t do any of that.” In his 2016 affidavit, Lentini revealed how consequential this failure was.

“Agent Cooper was shockingly uninterested in the fact that the fire left carbon deposits on the sliding bolt showing that the bolt was slid to the right at the time of the fire,” he wrote. According to his analysis of the evidence, not only was the door unlocked, “it was not even closed.”

House on Fire

As I left the house at 114 Broadway in December, Bayne was still working inside. He had torn out much of the carpet, revealing what looked like old burn marks at the entrance of the bedroom floor. But inside the living room, the floors had been replaced, destroying the visual evidence that Cooper had called “pour patterns” almost 28 years before.

Bayne also took measurements of the walls, windows, and doorways. An engineer has agreed to use the data to create a computer model — a common way to recreate and study a fire scenario — and he was hoping to convince another expert to undertake a separate simulation. A fire investigator who “is passionate about getting it right does not really ever stop evaluating a fire scene,” Bayne later wrote in an email.

Indeed, despite Cooper’s dismissive attitude toward fire recreations, test fires are a critical way to understand fire scenarios. It is through such experiments — live burns carried out by federal agencies and private labs — that some of the most important breakthroughs have been made. People like Garrett don’t generally have the resources for such tests, although that has not kept Bayne from trying. Among the endless appeals for help he has written was a 2017 letter to the United States Fire Administration. Given the role of a federal agency in sending Garrett to prison for life, why shouldn’t a federal agency help reexamine the case?

The U.S. Fire Administration declined to get involved. But Bayne has not given up on the idea, especially as long as the house remains intact. He is planning to make a similar appeal to the ATF itself. As he wrote in his previous letter, the home could be purchased and restored as closely as possible to its 1992 furnishings. “Then, conduct two sets of burn tests on two hypotheses (one intentional, one unintentional).” One would test the state’s theory and the other his own.

“Imagine testing these two ideas in the very house where the 1992 event occurred,” Bayne wrote. “What an exciting and revealing experiment it could be!”

The post After 28 Years, the Fire That Sent Claude Garrett to Prison May Get a Second Look appeared first on The Intercept.

The DA’s notice was filed alongside a report by Sunny Eaton, director of the office’s Conviction Review Unit, who spent the past year closely reexamining Garrett’s case. “While the CRU’s review of this case did not uncover affirmative evidence conclusively establishing Garrett’s innocence,” Eaton wrote in the report, “the CRU finds it wholly impossible to maintain confidence in Garrett’s conviction. Holistic review of the record, the District Attorney’s file, and new scientific evidence dismantles every single piece of evidence previously believed to inculpate Garrett.”

Garrett was twice convicted of setting the fire that killed 24-year-old Lance in the small home they shared in Old Hickory, Tennessee, just outside Nashville. The couple had returned from a local bar in the early morning hours of February 24, 1992, when Garrett said he awoke to find a fire in the living room. According to Garrett, he woke up Lance and ran with her toward the front door, only for Lance to turn and run toward the rear of the house. Firefighters later found her in a utility room, dead from smoke inhalation.

Although neighbors initially described Garrett as frantic, yelling for Lance from outside, investigators became suspicious upon arriving at the scene, where they smelled kerosene and found a large irregular-shaped burn pattern on the living room floor. The lead investigator, James Cooper — a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives — seized on this so-called pour pattern as proof that an ignitable liquid had been used to start the fire. He also concluded that the utility room had been locked from the outside, trapping Lance. Garrett was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Garrett’s case is one of countless arson convictions across the U.S. based on evidence that has since been debunked. Many visual indicators once believed to signal arson were rooted in a misunderstanding of fire behavior. The “pour pattern” found at the home in Old Hickory was in fact the result of a phenomenon called flashover, which was not widely understood in 1992. In the decades following Lance’s death, new developments in fire science transformed the techniques used to determine whether a fire is arson. But even as investigators have discarded the myths they once relied upon in favor of the scientific method, prosecutors have been slow to revisit old arson cases, frequently fighting to keep convictions intact.

The Davidson County DA’s office is an important exception. “Interpreted in light of new scientific advances and guided by the professional analysis of ten experts who have reviewed the evidence in this case, there is no basis whatsoever to believe that an incendiary act by Garrett caused this fire any more than a hypothesis suggesting accidental cause,” Eaton wrote in the CRU report. If not for the office’s willingness to reexamine the work of its own former prosecutors, Garrett could easily have faced the prospect of dying in prison for a crime he did not commit.

Although a judge still has to accept the findings of the CRU — and hold a hearing before agreeing to vacate the conviction — Garrett, now 65, could soon be released. For fire investigator Stuart Bayne, who became Garrett’s most dedicated advocate after testifying at his second trial in 2003, the DA’s decision is both vindicating and long overdue. For 20 years, he has told anyone who would listen that Garrett is an innocent man. “Finally, other people are beginning to see it,” he said.

A Sense of Urgency

I first learned about Garrett’s case in the spring of 2013, from an advocate who visited him in prison. At a glance, the case contained striking parallels to the infamous story of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was wrongfully executed in Texas after being convicted of killing his own children in a fire. The two fatal fires took place within months of one another, just before the publication of “NFPA 921,” a manual that would eventually revolutionize the field of fire investigation.

Garrett’s conviction was also a case study in the legal system’s lack of recourse for people incarcerated based on faulty forensics — particularly in the absence of tangible exonerating evidence such as DNA. As with most old arson convictions, there was no evidence left to test, only photographs and reports by investigators whose examination of the scene had been perfunctory at best. Nevertheless, by the time I first met Garrett at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, his case had already been reviewed by two leading fire scientists, who made clear that the evidence used to convict him was junk science.

One, the late Gerald Hurst, was best known for his attempts to clear Willingham before his 2004 execution. In a 2014 interview, Hurst told me that the fire investigation in Garrett’s case had been “a typical piece of crap” — based on a rush to judgment by an expert who believed that he could tell whether a fire was arson based on his observations alone. Renowned fire scientist John Lentini also reviewed the case as part of Garrett’s appellate proceedings and reached the same conclusion. Garrett tried to argue that his trial lawyers had been deficient for failing to effectively challenge the state’s arson evidence. But his appeal was denied.

After I published my initial investigation in early 2015, additional experts came forward to review the case, including fire engineer Craig Beyler, who produced a report on behalf of an international group of fire scientists that called itself the Tetrahedron Committee. Along with an updated report authored by Lentini, Garrett presented the Tetrahedron findings to his trial court in 2017, arguing that the experts’ conclusions were based on newly discovered evidence and established his innocence. But the Tennessee attorney general’s office objected, saying that the motion reflected no new evidence but merely “newly written opinions.”  The court dismissed Garrett’s motion without a hearing.

