Philadelphia fire investigators had no scientific basis to conclude that a 1985 rowhouse fire in Oxford Circle was arson, a defense expert testified about the blaze that killed two boys and sent their father to death row for their murder.
Nationally known fire consultant John Lentini said that when he heard that a city fire marshal, and then a second, had identified three separate points of origin for the fire, "I said, 'He must be magic, because it can't be done.' "
The fire, he said Tuesday in Common Pleas Court, could have started from a smoldering cigarette.
Lentini, head of Scientific Fire Analysis L.L.C. in Florida, testified on behalf of Daniel Dougherty, who has been imprisoned for 16 years after being convicted in 2000 of burning the home. Dougherty insists that he's innocent in the deaths of 3-year-old John and 4-year-old Daniel Jr., and that he's a victim of now-discredited ideas about how fires act, grow, and travel.
The prosecution in Dougherty's court-ordered retrial has relied on the 1985 findings of Assistant Fire Marshal John Quinn, and on this week's support of those findings by consultant and former fire marshal Thomas Schneiders.
Lentini, who has helped write national standards and texts for fire investigation, said they got it wrong. Since the 1990s, investigators have been lighting test fires - such as could be started by a dropped cigarette - that duplicate the type of damage and burn patterns found in the Carver Street home, he said.