#386 Jason Flom with Kristine Bunch

We released the harrowing story of Christine Bunch back in August twenty twenty. I had a chance to sit down with her in person at the twenty twenty three Innocence

I am still on Speaker's Bureau for the Innocence Project in New York, so I travel around doing speaking engagements. I am the outreach coordinator for Interrogating Justice, and so we're providing vetted resources and information on your legal rights to everybody in every stage of the legal system, not

I mean, that's a full dance card right there, and you do it all with a smile on your face, which is incredible. Also, Christine, I'm going to brag about you for a second. It was Christine's case that, when brought to the attention of the governor, led to the signing of a bill that established compensation for exoneries in the state of Indiana. So yeah, you have had a profound impact on so many people and including me. So what else? What do you do for fun? Christine?

I really love pedicures, especially if they serve cocktails while you're getting your pedicure.

I mean that's boss.

And tattoos, and of course playing with my dogs because I have two beautiful Siberian huskies that make every day perfect.

What are their names?

Piper and Paxton?

Amazing? And how do people find out more about what you're doing if they want to support it? Is there a website they can go to? Is there a link what is there.

You can go to Interrogating Justice dot org and connect with us and find ways that you can help. If your justice impacted, come for help. We want to hear from you, We want to serve you. We want to make transition into and out of the system easier for not only the individual but their families as well, because families are so impacted. And you can also make yourself more aware of what's going on the system by listening to the Wrongful Conviction podcast with Jason.

Flom Ah Yay, thank You. In the summer of nineteen ninety five, twenty one year old single mom Christine Bunch was living in a train in Greensburg, Indiana, with her three year old son Tony. In the early morning hours of July thirtieth, an electrical fire began between the roof and the ceiling tiles. When the fire caused one of the ceiling tiles to fall in Tony's bedroom, a cloud of carbon monoxide gas killed the little boy before the fire even could. Christine awoke in a carbon monoxide haze,

Bunch, Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here.

And with Christine as someone whose name you'll probably recognize, Ron Safer. Ron is a former US attorney turned corporate lawyer turned justice fighter, and you'll recognize him because he was a huge part of the Exoneration of Julie Ray, an episode that I'll never forget and I hope if you haven't heard it, that you'll go back and take a listen. Anyway, Ron, welcome back.

My pleasure to be here. Thank you, Jason.

So let's get right into it. Christine, you grew up in Indiana, right I did.

Things took a crazy turn when my parents divorced, but for the most part I was happy and it was good.

Now at the time of this unimaginable tragedy. You were just a young mother living in a trailer, working hard, going to school, just starting your life, just twenty one years old, right.

That's correct.

I was working and going to school, and I had a beautiful three year old son named Tony.

And then the worst nightmare that any parent can possibly have or wake up to in a cold sweat, and some of us probably have had that experience, but it actually happened to you, and Ron, can you tell us about that awful morning of June thirtieth, nineteen ninety five.

What happened was Christine and Tony had gone to sleep together on a couch in the living room area of the trailer. Before Christine woke up, Tony had moved to the front room, which was a separate room from the living room. Christine awoke to a sound and a small fire. She was disoriented, but she saw the small fire and she tried to put it out with a pillow and couldn't do that, so she tried to smother the fire with a blanket and that didn't work either. Carbon monoxide

It's impossible to even conceive of the horror and the panic in a time like that, even if you didn't have kids, like waking up to a fire. Christine, what are your memories of that awful night now twenty five years ago.

I think the thing that sits with me the most is it was just normal. I came home from school, and I got Tony from the babysitter, and we went home and we cooked.

And.

I think we watched some TV and did some laundry, and we fell asleep.

I'd read him a story and he wasn't feeling really well, and we fell asleep on the couch under the air conditioner, and everything just seemed normal.

You didn't realize that you were going to wake up in your whole world would be turned upside down.

Yeah, I mean your whole world was really destroyed at a time when the community and the system should have been coming to help you in every conceivable way. Instead, you were exposed to and victimized by the worst that

So fire investigation was an apprentice art. They were what would were arded as common knowledge and industry standards that were passed down from generation to generation. Virtually none of those conventional wisdom were true, and when tested by scientific principles, they were all debunked. Unfortunately, that came too late for Christine.

And this starts with a fire investigator named Brian Frank.

So what Frank did was the day of this fire, and keep in mind this trailer was completely incinerated. He comes into the trailer and just plucks things out of thin air. He says, Oh, this, this is a burn pattern on the floor. That's evidence of a liquid accelerant by gasoline. Ooh, there's a V pattern on the wall. That is, fire burns up in a V pattern. And therefore, because there are two of these, there were two points of origin. A normal accidental fire will have one point

Here's what's at absolutely nuts is that to become a licensed arson investigator, one who can testify in court, you can take a forty hour correspondence course. It takes fifteen hundred hours in some places. To become a manicurist. You can't get a barber's license in less than six months. The idea that they've been relying on these charlatans, you'd be better off consulting with psychics or even just guessing.