With the legal avenues for challenging his conviction increasingly narrowed, Garrett went before the Tennessee Board of Parole in 2018, where he insisted on his innocence — a somewhat risky strategy given the imperative that applicants show remorse for their crimes. Despite a virtually spotless record behind bars and a vote in his favor by the board chair, Garrett’s bid was denied.

But that same year, a series of follow-up stories by The Intercept caught the attention of the Davidson County DA’s Office, which had recently launched the Conviction Review Unit. Although the CRU’s guidelines dictated that it would not consider applications “while any appeal, petition, or writ is pending in court” — which would have disqualified Garrett, who was pursuing a federal appeal — the unit also maintained the discretion “to review the case if it is in the interest of justice.” If there is compelling evidence of innocence, Assistant Attorney General Robert Jones told me in February 2019, “we’re not gonna sit here for years and wait for the case to go through the courts.”

That same month, the Tennessee Innocence Project launched in Nashville. Garrett would become one of its first clients. In August 2019, the organization’s executive director, Jessica Van Dyke, and federal public defender Michael Holley filed an application to the CRU on Garrett’s behalf. But it was not until Sunny Eaton took over in September 2020 that things started moving. A former defense attorney who had seen clients she believed to be innocent go to prison, Eaton told the Nashville Scene that she intended to bring a “sense of urgency” to the work. “When I get a case to investigate, we either quickly need to restore confidence in that conviction,” she said, “or we need to remedy it.”

Faulty, Outdated, and Unsubstantiated

In the 14 months since Eaton took over, the CRU has accomplished more than it did during its first several years. Garrett’s case is the second conviction the office has sought to overturn in November alone. Less than two weeks ago, the DA’s office asked a judge to vacate the tragic wrongful conviction of a Nashville couple, Joyce Watkins and Charlie Dunn, who were accused of raping and murdering a 4-year-old child in 1987. Watkins was granted parole in 2015, after 27 years in prison. Dunn died in prison that same year.

The convictions of Watkins and Dunn turned on the faulty forensic testimony of an expert who also played a key role in Garrett’s case: Dr. Gretel Harlan, the medical examiner who conducted the autopsy on Lance in 1992. Although Harlan did not find any evidence of injuries to support the theory that Garrett had forcibly locked Lance in the utility room before setting the fire, she did visit the fire scene alongside investigators, where she took photos of the latch on the door. The visit clearly shaped her analysis; at Garrett’s first trial, Harlan testified that burns found on various parts of Lance’s body could have been sustained inside the utility room at the back of the house, even though flames never reached the area. “Everyone is familiar with the process of sunburning,” Harlan said. “All the skin requires to sustain the burn is too long exposure in too high a heat.”

“Detectives relied so heavily on the fire investigation that they failed to perform basic investigative functions.”

Experts have repeatedly argued that this is ludicrous. But when I reached Harlan in 2014, she insisted that Lance “must have” gotten her burns inside the room since the door had been locked. The CRU report disagrees. It points to physical evidence that supports Garrett’s account that he and Lance ran past the living room toward the front door before Lance turned around. Garrett sustained burns on his face and left arm, which “were similar in location, depth, and intensity to those of Ms. Lance,” Eaton wrote. The CRU report echoes what Bayne has long argued: that the parallel burn patterns on Garrett and Lance show “that both bodies were in the same location, at the same point in time, facing the same intensity of heat exposure, from approximately the same distance to the heat source, for approximately the same duration.”

This exposure to intense heat would also help explain why Lance ran to the utility room. When I asked Hurst in 2014 why Lance would have run to the back of the house instead of following Claude out the front door, he explained that while she was almost certainly disoriented, people in a fire scenario will also do whatever they can to get away from smoke and flames. An enclosed room can provide protection from fire, he said, and for a time, it did. “If they had found her earlier, they might have saved her life,” he said.

Perhaps most important, the CRU report emphasizes that there was never any real evidence that the utility room was locked and Lance was trapped inside. Indeed, Garrett’s original 1993 conviction was overturned after he filed an open records request and received a police report that had been illegally withheld from his defense attorney. In the report, a Nashville police detective said he’d been told by the fire captain that the door had been found unlocked.

Eaton writes that “despite the enormous significance that was attached to the latch at trial,” investigators did not bother preserving or studying it. “Detectives relied so heavily on the fire investigation that they failed to perform basic investigative functions as they would have done in any other suspected homicide,” she wrote. Neither the door nor the latch was collected or analyzed even though, “according to the state’s theory, these were the murder weapons in this case.”

Experts have long pointed to the latch as critical. So has Garrett, who repeatedly constructed models of the latch while in prison. Because the locking mechanism relied on a latch that slid back and forth, its condition after the fire could have provided important clues. One photo from the scene, which Lentini included in his updated 2016 report, showed heavy smoke deposits on the edge of the door to the utility room — the part that would presumably have been shielded by the door frame had it been closed during the fire. These smoke deposits showed that the door “was not even closed” during the fire, let alone locked, Lentini wrote.

Smoke deposits showed that the door “was not even closed” during the fire, let alone locked.

The CRU report reinforces this conclusion. Among other experts, it cites the work of a fire scientist named Candace Ashby, who in 2019 conducted an experiment that recreated the conditions of the fire. “Based on the carbonization differences,” the report states, Ashby concluded that “the latch was in the unlocked position during the fire.”

Many of the CRU report’s 50 pages focus on the work of Cooper, the ATF special agent. Experts consulted by the CRU found his “investigation to be faulty, his methods outdated, and his conclusions unsubstantiated,” Eaton wrote. In addition to lacking any scientific basis, the CRU notes, “his testimony in the second trial was emotionally charged, filled with inflammatory overstatements, mischaracterizations of the evidence, and assumptions regarding Garrett’s intent.”

Cooper is retired and living in Alabama. Although he has repeatedly refused to consider the many expert reports debunking his work, he has repudiated at least some of what he said at Garrett’s original trial. When I visited him in 2018, I asked him about his statement that burns on Garrett’s face had likely been sustained when he leaned down to light kerosene in the living room. Transcripts from the trial show that Cooper had compared it to lighting a gas grill: “Sometimes it won’t ignite and you stick your head down there to see and you’ve got this open flame that comes back with a POOF!” he said. Experts later deemed this to be impossible — and to my surprise, Cooper agreed. “I would be crazy to say that,” he said.

