by Edward Humes
Most, at least at first, found it easier to dispute rather than embrace the new guidelines, calling them misguided and mistaken. Some argued that they were the handiwork of the defense bar trying to get guilty people off the hook and out of jail. Others saw in the new guidelines the well-meaning naiveté of eggheads in spotless lab coats who practiced science in clean laboratories, but who lacked practical experience with the dirty business of crawling through ravaged, ash-filled fire scenes in search of truth.
One of the leading law-enforcement arson investigators in Los Angeles testified in April 1992 about his colleagues’ unfavorable attitude toward the then-new NFPA 921. He dismissed the National Fire Protection Association, which produced the guidelines, as a group primarily interested in promoting better sprinkler and fire-door designs. And he opined that the group’s investigation guidelines conflicted with techniques embraced by most arson investigators “worth their salt.”
That leading investigator was Ron Ablott of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Arson/Explosives Detail—the principal fire investigator in the Jo Ann Parks case.
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Two days after the Oakland firestorm, a pair of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s homicide detectives flew to St. Louis. There had been no major breakthrough in the Parks case, just a slow accumulation of information and one surprising twist: It was conclusively shown that the wires in the living room said to have been sabotaged and turned into a time-delayed incendiary device had not started the fire. Ron Parks, it seemed, was off the hook. If it was arson, then the fire had to have been set by whoever was home at the time. The prime suspect shifted then from husband to wife. The gung-ho prosecutor assigned to the case filed charges two and a half years after the fire. He would later describe Jo Ann Parks as one of the most evil defendants in Los Angeles history.
She was, the prosecutor proclaimed, a monster unlike any he had ever pursued before.
The two detectives drove in a rental car from the airport and, with local police backup, walked into the Lake St. Charles Retirement Community. Jo Ann Parks had worked there for several months as patient coordinator for this small assisted-living facility for elderly Christian Scientists. She had been hired away from a local nursing home where she and Ron had worked together. The new job required her to be on call at all times, so one of the benefits was a furnished, rent-free apartment on the retirement community’s parklike grounds.
Jo Ann would later recall this apartment was one of the most pleasant dwellings she and Ron had ever shared. Not only was it comfortable, it also allowed the couple to bank their rent money toward purchasing their first house. Just the day before, they had made an offer on a ranch-style house with plenty of land and room for all the many pets Jo Ann craved. The years of rootlessness and constant moves from one hovel to another seemed finally to be behind them.
On the job, the woman police believed to have been a slovenly, neglectful, and ultimately murderous mother appeared to show a different personality at the retirement home, seemingly patient and gentle with the aged residents there. She helped the residents dress and bathe, she walked them to church services, and she escorted them to beautician and haircut appointments so they would look their best when family came to visit, her supervisor would recall.
Jo Ann Parks seemed to have no idea that the fire investigation in Bell remained open, that she and her husband remained murder suspects, or that this apartment she so loved could end up being her last home without bars.
The homicide detectives did not call ahead. There was no warning. When they approached Jo Ann Parks in the retirement home lobby holding an arrest warrant and handcuffs, she stared at them for one frozen moment, then collapsed and began to wail.
The warrant—naming only her, not her husband—accused her of arson and three counts of first-degree murder. The charging language included the term special circumstances—the phrase required under California law when prosecutors seek the death penalty.
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One year later a tale of sabotage, arson, and a child locked screaming in a burning closet persuaded twelve jurors to convict Jo Ann Parks of capital murder. She never spoke to police after her arrest, nor did she testify in her own defense at her trial. And so the jurors gave prosecutors everything they asked for but one thing: They voted no to the death penalty.
In a somewhat contradictory resolution, the jurors concluded a monstrous crime indeed had been committed, but that Parks was not so monstrous herself.
This compromise left the judge only one option for sentencing under California law: life in prison without possibility of parole. Times three.
For twenty-six years, more than half her lifetime, Parks remained behind bars, consigned to an institutionalized life, stripped of family and hope, branded a child killer by other inmates who were not interested in her protestations of innocence. Eventually she stopped offering them, resigned to a life behind walls, expecting she’d age and die there.
Then, as she began her twenty-seventh year in prison, a letter arrived from something called the California Innocence Project, offering both a chance at redemption and a prod to resurrect the most painful memories of her life, buried by then for more than a quarter century. She barely dared to believe it was possible: Somebody out there not only wanted to get her out of prison. They wanted to prove she had been convicted of a crime that never happened.
PART TWO
STIRRING THE ASHES
8
The Pit
There is a room on the ground floor of the California Western School of Law in downtown San Diego sometimes known as “the Pit.” The size of the average apartment living room, the Pit can feel cramped, hot, crowded, and loud. The walls are lined with computer stations and desks covered with stacks of legal papers and correspondence, everything in a constant state of churn. On the floor in the room’s center sit six laundry-basket-sized US Postal Service mail cartons spilling over with envelopes of every shape and thickness. The Pit more closely resembles a direct-mail boiler room than what it actually is: a critical part of a most unusual law office.
