Dennis Counterman was freed from a Pennsylvania court­room on October 18, 2006 after serv­ing many years on the state’s death row. Counterman had been con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death in 1990 for alleged­ly set­ting a fire in his own house that result­ed in the death of his three chil­dren. That con­vic­tion was over­turned in 2001 because pros­e­cu­tors had with­held evi­dence from the defense indi­cat­ing that the old­est child had a his­to­ry of fire-set­ting.

At Counterman’s orig­nial tri­al, the pros­e­cu­tion wit­ness­es said that a burn pat­tern was dis­cov­ered that indi­cat­ed an accel­er­ant was used, even though no accel­er­ant was found. At lat­er hear­ings, how­ev­er, an expert hired by the pros­e­cu­tion said that the pros­e­cu­tion’s the­o­ry of how the fire start­ed ​“is not prop­er­ly sup­port­ed by today’s stan­dards.”

Rather than face the uncer­tain­ty of anoth­er tri­al, Counterman agreed to enter an Alford plea, that is one in which the defen­dant does not admit guilt but agrees that the pros­e­cu­tion might have been able to con­vince a jury of his guilt. The plea was to a charge of third-degree mur­der and car­ried a max­i­mum term of 18 years in prison. Since Counterman had already served the max­i­mum time, he was released imme­di­ate­ly by Lehigh County Judge Lawrence Brenner. After his release, Counterman said, ​“I am more frus­trat­ed than angry. I spent all this time for some­thing I did­n’t even do.”

(The Morning Call (PA), Oct. 19, 2006). See also Maurice Possley’s arti­cle in the Oct. 18, 2006 edi­tion of the Chicago Tribune about faulty arson inves­ti­ga­tions in other cases. 

See Innocence and Arbitrariness.

(DPIC Note: Cases such as that of Dennis Counterman are not count­ed as part of DPIC’s Innocence List, which includes only peo­ple cleared of all charges relat­ed the original crime.)

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