Until the Door Opens

The CRU report was filed less than a week after Garrett turned 65. In a phone call on his birthday, Garrett said his neighbors were giving him Pepsis and candy bars — “Things I don’t need,” he chuckled. In the years I have known Garrett, he has strived to take care of his health, which is not easy behind bars. Last year, as the coronavirus swept through Riverbend prison, he got sick with Covid, but his symptoms remained mild.

For a long time, Garrett was understandably skeptical of the CRU. Why would the same office that twice sent him to prison exonerate him? But he has also been heartened by the increased public scrutiny of the original prosecutor in his case, former Davidson County Assistant Attorney General John Zimmerman, who concealed the exculpatory police report and has since faced multiple accusations of prosecutorial misconduct. In 2019, a Nashville judge vacated the death sentence of Abu-Ali Abdur’Rahman on the grounds that Zimmerman had discriminated against Black jurors. Despite repeated attempts by the Tennessee attorney general to block a plea deal in the case, Abdur’Rahman was finally removed from death row earlier this month.

In a phone call shortly after the CRU report was filed in court, Garrett expressed gratitude to those who have been willing to examine his case. “I’m thankful, I’m excited,” he said. But he’ll remain guarded “until the door opens.”

Garrett still faces a series of legal hurdles before he can be released.

Garrett’s caution is warranted: He still faces a series of legal hurdles before he can be released. The judge presiding over his case must be persuaded that the findings within the CRU report qualify as newly discovered evidence of innocence under Tennessee law, a claim the same court has previously rejected. Both the CRU report and a concurrent filing by Holley, Garrett’s federal public defender, and Van Dyke, of the Tennessee Innocence Project, argue extensively that the evidence provided by experts in Garrett’s case should count. Garrett’s attorneys cite five scientific developments since Garrett’s 2003 trial — including two studies from 2019, after Garrett’s last unsuccessful motion for relief — that were clearly unavailable to him at the time. “No court has reviewed these studies and developments. … Nor has any hearing been held where Mr. Garrett could present this new evidence.”

Although he has yet to read the CRU report for himself, Garrett has been aware of its general conclusions for some time. News of the DA’s decision in his case first leaked on November 2, after the CRU discussed its findings with Lance’s surviving relatives. In a statement to Nashville’s Channel 5 News, Lance’s family wrote that they were saddened by the decision and “wholeheartedly believe” in Garrett’s guilt. The family has long insisted that Garrett was an abuser who killed Lance after finding out that she planned to leave him.

Although it deeply bothers Garrett that Lance’s family remains convinced he is a murderer, he speaks about them with compassion. “They’ve been victims just as much as I have,” he said.

On Monday afternoon, Channel 5 ran a second news segment, this time outlining the CRU’s findings. Garrett watched it on TV, as did other men in his unit. “It kind of makes it more real,” he said in a phone call Tuesday morning. Later, Garrett planned to call his daughter, who is waiting to introduce him to his 4-year-old grandson. “She’s excited. And frustrated that it is taking so long. But you know, she’s thankful as well,” Garrett said. “Probably a bit like me. Cautious.”

Garrett’s daughter, Deana, now in her 30s, has shared links to stories on Facebook about her dad’s case. Although she always believed in his innocence, she has only recently become outspoken about his wrongful conviction. After news of the CRU report first leaked, she was dismayed to see some negative reactions — a reminder that some people would never believe her father was innocent. But she resolved not to pay attention. “I’ve ignored it for this long,” she said. “I guess a little while longer couldn’t hurt.”

The post Nashville DA’s Office Seeks to Vacate Claude Garrett’s 29-Year-Old Murder Conviction appeared first on The Intercept.

Garrett was convicted of setting a 1992 fire that killed his 24-year-old girlfriend Lorie Lance. Prosecutors said Garrett locked Lance in a utility room and poured kerosene throughout the house. For decades he’d proclaimed his innocence — and last November, the Davidson County District Attorney’s Office released a long-awaited report by its Conviction Review Unit, which had reinvestigated the case. It concluded that the state’s original arson theory was bogus. There was not a single reliable piece of evidence to show that Garrett had set the fire.

Garrett and his supporters had hoped he might be home for Christmas. But first a judge had to formally sign off on a motion to vacate his conviction. After months of delay — first a snowstorm, then a new presiding judge — lawyers for Garrett finally had a chance to present the evidence that his jurors had never heard. The DA’s office, meanwhile, had a chance to explain why the CRU findings supported Garrett’s bid for freedom. It was now up to fire scientist Greg Gorbett, the state’s sole witness, to drive home for Judge Monte Watkins why he should rule in Garrett’s favor.

Gorbett, 41, was far younger than the many of the veteran fire experts who previously examined the case. He came of age at a time when investigators were being forced to discard long-held myths used to identify arson and replace them with science. One such myth had been the lynchpin to Garrett’s conviction: a large irregular burn mark on the floor of the house, which investigators labeled a “pour pattern” — proof that an ignitable liquid had been used to set the fire. Today, such evidence is widely regarded as junk science. Burn patterns like these can actually be produced through a phenomenon called flashover, or the moment a fire in a room becomes a room on fire. For Gorbett’s generation of fire experts, cases like Garrett’s were a relic of another age. “They didn’t follow the scientific method — or even any real science we had in 1992,” Gorbett said.

Nashville prosecutor Sunny Eaton, the head of the CRU, walked Gorbett through the work of the state’s star witness at trial, Special Agent James Cooper of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Cooper claimed to be able to tell that a fire was arson through his visual observations alone — a hallmark of wrongful arson convictions. But he had also taken samples from various areas at the scene where he believed he might find kerosene. “What does he then do with those samples?” Eaton asked.

Gorbett’s face broke into a slightly pained smile. “He puts them together in a can,” he replied.

“In the same can?” Eaton asked. Yes, Gorbett said.

One didn’t have to be a fire scientist to see the problem. With the samples mixed together, there was no way to know where an ignitable liquid may have been present — a crucial factor in determining whether the fire was arson. “If there was an ignitable liquid, then he just cross-contaminated everything,” Gorbett explained.

This was hardly the most shocking revelation to date about the evidence that sent Garrett to prison. Experts have pointed to myriad blunders over the years: the fire marshal who smelled kerosene and immediately assumed it was arson; the failure by Cooper to interview firefighters or reconstruct the scene; and perhaps most stunning, the total lack of examination — or even decent photographs — of the door or latch that supposedly trapped Lance inside the utility room. This was the alleged “murder weapon,” Eaton told the judge. Yet police did nothing to preserve it.

