Matches in His Pocket

Late one night a fire swept through a fourth-floor hallway of a crowded landmark hotel where a holiday party was under way, and twenty-eight people died. A 16-year-old who had been in the hotel that evening, watching the party and later sitting on a stool in a hallway, was charged with murder on the theory that the deaths occurred during an arson. Police found five packs of matches on him, and expert testimony about burn patterns indicated that matches could have started the fire. A witness testified that the teenager told him he had squirted lighter fluid on a wall and lit it. The defence argued that his statements after a long police interrogation were involuntary; he consistently denied setting the fire and said he had seen other people near it.