Jo Ann Parks, the subject of my book, Burned: A Story of Murder and the Crime That Wasn’t, walked out of the world’s largest women’s prison yesterday, freed for the first time in three decades from a murder conviction based on flawed forensic science.
Her first wish: a hot and private shower. Next up: Chinese Food dinner.
Raquel Cohen, the California Innocence Project attorney who has fought for the past six years to free Parks, made sure those wishes came true shortly after putting the sprawling prison in Chowchilla, California, in the rear view mirror. On the dinner menu: Beef and broccoli, egg foo yung, shrimp-fried rice, and egg rolls.
Later, she took Parks for her first walk on the beach in three decades.
“I can’t even describe how this feels,” Parks said moments after her release, weeping as Cohen handed her a box containing her rings and other mementos that have been in storage since she entered prison.
Jo Ann Parks and attorney Raquel Cohen, shortly after her release from prison.
In Burned, I investigated the deaths of Parks’ three young children in a 1989 house fire, and her conviction three years later for allegedly setting the house aflame and trapping her children inside. I found that the prosecution’s assertions that she set the fire deliberately and barricaded her son in his bedroom closet were based on flawed and outdated forensics and firefighter testimony that the trial prosecutor later admitted was incorrect.
Computer modeling of the fire and a leading arson expert’s review of the case has since suggested the fatal blaze in Bell, California, was likely an accident and that no valid scientific evidence of a crime exists.
Parks no-parole sentence was commuted last year by Governor Gavin Newsom, making her eligible for release. But her 1992 murder conviction still stands. The innocence project has appealed to the California Supreme Court for a full exoneration.
“I am extremely relieved,” Cohen said after driving Parks to San Diego. “I feel like there’s a great sense of pressure lifted, since she is out and safe and able to experience life. But i know the it’s not over and I hope to give her the gift of having her conviction overturned soon.”
Parks will live for a time in a halfway house in San Diego to help her with the transition from prison, where the 54-year-old spent more than half her life.
The widow of a former Los Angeles Fire Department captain and arson investigator Bob Lowe — who championed her claims of innocence and first got the innocence project interest in the case — asked Parks to move in to her family home in the San Diego area when she leaves the halfway house. The entire family has become Parks’ surrogate family during her time in prison, and has championed her parole and exoneration requests since Lowe’s death.
Here’s my LA Times piece on the Parks case and the larger problem of flawed forensic science, and the LA Times story on her release.