If anything, the testimony about the contaminated samples added a layer of absurdity to a conviction that has been so thoroughly discredited, many in the courtroom wondered why Watkins wouldn’t just free Garrett on the spot. Instead, after closing statements, the judge said he would have a decision as soon as possible.

Garrett’s daughter Deana, who traveled hundreds of miles for the hearing, had hoped to walk out of court with her father that day. As she listened to the testimony about the botched fire investigation, she found herself getting angry. For all the high-level science brought to bear in debunking the case against Garrett, his conviction had largely come down to a basic mix of ineptitude and misconduct: a shoddy investigation, unqualified experts, and prosecutors who concealed key evidence from the defense. After Garrett’s original conviction was thrown out in 2001 following the discovery of a police report containing critical exculpatory information, the DA’s office simply retried him, winning a second conviction in 2003.

Deana planned to stay in Nashville, hoping every day for a ruling. But no one seemed to know when a decision would come down. Once again, the only thing to do was wait.

Myths and Misconceptions

I first met Claude Garrett in 2013. By then, his case had already been reviewed by two leading fire scientists who made clear that the evidence used to convict him was junk science. Another expert, East Tennessee fire investigator Stuart Bayne, who testified at Garrett’s retrial, had become his most passionate advocate, meeting with me multiple times to explain why the state’s theory of the fire was impossible.

Although additional experts came forward soon after The Intercept’s 2015 investigation into the case, there was no clear path to exoneration. When Garrett presented a new set of reports to his trial court in 2017, the Tennessee attorney general’s office objected, saying they reflected no new evidence but merely “newly written opinions.” The court dismissed Garrett’s motion without a hearing.

In 2018, Garrett went before the Tennessee Board of Parole, where he insisted on his innocence. Although the board chair voted in his favor, Garrett was ultimately denied parole. Later that year, however, The Intercept’s coverage caught the attention of the Davidson County DA’s office, which had recently launched the Conviction Review Unit. Then the Tennessee Innocence Project launched in Nashville, and Garrett became one of its first clients. In August 2019, Innocence Project lawyers and the state federal public defender’s office filed an application to the CRU on Garrett’s behalf. But it was not until Sunny Eaton took over in September 2020 that the reinvestigation made real progress.

The hearing took place on a rainy day in early April. The first person to address the court was Lance’s sister, Haley Smith. Although she was only a little girl when her sister died, she had become the family’s main spokesperson over the years. She had opposed Garrett’s release on parole, and she opposed his release now. But she also seemed resigned to the outcome of the DA’s investigation, which she described as biased in Garrett’s favor. Her voice shook as she held up a photograph of her sister for the judge, to “let you remember who the true victim in the case was.”

In her opening statement, Eaton described the CRU’s exhaustive review of the case. She emphasized that the DA’s office had not relied on Garrett’s expert witnesses but solicited independent reviews from their own experts. “The primary question before the state was always: What happened to Lorie Lance?” she said. But the DA’s duties to the victim also required that other questions be answered. “Does new scientific evidence exist that was unheard by a jury that would lead us as an office to lose confidence in Mr. Garrett’s conviction?” Next, if the DA’s office had known in 1993 or 2003 what it knows today, would it have indicted Garrett for murder? And finally, would a reasonable jury today convict Garrett today?

We may never know what happened to Lorie Lance, Eaton said, in part because the investigation into the fire was so flawed. But the CRU had reached a firm conclusion on the rest of the questions. New evidence “dismantles all evidence of Mr. Garrett’s guilt in this case.”

The first defense witness was famed fire scientist John Lentini, who first testified on Garrett’s behalf in 2010. To explain just how profoundly the field had evolved, Lentini gave a presentation on the history of fire investigation, starting with a video showing how a smoldering cigarette in a couch could quickly lead to a conflagration. The point was to demonstrate flashover, a critical factor in determining a fire’s origin and cause, Lentini explained. But at the time of the fire in Garrett’s case, investigators were not trained to understand the phenomenon.

“Before 1992, the fire investigation was riddled with myths and misconceptions,” Lentini explained. Although a landmark guidebook by the National Fire Protection Association was published the same year as the fire, many of the myths persisted through Garrett’s 2003 trial.

But Lentini also made clear that the investigation into the fire had been shockingly inadequate even for the loose standards in place at the time. He emphasized the significance of the utility room door. Confirming that Lance was locked inside the room should have been the most critical question from the start — the difference between a murder and an accident. Had investigators preserved the door and latch, they could have studied the smoke deposits left behind. In fact, the few photographs taken of the door showed soot on the part of the latch that would have been protected had it been in a closed position. It also showed burns on the side of the door, which suggested it had been open during the fire.

Yet at the retrial, Cooper, the ATF special agent, dismissed such evidence. “I don’t care about the carbon on that latch,” he said. To Lentini, this was shocking testimony. “There’s physical evidence fire investigators are supposed to be looking at,” he said. “He never looked at it.”

The next witness was Candace Ashby, a battalion commander at the Indianapolis Fire Department who runs a private fire investigation company. Ashby was hired to do an experiment in 2019 by a TV producer working on an episode about Garrett’s case. To investigate what smoke deposits might have shown if the evidence had been preserved in 1992, she got permission to do a live fire test at an empty warehouse outside Nashville. Two slide locks were placed onto wooden boards: one in an unlocked position and the other in a locked position. The boards were then exposed to intense heat and flames. Afterward, Ashby reported that the slide lock in the unlocked position “showed carbon build up had collected on the exposed bolt,” whereas the other bolt had no such build up, since it had been protected by the exterior of the lock.

The experiment supported what Lentini has long argued: that the door to the utility room was unlocked during the fire. But it also supported Ashby’s own experience as a firefighter. As she explained on the stand, it was very unlikely that a firefighter with limited vision, wearing thick gloves and heavy gear, could have manipulated such a small latch to get into the room where Lance was found. If anything, they would have kicked down the door. For Ashby, it was inconceivable that someone would have found Lance trapped inside the room and not immediately announced that the door was locked. “The first thing they would have done is tell everybody on that scene who would listen,” she said. “Because that’s really significant. And that was not done in this case.”

A Bittersweet Day

In a face mask and blue jeans, Garrett sat in handcuffs throughout the hearing. Friends and advocates had come to support him, some of whom he had not seen in years. But he restrained himself from waving hello. He considered the hearing a somber occasion. Lance had still lost her life. “And she’s been looked at as a murder victim,” he said in a phone call from prison afterward. “Her family’s been told that for 30 years.”