Somewhere in those boxes of mail, buried inside layers of legalese or handwritten rants, there is the story of an innocent woman or man languishing in prison, a cold closed case waiting to be teased into the light and reopened. The Pit is one of the few places in the country where this has an actual chance of happening. It is the gateway to representation by the California Innocence Project, part of a nationwide web of similarly minded nonprofit operations, neither the largest nor the smallest, dedicated to freeing people from unjust imprisonment. And as it prepared to take on Jo Ann Parks’s case, the California Innocence Project had been on a roll, having freed twenty-eight men and women from wrongful convictions for murder, rape, and other serious cases across the past decade.
Project interns and volunteers find many of those cases by digging through the six postal boxes, which hold the weekly mail from defense lawyers, mothers, fathers, spouses, friends, and convicts begging for a champion to prove someone’s innocence. As fast as they can be emptied, a new batch arrives to fill the mailboxes anew.
A cursory review by the volunteers in the Pit weeds out the cases that have no chance of success, which means most of this sad, mad influx—two to three thousand a year—never gets past the boiler room stage. These are the letters that reveal cases with exhausted appeals, or convictions supported by overwhelming evidence of guilt, or that are merely angry diatribes about the real, perceived, and fanciful corruption within the legal system. Many letter writers fume about some legitimate but minute contradiction in the evidence against them in an otherwise solid prosecution, not understanding that the flaw or lie or inconsistency they have spotted has to be so huge that, if corrected, it likely would change a jury’s decision from guilty to not guilty. This is a hurdle only a very few can clear. Other convict correspondents will actually admit the
y are guilty but that they’d appreciate the change of scenery and relief from routine a court hearing would provide. Desperation, loneliness, and boredom, rather than sincere pleas of innocence, motivate many of these letter writers. While such qualities may be grounds for sympathy, they do not make for successful appeals.
The hardest entries in the slush pile are the anguish-laden letters from parents attacking the evidence against their children, the facts no parent can bear to accept about a son or daughter, the witnesses that surely must be lying, the DNA evidence that can’t possibly be correct. These letters often consist of painstakingly long handwritten recitations of the perfidy of the authorities and their twisting of the facts of the case, all highly colored by the blindness only love and grief can sustain. These are the most heartbreaking letters to reject. But sorrow, no matter how profound, will not open a prison cell door, either.
The mail that remains after this basic weeding of the pile moves on to progressively more detailed layers of review until the tidal wave is reduced to a slim stack of possible clients worthy of being more deeply researched.
“She trusted the legal system,” read one typical letter that survived this stage. “She had always respected authority . . . But once the local authorities began looking for a crime, all objectivity was lost—that their theories were adjusted to suit their mind-set was immaterial, as long as they ‘had their man.’”
The letter was fairly typical in its claim of an innocent person betrayed by an official rush to judgment. But it was highly unusual in another respect: It came not from a convict or a family member, but from a forensics expert who had testified for the defense in a murder case. He had been devastated when a guilty verdict was returned, and he had devoted his own time and money to try to help. His analysis of the case and the proof of innocence he had offered at trial should have been enough to win the case, he complained, but he had been undermined by what he felt certain had been poor lawyering by the defense and overzealousness by the prosecution. Instead of providing decisive testimony, he wrote, he became “nothing more than window dressing going through the motions.”
This was interesting—as much for the source of the correspondence as for the information it contained. The letter writer was a twenty-five-year veteran of the Los Angeles Fire Department who had spent his career catching arsonists, not setting them free, which gave him a level of credibility that was quite rare among the stacks of letters that flood the Pit. And so it was, way back in 2001, that a letter about the People of the State of California v. Jo Ann Parks survived the initial cut at the California Innocence Project.
At this stage, law students and interns gather background information for each remaining letter. Those that aren’t winnowed out after that level of scrutiny are then presented at a roundtable meeting with the staff attorneys—there are seven at the California Innocence Project—where the merits and flaws in each case are discussed. And out of those, a rare few, twenty to twenty-five cases a year, survive to be assigned for a full legal and investigative review. The review determines which of the remaining cases, if any, are suitable candidates for filing the innocence project’s primary legal tool, the habeas corpus petition, based on an ancient legal principle that has shielded individuals from government overreach since the days of William Penn. Each habeas petition absorbs a significant chunk of the project’s finite resources, so choosing well is critical.
These final calls can be agonizing because it’s just not enough to find evidence that a potential client is innocent. Contrary to public perception, the courts do not generally recognize even overwhelming evidence of innocence as a valid reason to open the cell door for someone after a guilty verdict has been rendered. There also must be legal proof that the accused did not get a fair trial leading up to a guilty verdict. The two ideas—Are they innocent? and Did they get a fair trial?—can overlap, but they are not one and the same. As the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia repeatedly pointed out—approvingly—the US Constitution does not forbid the execution of an innocent man so long as he received a fair trial first.