You're just in shock, and you don't really believe what people are telling you because they kept telling me, no, you can't go in and know we couldn't get hit him and know.

He's not alive.

And of course, as a parent, you don't want to believe that.

People on the outside want to look at it.

And say, well, if this was done differently, or if you had acted this way.

And I mean, for myself, I have played.

It over and over and over and over again in my mind.

I still every day that I wake up play it over in my mind, and.

I don't know how to come up with a different scenario. When you're in that moment and the terror paralyzes you, you.

Don't know what you would do.

So it's easy to stand outside and say this should have never happened, and somebody has to be blamed.

Right, because the alternative is incomprehensible to most people. Why innocent baby would be taken from us? Christine? Six days in hell? Right? Six days for you between the fire and the loss of your child and the time that you're arrested. What were those six days?

Like?

What were you doing?

I went with my parents to play a funeral, and my mom and dad really went through how the service was going to be, and I just remember sitting there and crying. And then I told him that I wanted a song played something that I, you know, sang with Tony, and he said, we can play whatever you want, and.

Then I had to go get clothes to her to a funeral. At that time, I was still walking around barefoot because I'd literally lost everything, and everybody was trying to, you know, comfort you and give you advice, and it just.

Doesn't comfort you.

So you feel more alone than ever because you don't want to hurt their feelings, but everything they're saying to you doesn't penetrate. The police didn't help because they followed me everywhere I went and talked to everybody after I left, and they even showed up and my son's funeral and burial.

They came to me before I even got out of the hospital and told me that it was an arson.

They literally wanted a list.

Of all my family and friends, anybody that could have possibly done it.

Then they come back to me and say, no, you're you're the person. You're under arrest for this.

And in a small town, once.

They make or arrest and put a headline on the paper in a small community, in that community's mind, you're guilty.

So now you're arrested. How long were you held before the trial? Were you able to bail out?

I was in there from July sixth to October. Mid October, I bonded out on a fifty thousand dollars cash bond. I tell my son Trent all the time that he's the miracle that saved me. But when I got out, I certainly didn't care if I lived or died, and so I was drinking and doing a lot of self medicating because I just didn't want to feel anymore. And in the midst of that, I started getting sick and that's when I discovered I was pregnant.

Yeah, and that's the worst possible scenario. Although now, as you said, it turns out to be the thing that saved you. And we'll get into more of that later. But Ron, this trial is full of I mean again, it's horseshit, the stuff that they were spewing from the stand.

It began with the prosecutor standing in front of the jury and saying, motive is not an element of the crime. We don't have to prove motive. People tend not to commit crimes for no reason. And of course they investigated Christine and her motive for this crime, and they found that she was a good, loving, caring, wonderful mother and

And I have to tell the audience that this critical evidence becomes just as important later to prove in Christine's innocence as it was in getting her convicted. But go ahead, Ron.

They took ten samples from the trailer, from the floor of the trailer, from the carpet of the trailer, from Christine's nightgown, and they tested it for various accelerants. There was no gasoline. There was no inflammatory substance of any kind on Christine's nightgown, even though they said that she

March fourth, nineteen ninety six, twenty two years old. Pregnant Christine is convicted of arson and murder. Less than a month later, she's sentenced to two concurrent terms, sixty years for murder and fifty years for arson. So how pregnant were you, Christine at the time of this wrongful conviction? And what the hell was it like giving birth behind bars?

I was almost six months pregnant. The only thing they don't do to pregnant women is make them wear the belly chain and the box because the baby's not a prisoner.

But with so many pregnant women in there.

You don't always get soft cuffs for your feet. So I've got deep scars on the back of my ankles from wearing those metal shackles. And then when I finally went into labor, I didn't really know that I was in.

Labor because I was just having a backache.

So they took me to the infirmary and couldn't find a heartbeat. I lost it. I started, you know, screaming at him, and so I was.

Handcuffed and shackle and taken out into an ambulance, and when I got to the hospital, a doctor come in and explained that I was having contractions and that's why they could hear the heartbeat. They determined that I was going to have an emergency see section, so the handcuffs and shackles came off and I got a metal cuff on my ankle in the log chain. I got about thirty six hours with Trent, and.

Then I was transferred back to the facility and my family took him home.

The Pacers Foundation is a proud supporter of this episode of Rawful Conviction and of the Last Mile organization, which provides business and tech training to help incarcerated individuals successfully and permanently re enter the workforce. The Pacers Foundation is committed to improving the lives of Hoosiers across Indiana, supporting organizations that are dedicated primarily to helping young people and students.

Yes, Christine pursued this tirelessly against all odds, found a wonderful local attorney, Hillary bo Rix, who believed in Christine but really did not have the resources to take on the awesome power of the state, and a supporter of Christine wrote a letter to Northwestern Center on Wrongful Convictions, and Jane Railey, along with Karen Daniel, took Christine's case and they disassembled every piece of evidence the state put forward.