Garrett found himself getting emotional during the video played by Lentini, which brought back the trauma of the fire. “Thinking back about, you know, everything that was going on at that moment,” he said, “what Lorie was going through.” The hearing was also bittersweet for another reason: His mother had always hoped to see his freedom, but she died in 2020. Asked what he thought she would say now, Garrett responded, “I’m glad you guys finally caught up. I’ve always known that he wouldn’t do this — not that he didn’t, but that he wouldn’t.”

For Bayne, the fire investigator and advocate for Garrett, the hearing was a vindication of everything he had argued for decades. During one of their regularly scheduled phone calls, Bayne also picked up something different in Garrett, a sense that he was allowing himself to look toward the future. “The words he’s used over these years is ‘guardedly optimistic,’” Bayne said. He encouraged Garrett to stay that way until the decision came down. But Garrett sounded ready to leave prison behind. “He’s about to close a chapter — and really hoping that that page actually gets turned.”

The post Fire Scientists Testify in Support of Claude Garrett’s Bid for Freedom appeared first on The Intercept.

The order comes one month after an evidentiary hearing in Nashville in which leading fire experts testified that the case against Garrett was based on a rush to judgment, a shoddy investigation, and junk science. The hearing followed a reinvestigation of the case by the Davidson County District Attorney’s Office — spurred by The Intercept’s reporting — which concluded last year that it could no longer stand by its conviction. Lawyers from both the Tennessee Innocence Project and the DA’s Conviction Review Unit subsequently asked Watkins to vacate the conviction in light of new scientific evidence that dismantled the state’s original theory of the crime. “If the state had been armed with the information that we now have,” Conviction Review Unit Director Sunny Eaton told the judge, “we would not have indicted this case.”

Garrett, 65, has always insisted on his innocence. As he describes it, he woke up in the small home he shared with Lance on February 24, 1992, to a fire in the living room, then tried to escape with Lance. But rather than follow him out the front door, he said, she turned to the back of the house, where she was later found dead from smoke inhalation. Investigators became suspicious upon arriving at the home; they smelled kerosene, which the couple used to heat the house, and found a large, irregularly shaped burn pattern on the living room floor. At that time, fire investigators labeled such evidence “pour patterns,” believing them to be proof that a liquid accelerant had been used to start a fire. Today such indicators have been widely discredited as myths.

Prosecutors tried Garrett twice, arguing that he had locked Lance in a utility room in the back of the house and then used kerosene to start the fire. But the evidence was shaky at best. After Garrett uncovered a police report that had been concealed from his defense attorney at trial — which indicated that the utility room door had been unlocked — a court overturned his conviction. By the time prosecutors tried Garrett again in 2003, scientific advancements in understanding fire behavior should have discredited the central evidence against him. But the state’s star witness, veteran Special Agent James Cooper of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, insisted that he could tell through his visual observations alone that the fire was arson. The second jury also found Garrett guilty.

At the hearing in Nashville last month, fire experts made clear that Cooper’s claims were divorced from science and that the investigation into the alleged arson had failed to adhere even to the loose standards in place in 1992. Particularly egregious was the failure to preserve or even examine the door and latch that had supposedly trapped Lance in the utility room. Smoke deposits could have provided critical evidence to show the position of the door, the expert witnesses explained. Instead, Cooper had dismissed such vital evidence. In his order vacating Garrett’s conviction, Watkins noted that “every expert applying modern standards concludes that the latch was unlocked.”

At the heart of the judge’s order was what experts described as a “paradigm shift” between 1992 and modern-day fire investigation. Today’s fire investigators are trained to follow the scientific method in determining the origin and cause of a fire, gathering evidence to test a hypothesis before drawing any conclusions about whether a fire was arson.

Watkins was persuaded by expert testimony showing that “although the field had taken significant strides toward accepting the scientific method by the time of Garrett’s retrial in 2003,” Cooper had insisted upon discredited methodology, using the term “pour pattern” 34 times on the stand. What’s more, in the nearly 20 years since the retrial, additional research on fire behavior has continued to debunk the evidence used to convict Garrett. “Jurors at Mr. Garrett’s 2003 trial were not informed about any of these developments,” the judge wrote.

Ultimately, Watkins granted both claims brought by Garrett’s attorneys, both based on new scientific evidence: “a freestanding claim of actual innocence” and a claim that Garrett’s due process rights were violated under the Tennessee and federal constitutions. On the latter, Watkins found that Cooper’s expert testimony regarding the origin of the fire — the “pillar of proof” against Garrett — was “highly prejudicial.”

“To view any of the evidence as inculpatory requires speculation or rejection of scientific fact,” the judge wrote.

The finding of actual innocence, meanwhile, carries particular meaning for Garrett. Unlike an exoneration through DNA, in which scientific evidence reveals the real perpetrator of a crime, the failed investigation and destruction of evidence in 1992 means that the true source of the fire will remain unsolved. Although the Conviction Review Unit was unable to “uncover affirmative evidence conclusively establishing Garrett’s innocence,” Eaton wrote last fall, the case against Garrett was “nonexistent.” Watkins agreed. He found that the evidence supported an accidental fire scenario, even if the cause remained undetermined. If Garrett were tried today, the state “would have no reliable proof of guilt.”

For Garrett’s most dedicated advocate, veteran fire investigator Stuart Bayne, the order was a final step toward correcting a profound injustice. When he received the news Friday afternoon, Bayne called the prison chaplain at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Shortly afterward, the phone rang. When Bayne heard Garrett’s voice on the other line, he was singing from the Barry Manilow song “It’s a Miracle”: “Looks like we made it.”

The post Claude Garrett Sees Murder by Arson Conviction Overturned appeared first on The Intercept.

It was just after noon on May 10. Davidson County Criminal Court Judge Monte Watkins had vacated Garrett’s conviction the previous Friday. Someone speculated that the person with the paperwork must have gone on their lunch break. Another person joked that it was being transported via carrier pigeon. But nobody was really complaining. “It’s over and the best is yet to come,” someone wrote in the group text.

Garrett was used to waiting. It had taken about 28 years, after all, for the Davidson County District Attorney’s Office to make the decision to reinvestigate his case. When the DA’s Conviction Review Unit finally agreed with what Garrett had insisted all along — that he’d been wrongfully convicted of setting the fire that killed his girlfriend in 1992 — there was another round of waiting: first for an evidentiary hearing in which fire scientists explained why the case against Garrett had been fatally flawed, and finally for the judge to sign the order vacating his conviction.

