More than just a detective story, Burned is a tale of injustice that will leave you questioning our criminal justice system and the supposedly irrefutable forensics that have served as its bedrock for the last several decades.
On an April night in 1989, three young children perished in a tragic Los Angeles house fire. Their mother, Jo Ann Parks, couldn''t save them but did manage to escape with her own life. She was of course bereft. With emotions exploding, her husband accused her of abandoning the children when he arrived at the scene of the fire. It was soon determined that a worn extension cord was the cause of the tragedy. But then doubts arose. As firefighters investigated further, they came to believe that the fire was the result of arson; a heinous crime committed by a wicked young woman who, they argued, had never really wanted to be a mother. Jo Ann Parks was tried and convicted and has languished in prison for the last twenty-five years. But now, as certain investigative methods from that era have been debunked, a pair of young lawyers from the Innocence Project have come to believe that Jo Ann was wrongfully convicted, and that the fire might not have been caused by arson at all.
No one has been imprisoned as a result of bad fire science longer than Jo Ann. Humes calls her "Patient Zero" in an epidemic of convictions throughout the nineties based on fake science. Tens of thousands of cases . . . If her conviction is overturned, all those convictions are at risk as well. The stakes could hardly be higher.