Jo Ann Parks ran this review gauntlet not once but three times.
The project rejected the case that first time in 2001: The legal and scientific hurdles and prevailing beliefs about fire behavior appeared to make a successful outcome unlikely, the reviewers decided.
A decade passed before the project attorneys decided to take a fresh look. Several high-profile arson convictions had been overturned around the country because fire experts in those cases had used outdated and unproven methods, finding evidence of arson where none existed. John Lentini was involved in several of those exonerations. Working with other fire experts, he had started an arson review committee to examine cases for free. The first such report maintained that the State of Texas executed an innocent man, Cameron Todd Willingham, in 2004, due to flawed science and arson myths. A state commission agreed that the arson case against Willingham could not be supported, sparking reforms by the state fire marshal’s office, though too late to stave off the execution. In 2012, Lentini’s committee reached a similar conclusion about the Parks case and provided a free report to the innocence project that stated, “The evidence was tainted by the fire investigators’ failure to understand the behavior of fire, and on unfounded beliefs about their ability to interpret post-fire artifacts. . . . But once the state’s investigators committed to an incendiary classification, even the changing of the most important details did not persuade them to change their determination.”
This time the Parks case made it to the final stage of review, but once again was rejected—based on a matter of law, not fact. For Jo Ann Parks to win her freedom, she would have to prove the evidence against her was false. But California at that time had one of the toughest legal standards in the country when it came to challenging the veracity of expert witnesses. In other states, Parks might have had a good case, the project lawyers decided. But in California, she had no chance. The law stated that expert opinions—about how a fire started, whether a footprint or a bite mark matched a murderer, or anything else—could not be considered false evidence, because opinions can be neither right nor wrong. Only facts could be true or false. And so Parks was out of luck.
But then in 2015, the Parks case came up for review once more, likely for the last time. Changes in the law, sparked by a provably innocent man who had no legal recourse under California’s strict rules on challenging expert testimony, had opened a door for Jo Ann Parks to challenge her imprisonment at last. The state legislature decided expert opinions could be false evidence after all. Suddenly Parks had facts and the law to work with. The innocence project staff voted to take on her case.
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• • •
The file landed in the tiny office shared by attorneys Raquel Cohen and Alissa Bjerkhoel. The young lawyers were ebullient from just winning the freedom of a man who had spent sixteen years in prison because of a mistaken eyewitness—a case that had taken years to resolve, even after it was clear to everyone their client had been blamed for someone else’s crimes. Now it was time to find the next case.
Bjerkhoel was already diving into the conviction of a San Diego day-care center owner convicted of shaking a baby to death—with the government relying on scientific evidence against the woman that had since been rejected by the medical community as unreliable.
So the Parks case came to Raquel Cohen. She cracked open the file and leaned forward in her chair, trying and failing to get comfortable. At thirty-two, she was almost three months pregnant with her second baby, just far enough along to make getting her compact form settled at her desk more awkward than effortless. Normally this would be her cue to joke and complain about “the bump,” as she referred to her unborn daughter. But this time the case file absorbed her attention and rendered her discomfort forgotten in mid-punchline.
There is a right way and a wrong way to read a case file, Cohen knows. She is prac
ticed at this: You never read it cover to cover like a book, at least not at first, because legal files are never organized in narrative fashion. They are organized by the date on which pleadings were filed, which means the story is out of order, the snore-inducing minutiae mixed up with the momentous. Instead, you look for and begin with the highlights. She saw there had been an appeal right after the conviction—standard procedure in a capital case—and although it had been summarily denied without a hearing, the appellate document had an excellent summary of the facts and disputes in the case. Good ones read like a movie plot treatment, and this one was a good one. Perfect, Cohen thought.
Unsurprisingly, the trial defense had been in part that the fire was accidental, with the likeliest starting point identified as an old television set with a frayed and patched cord that Ron Parks had bought at a swap meet. It had been gathering dust in storage for months before the move to Sherman Way, and had been set up in the area where the prosecution claims the fire started: in front of the windows and inches from the drapes. The defense argued that law enforcement had destroyed the TV without properly examining it, justifying this by claiming—apparently incorrectly—that it was of no value because it had stood too far from where they believed the fire started. To the police, the TV was a distraction, unworthy of consideration as a fire cause. To Cohen, it was potential ammunition.
Other evidence had been destroyed, too, Cohen saw, even the closet door in Ronnie’s room, making it difficult if not impossible to determine conclusively if it was open, closed, or barricaded during the fire. The authorities also repeatedly changed their theory about how the fire started, it seemed. Opposing lawyers love missing evidence and inconsistency on key points. Such issues can make their opponents’ case seem weak, opportunistic, and untrustworthy.