Earlier that day Garrett had been transported downtown for one last court appearance, where Sunny Eaton, the director of the Conviction Review Unit, announced that the DA was dropping the charges against him. Garrett’s friends and family expected him to walk out of court, but they were told by his lawyers that he would be taken back to Riverbend first. The maximum-security prison sits less than 20 minutes from downtown Nashville, near a small airport on a mostly industrial stretch of road. Unsure when he might be released, a small group gathered first at a nearby gas station, then at a spot just outside the prison’s entrance.

In a baseball cap and sunglasses, Denny Griswold held a black umbrella over his wife to protect her from the sun. Griswold had met Garrett through the prison outreach ministry at his church 14 years earlier. Over time he had become a mentor to Garrett — and a firm believer in his innocence. Griswold came to court that morning with a change of clothes for him. Garrett had not asked for anything in particular. “He’ll look like an average old man,” Griswold said, smiling.

A few feet away, veteran fire investigator Stuart Bayne stood quietly, holding a book he’d been waiting to give to Garrett, which he’d asked everyone to inscribe. It was a memoir by the founder of a nonprofit organization that advocates for the wrongfully convicted. The title was enough to move Bayne to tears: “When the Truth Is All You Have.” From the moment he first studied the evidence as an expert witness for Garrett’s 2003 retrial, Bayne had been consumed by what was clearly a miscarriage of justice. For years he had been one of Garrett’s sole advocates; it was only relatively recently that a wave of leading fire scientists joined the cause.

In phone calls with Garrett, Bayne occasionally joked about showing up with champagne in the parking lot on the day of his release. Garrett reminded him that was contraband. But now Bayne was more contemplative than celebratory. At one point, Watson sent a photo of a large plastic box truck containing piles of paperwork her dad was taking home with him. “Wow,” Bayne said quietly. “That represents 30 years of his life. He kept everything. All our letters, all his appeals, all the stuff I’ve sent him. My goodness.”

It was just after 1:30 p.m. when Watson’s black SUV finally made its way down the hill from the prison. Seconds later, Garrett emerged from the passenger’s seat. “Who do I hug first?” he asked. A TV camera followed Bayne as he strode toward the car. Garrett approached the man who had been fighting to help him clear his name for more than 20 years. They shook hands and then broke into a hug. “Welcome to the free world,” Bayne said.

A World Transformed

Garrett’s release was the culmination of a long legal fight whose outcome would have been hard to foresee just a few years ago. In the decades he spent insisting upon his innocence, Garrett never fathomed that the same office that sent him to prison for life would eventually advocate for his release. Yet the statement from Eaton was clear: “Following an extensive collaborative investigation between the Nashville District Attorney’s Conviction Review Unit and the Tennessee Innocence Project, Claude Garrett has been exonerated for the wrongful conviction of the murder of Lorie Lance.”

Garrett was twice convicted of setting the fire that killed 24-year-old Lance in the small home they shared in Old Hickory, Tennessee. The couple had returned from a local bar in the early morning hours of February 24, 1992, when Garrett said he awoke to find a fire in the living room. According to Garrett, he woke up Lance and ran with her toward the front door, only for Lance to turn and run toward the rear of the house. Firefighters later found her in a utility room, dead from smoke inhalation.

Although neighbors initially described Garrett as frantic, investigators became suspicious upon smelling kerosene at the scene. The lead investigator, James Cooper — a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — seized on a so-called pour pattern on the living room floor as proof that an ignitable liquid had been used to start the fire. Perhaps most critically — and despite evidence to the contrary — Cooper also concluded that the utility room had been locked from the outside, trapping Lance.

Garrett’s case is one of countless convictions across the U.S. based on forensic evidence that has since been debunked. In the decades following Lance’s death, new developments in fire science transformed the techniques used to determine whether a fire was arson. But even as investigators have discarded the myths they once relied on in favor of the scientific method, prosecutors have been slow to revisit old convictions. This problem spans well beyond arson cases. Many DA’s offices continue to fight to preserve convictions even when the underlying evidence has been exposed as junk science.

Today the Davidson County DA’s office is an exception to that rule. Since Eaton took charge of the Conviction Review Unit in 2020, the office has ramped up its work. Last year it exonerated a Nashville couple accused of raping and murdering a 4-year-old child in 1987. That conviction was based on the faulty analysis of a medical examiner who also played a key role in Garrett’s conviction.

The decision to reinvestigate Garrett’s case was prompted largely by The Intercept’s coverage, dating back to 2015. Although a number of fire experts had concluded by then that the conviction was based on junk science, the first in-depth story revisiting the case attracted an additional cohort of fire scientists, who studied the evidence and released new reports debunking the state’s arson theory. While the courts initially dismissed this new evidence, a follow-up story in 2018 caught the attention of the DA’s office, which had recently launched the Conviction Review Unit.

Standing outside the prison after his release, Garrett thanked The Intercept and all who had drawn attention to his wrongful conviction. It was only recently that he had even allowed himself to think about a future beyond prison walls. For years, Bayne said, Garrett would say, “It’s too early to think about this. … It’s too early to plan these things. … I just gotta get the door open.” Now Garrett wanted to focus on making up for lost time with his daughter. Watson was only 4 years old when Garrett went to prison. She now had a son that same age. That afternoon Garrett spoke to his grandson via FaceTime — “one of the best parts of the day.”

Later that evening, Garrett sat next to Watson at a restaurant just north of downtown Nashville. He’d changed out of his prison blues and into the clothes Griswold gave him: a gray collared shirt and dark blue jeans. As Watson ordered appetizers, Garrett sampled a little bit of everything — truffle fries, crab-stuffed mushrooms — but declined an entrée. He was trying to pace himself, he explained. After leaving prison earlier that day, they had stopped for food at Chick-fil-A, where he’d gotten a sandwich. “I’ve still got half of it,” he said.

There was so much to navigate. Some things he had long anticipated, like learning to use a cellphone. But he hadn’t realized that everybody would be looking at their phones all the time. Then there were the things other people took for granted. At Griswold’s house earlier that day, where he spent his first few hours of freedom, there was a bowl of berries in the kitchen. He realized that he hadn’t seen a strawberry in 30 years.

One of the most overwhelming things was seeing the city of Nashville itself. In the decades he’d been in prison, the city had completely transformed. Garrett remembered a trip downtown for a hearing in the late 1990s. Turning off the highway toward the courthouse, “You could see all of downtown,” he said. “It occurred to me right then … ‘All of that is against you.’” Coming to the restaurant that evening, he realized that he was in the same spot, although one of the street names had changed. “I looked at it again, and I’m like, what the hell happened?”

