Michelle Taylor sat at the defense table during her sentencing hearing in St. Augustine, Florida, listening to a trio of forensic chemists lay out the scientific evidence to prove what she’d sworn for years: She had not set the fire that burned down her house and killed her own son.

It was the last Friday in May, and the St. Johns County courthouse was mostly empty.

The expert witnesses each testified via Zoom, their faces appearing on a pair of large monitors inside the wood-paneled courtroom. None of the experts knew Taylor personally. But they knew chemistry. And each made clear that the case against Taylor had been based on junk science: faulty analysis by a state lab worker who detected gasoline in fire debris samples where there was none.

The testimony was vindicating for Taylor. But it also came too late to prevent what she insisted was a wrongful conviction. More than six years after the fire, she had reluctantly accepted a plea deal at the urging of her defense attorney. It allowed her to maintain her innocence — and avoid a mandatory life sentence had she gone to trial and lost. But it had not cleared her name. Now Taylor hoped the hearing might.

Taylor’s home caught fire on the night of October 23, 2018. She and her 18-year-old daughter Bailey escaped through a window. But her 11-year-old son David went back for the family dog and died. Investigators became immediately suspicious of Taylor after a dog trained to detect accelerants alerted in several spots throughout the home. At the state fire marshal lab outside Tallahassee, fire debris analyst Dee Ann Turner examined samples collected from the scene and repeatedly found gasoline, a telltale sign of arson.

But Turner was disastrously wrong, the witnesses said. According to the experts, she had misidentified gasoline in 12 different samples taken from Taylor’s home. The samples were “very clearly not gasoline,” testified John Lentini, a renowned fire scientist who first reviewed the data and submitted his findings in a defense report in January 2024. Turner’s erroneous analysis had gone undetected for so long because investigators had little reason to suspect such sweeping mistakes — “nor did they have the expertise to question it,” he testified.

The faulty forensics became the basis for the entire case against Taylor, Lentini said. “Every time another possibility was considered, the [lead investigator] said, ‘Yeah but we’ve got gasoline here.’”

Prosecutors had long known that their forensic evidence was fatally flawed. Lentini’s report had been reviewed by a pair of chemists with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who agreed that the data did not show gasoline. Yet Seventh Judicial Circuit State Attorney R.J. Larizza had refused to drop the charges against Taylor, instead seizing on financial improprieties in her bank records as proof that she committed arson for profit. Taylor and her husband were behind in their mortgage at the time of the fire. Despite having money to pay for it, there was evidence that Taylor had defrauded area churches to cover the payments instead.

Such circumstantial evidence did not prove anything on its own. But Taylor’s attorney, John Rockwell, worried it may be enough for a jury to convict his client anyway. He worked out a plea deal with prosecutors, who agreed to drop the arson charge if Taylor pleaded no contest to manslaughter. Rockwell, a former prosecutor, began to prepare for the sentencing hearing the way he would for a criminal trial. If he could prove that the scientific evidence did not hold up, he could convince the judge to impose the lowest possible sentence.

The stakes remained high. Under the plea deal, Seventh Judicial Circuit Judge Lee Smith could still sentence her to as many as 13 years in prison. And while the scientific evidence was certainly on Taylor’s side, there was no guarantee Smith would be moved by it. At the start of the hearing, Lee asked Taylor: “And you still want to proceed today with the sentencing knowing the possible range of possible sentences that you’re facing?”

“Yes, sir,” Taylor said.

No Gray Area

I first wrote about Taylor in March, delving into the fire investigation in her case as well as the Florida lab, which had a record of faulty fire debris analysis. At that time, Taylor was scheduled to go to trial over the summer — and prosecutors had asked the judge to limit what Lentini would be allowed to say to the jury about the lab, arguing that its history was irrelevant.

Lentini had been raising alarm over the lab for years. The lab’s flawed gasoline findings had led numerous people to be wrongly accused of arson — including in a death penalty case. In 2016, he filed an ethics complaint against the lab, which led to an audit by a team of independent experts. The results were abysmal: Of 26 cases they selected for reanalysis, lab analysts had wrongly reported gasoline in 14 of them. The lab temporarily lost its professional accreditation but regained it after agreeing to a remedial plan, which included a self-review of work dating back to 2009. But the review was never completed, leaving some 8,000 cases unexamined.

“There is no gasoline in these samples.”

At the heart of the problem, Lentini argued, was that state lab analysts were not following the professional standards for fire debris analysis that had been in place for decades. Rules for identifying ignitable liquids in fire debris were developed in the 1990s by the American Society for Testing and Materials. A standard known as ASTM E1618 laid out specific parameters for identifying gasoline. The auditors had previously found that lab analysts were not following the standard, instead using an “unvalidated protocol that is not generally accepted in the scientific community.” Although the lab claimed to abide by ASTM........

© The Intercept