Other changes were more painful. Garrett counted the number of friends and family who had died in the decades he’d been gone. It was more than 50 people. Among the few plans he had made was going to Kansas to visit his mother’s grave. Otherwise, he said, “I’m not gonna try to plan much. I’m gonna let it unfold as it goes.”

The post After 30 Years Insisting on His Innocence, Claude Garrett Is Free appeared first on The Intercept.

Waiting for him outside the prison alongside his daughter were lawyers with the Tennessee Innocence Project as well as Claude’s most devoted advocates: his pen pal-turned-mentor, Denny Griswold, and his loyal friend and staunch supporter, veteran fire investigator Stuart Bayne. There were hugs and handshakes and some brief words for the press. Then he got into Deana’s car and rode away.

Claude spent the next few months making up for lost time. He swam in the ocean on Father’s Day and played basketball on the Fourth of July. He stared at the stars with Deana and wrestled and took selfies with his grandson. He went to church with Denny, whose prison ministry first brought them together. And he visited the grave of his mother, Betty, who had always hoped to see him exonerated.

Claude also got good at texting. He sent memes and funny messages and inspirational quotes. “Surround yourself with people who push you to do and be better,” read one he sent me last summer. “No drama and negativity. Just higher goals and higher motivation.”

I first met Claude at Riverbend while working on a piece about his case. Published in 2015, my investigation told the story of how he had been sent to prison for life for the murder of his girlfriend, Lorie Lance, who died in a fire in the couple’s home outside Nashville in 1992. His conviction was rooted in junk science — evidence once believed to indicate arson that had since been debunked. Eventually my coverage caught the attention of the local district attorney, whose conviction review unit reinvestigated the case. By the time Claude walked out of prison, we had been talking for nine years. But in many ways, I was only just starting to know him.

Early one morning in mid-September, Claude called out of the blue and asked if I wanted to meet for coffee. A couple of hours later, we were on the patio of a cafe downtown. It was a beautiful, clear day. One of Nashville’s major music events, AMERICANAFEST, was underway, and the place was packed. But Claude didn’t mind. He was taking it in, enjoying the scene. “Everybody’s out, moving around, enjoying life,” he said.

Claude had tried to keep a low profile after his release. He’d gone to North Carolina, where Deana lived, and had only recently moved with her family to Clarksville, northwest of Nashville. Deana, who ran a real estate agency, set him up in a rental property. He got a used car and a job doing plumbing and electric work — labor he’d done in prison for years. And he tried to help Deana when she needed it. She loved Halloween and started decorating well in advance. So that morning he’d gone to a Halloween store. He smiled mischievously revealing his costume for Deana’s upcoming party. “I want to go as a cop,” he said.

In early October, Garrett texted to say that the Tennessee Innocence Project was holding its annual fundraising gala. It seemed like an exciting opportunity to celebrate his release. But in truth, he was ambivalent about attending. For years he’d told people, “I don’t want to be anyone’s pet convict.” As proud as he was of his exoneration, he did not want to be defined by it.

In the end, he decided to go anyway. He took his friend Norman, whom he’d met in prison, as his guest. At the table alongside exonerees, Norman felt a little out of place (“I was the only one who was guilty”), but they had a good time. At one point the two accidentally locked themselves out of the enormous Music City Center and had to walk around the building. Norman, a lifelong smoker, was huffing and puffing. Claude teased him, asking, “Are you sure you’re going to make it?”

Three days later, on October 30, I was in my car getting ready to drive back to Nashville from New York when I got another text message. It came from Stuart’s wife, Gigi. Deana had called. “Claude passed away last night,” she said. He’d gone to the Halloween party and had a great time. Then he fell asleep and never woke up.

Just Starting Over

In many ways, Claude was luckier than most people who leave prison after decades. He had a job. He had a place to live. And he had the support of family and friends. “If every person that was released had the same opportunities that I had when I walked out that door, the recidivism rate would be 0.0 something,” Claude told me. Most of the time, “nobody is standing at the door to welcome them home and say, ‘Hey man, come with me, I’m gonna take care of you.’”

But even the best of circumstances couldn’t make up for the impact of incarceration. At 65, Claude carried untold physical and psychological trauma. Studies have long shown that prison ages people prematurely. For people who spend decades in prison under a wrongful conviction, the stress does not go simply go away after release. According to the Innocence Project, “Many suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, institutionalization, and depression.”

Claude spent his first 30 days of freedom acutely aware that the Tennessee attorney general could appeal the decision to vacate his conviction. He went out of his way not to say anything publicly that could make him a target of backlash, especially about state authorities. When I told him I was struck by the fact that he had eaten his first strawberry in 30 years, he said he didn’t want to be quoted criticizing the Department of Correction for not providing fresh fruit. “That’s part of the system,” he said. “And that can be interpreted in many ways.”

A lot of stress seemed to dissipate after the state’s deadline to appeal passed. “All agree that it is officially official,” he texted me on June 11. “Free at last!” Yet the challenge of navigating his new surroundings was only beginning. On his first morning after leaving prison, he woke up before 4 a.m. and went to the garage to work out, only to set off the home security system. The next night, he was jolted out of bed by the sound of the ice machine. The house was just so quiet. He had not experienced that level of silence in 30 years.

Claude and Deana laughed about these things at the time. They told me about a failed first attempt to get a cellphone; Claude got fed up at the Verizon store after seeing a man appear to cut the line. “He said, ‘Shit, I’ll stop at a payphone,’” Deana said. “And I’m like, ‘No you won’t, they don’t work! They don’t exist!’” It didn’t dawn on Claude until later that the man probably had an appointment. He didn’t know it worked that way. There were a lot of situations like that. There should be lessons for people leaving prison, Claude told me. “A dinosaur like me? No idea.”

In retrospect, there were signs that Claude was struggling more than he let on. He was staying home at lot, he told me in September. “I still don’t feel comfortable getting out by myself.” If something bad were to occur in a place he happened to be, “Somebody’s going to say, ‘Well, he was here.’” And he avoided any potential run-ins with police, even if it meant driving 55 miles an hour on the highway. A lot of drivers are “just nuts,” he said, before conceding that the same could be said about him. “I’m not kicking dirt on them without getting dirt on me. Because sometimes I’m nuts too.”

He did have something motivating him: a new legal fight that he wasn’t ready to discuss publicly. He’d consulted with an attorney who planned to help him win compensation. In Tennessee, a person who is wrongfully convicted must be formally exonerated by the governor before they are eligible to receive money from the state. There was no way Gov. Bill Lee would do that in 2022 — an election year, Claude said. But this was his next big goal. It wasn’t just about the money, although “I do believe that they owe me.” They also owed Deana, who was 5 years old when he went to prison. By taking her father away for so long, “her life was stolen too.”

Otherwise, Claude was taking things one day at a time. He was thinking of getting a motorcycle and a dog; maybe chickens his grandson could chase in the backyard. And he was trying to stay healthy, just like he’d done in prison. The day before we met for coffee, he’d toured a Planet Fitness. He liked that it was open 24 hours (he was still getting up before 4 a.m.). But he hadn’t signed up yet. When he told the gym employee that he didn’t have a bank card, “he looked at me like I was an alien,” Claude said. “And I just told him, ‘Look man, I was in prison for 30 years for something I didn’t do. … I’m just starting over.’”

Only So Much Time

Claude’s memorial service was held on November 5 in Springfield, Tennessee. There were colorful index cards at the funeral home for people to share memories of Claude, “aka Shorty,” as he was nicknamed when he was younger. In lieu of flowers, Deana asked guests to consider donating to the Tennessee Innocence Project.

The funeral was packed. Country music ballads opened and closed the service (“Even Though I’m Leaving” by Luke Combs and “You Should Be Here” by Cole Swindell). Deana thanked everyone who had worked to exonerate her father. “You gave a man his life back,” she said. Members of Claude’s family in Kansas spoke; a nephew who had sent Claude a typewriter recalled how he typed all his letters despite having “amazing penmanship.” A cousin who had fought with Claude as a kid remembered the beautiful cards he mailed to her while she was being treated for cancer.

A month after Claude’s funeral, I visited Norman at the halfway house where he lives and works. There was a Christmas tree in the living room, a reminder of the holidays Claude did not get to see as a free man. For a long time while Claude was in prison, Norman planned to save a room for him there. He showed me some letters and leatherwork Claude had sent him over the years. Deana had also given him a bunch of Claude’s clothes, which were piled in his bedroom. “People come in here and don’t have nothing,” he said.

Norman was distraught by Claude’s death. The two had been trusted friends on the inside and outside. He was one of the few people in Claude’s life who understood how destabilizing it could be to leave prison and find the world around you changed. “You don’t see that when you’re in there. You think everything is just the same.” Norman remembered feeling completely overwhelmed. He didn’t want to go back, but “I didn’t feel like I belonged out here either.”

He was still grasping for explanations. He imagined that being wrongfully incarcerated would compound the stress of living behind bars. “You’re in a place you shouldn’t be. And you’re in there 24 hours a day thinking about it, trying to get out. I mean, he fought every day for 29 and a half years. So I imagine it did take a toll on him, some way or another.”

There was no such thing as preventative medical care in prison, Norman said. Norman, who is about two years younger than Claude, didn’t know he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease until he’d been out for two years. Today he sees a primary care doctor and lung specialist and gets regular blood tests. In prison, “unless somebody stabs you, you ain’t gonna get no blood test.”

A few days later, I went to see Stuart Bayne, the fire investigator, at his home in East Tennessee. He showed me his office, where he’d worked for so many years on Claude’s case. Since 2001, when he was hired as the expert witness for Claude’s retrial, Stuart had firmly believed in his innocence. After Claude was convicted again, Stuart became consumed with correcting what he saw as a profound miscarriage of justice. It had been his life’s mission ever since.

Like everyone who was still processing Claude’s death, Stuart was stricken by the unfairness of it all. Claude had been so patient — so hardworking and focused. He believed he would live another 20 years. “I haven’t told my poker group yet,” Stuart confessed. Claude was supposed to join one of their game nights. But he took comfort in the fact that Claude had gotten to come over for a home-cooked meal. Over years of phone conversations while Claude was in prison, “he wanted to know everything Gigi was making whenever he called.”

Stuart had no recollection of the moment he’d learned of Claude’s death. It was such a shock, his wife told me. Stuart could not grasp what Deana was saying until Gigi told him, “Honey, she’s talking about Claude.” They got the news while at a fire investigators conference in Alabama, where Stuart was supposed to speak about Claude’s case. Somehow, he moved forward with the presentation, deciding to close by revealing what had happened: a reminder that “we only have so much time we get in this here world and we better use it as best we can.”

A Chance to Grieve

In early January, I went to see Deana at her home in Clarksville. In the years I knew Claude, he never wanted me to include her in my articles. He wanted to protect her. But she had come to believe that families like hers needed to share their stories. His wrongful conviction had shaped her too. And as much as Claude wanted to move on with his life after prison, she told him, “If you don’t tell this story, nothing changes.”

Deana had given me a photo album that told the story of Claude’s last five months, from his first breath of fresh air outside Riverbend to the Halloween party. When he walked in wearing his police costume that night, “people were rolling laughing,” she said. He was still wearing it when she found him the next morning.

Deana was trying not to dwell on questions she couldn’t answer. The autopsy results had not come back yet. “I have not let myself think about this very much,” she said. But Claude’s family had a history of heart problems. When Deana went to clean out his house, she found blood pressure medication he’d brought from Riverbend that had not been refilled. She remembered him saying that he could not go to the doctor until his insurance kicked in, which would have been November 1, just two days after he died.

The thought that Claude had left prison only to find himself without the medication he needed felt like too cruel an irony. But Deana also knew that his death was not the result of any one thing. On his last night alive, he’d been “the life of the party,” talking to everyone and making s’mores with the kids, although he was wary of fires. She reiterated what she said at the funeral: He was the happiest he’d ever been.

Still, things had not been perfect. Helping Deana with her Halloween decorations, which included a pair of 12-foot skeletons, he protested in jest. “He’s like, ‘This is a sickness. … Did I do something wrong in your childhood?’” she laughed. “And I’m like, ‘I mean, you did go to prison.’” By October, they had begun arguing in earnest. Deana could see his anger and trauma surfacing in ways that were hard to comprehend. One day he said, “I can’t believe no one is talking about Lorie.” Deana realized he had only just started processing her death. He insisted on visiting her grave the day after he left prison, searching frantically to find it. When he did, he stood there for a long time. In all the decades he spent fighting, he never had a chance to grieve.

The findings didn’t bring much closure. Deana found more comfort in letters she’d sent him in prison, which she found at his house. She had written them in her early 20s, while trying to forge a relationship with a father she’d never really known. At that time, she could not have imagined all the things she would eventually do with him. If he ever got out, she wrote, she wanted to go to the beach with him. She just wanted to talk and have quality time. “I think that’s what I’m missing the most.”

The post Claude Garrett Was Wrongfully Imprisoned for Decades. He Died After Five Months of Freedom. appeared first on The Intercept.