So Christine's team exposed the junk science and the outright falsification of the real scientific data that led to her conviction. And by the way, these are your tax dollars at work. And if you don't think this could happen to you, well, don't even get me started. There's more to this, and I'm talking about with the defenses expert Jamie McAllister testified to about how the fire really started.

Jamie McAllister, who is an expert in examining the victim's chemistry and reverse engineering how a fire must have started, testified about how this fire started. Tony died before the fire got hot. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning. There was no burning in his trachea, no burning in his lungs, and so he had stopped breathing before the fire got hot. His carboxy hemoglobin rate, which is what we referred to as carbon monoxide poisoning. It's when the carbon monoxide bonds

But in spite of all of this, on June eighth of twenty ten, now over four years after your conviction, Judge Weshoffer denied you a new trial. He said, quote while and this is a quote, while MSS Bunch had new resources available to her at the post conviction hearing. New experts do not create new evidence. The issues raised and the conclusions reached, while packaged differently, remained basically the same as they were at trial in nineteen ninety six

At the argument itself, it was very clear from the questioning of the judges that one judge was dead set against us. There was nothing I was going to be able to say to change his mind. One judge was for us, and no matter how incoherently I babbled, he was going to vote for us. And so the middle judge,

And eight of what must have been truly agonizing months later, Christine, on March twenty first of twenty twelve, in a two to one decision, the panel reversed the conviction and granted you a new trial, citing the evolution of fire science as well as the fact that the sculpatory evidence was withheld that quote unquote directly contradicted ATF forensic analyst William Kinnard's trial testimony. Christine, how did you find out about this momentous decision.

I got a call to come to the counselor's office and my lawyers were on the phone.

To tell me that they had reversed my conviction and remanded for a new trial.

I started crying, and I asked them if they called my son.

Him to know that I won and I was going.

To come home, and so they assured me that yes, they were calling him, and I ended up. I stayed at the counselor's office for like an hour and a half because I head back to back calls, and she said, you know, she said, we're just gonna make this your day, so everybody can call and congratulate you and tell you the news.

And they were just so happy for me.

Ron, What about you? What's your recollection of that phone call?

I cared beyond measure about Christine in this case and getting her out of jail, and when it ultimately happened, it was as if it was happening to my sister. Just the most moving experience. Although the reality comes home of Okay, she's not out of jail, she gets a new trial, she's still sitting in jail. We got to get her out of jail.

So almost five months go by, after March twenty first, twenty twelve, and the amazing phone call, all the way to August eighth, when the Indiana Supreme Court left the Appellate Court's decision undisturbed, and then finally about a month after that, September one, twenty twelve, seventeen years, one month and sixteen days after you were arrested, Christine, you were finally released into the arms of your family. What was that like?

Well, I mean, when you first walk out, I think all you're looking at is the dream finally happened.

And I have so many possibilities.

After that initial who wears off, then you're left with all of these fears and insecurities. It was great walking out and seeing everyone, but then you know, I'm facing another murder trial, so we have to start prepared for that.

And I have.

You know, my son, who I have to provide a home for, and I have to make sure that he has everything he needs. He's just sixteen, so I don't have a driver's license, I don't have any kind of ID, I don't have Renner's history, credit score, all of these things.

I don't even know where I'm going to get a job.

After seventeen years, so fear starts to take you over, and I think that at first, I was just like, I'm not.

Going to make it. There's no way I'm going to be able to make it.

And that first night, my son was showing me on his laptop how to set up a Facebook account, and while I'm looking at it, I see that he has the appellate court site bookmarked.

And I said, why do you have that?

And he looked at me and he said, because I checked every day to see if they made a decision and.

You were come.

And I started to crying and.

I said, you know, I said, I've been so worried and so unsure, but.

Hearing that you believed in me and we're.

Just waiting for me to come home, I can make it through anything.

Then another and a long line of amazing developments in your case happened just before Christmas, which must have made that time of year even sweeter. The prosecution finally came around to their senses and dropped the charges, which brings us to your next struggle, compensation for all that lost time, And of course no amount of money can be enough to repay what you lost, but you had an uphill battle and a unique struggle just to even get compensation. Can you fill us in on that.

Yes, So, like everyone, I filed a civil suit.

Clearly people are protected, so you have to break through immunity to try to sue. The issue is the ATF chemist is deceased, so I didn't have a lead to stand on, and that was ultimately dismissed.

Compensation.

I have been working since I've been out, and well, I've helped pass new legislation in three different states, working with the Innocence Project. This past year, we passed compensation in Indiana, and then when my civil suit was dismissed, I applied for the compensation. You know, it was I think, very surreal to receive a letter from them saying that just because my conviction was reversed and I wasn't retried

Because I testified before these legislators three separate occasions.

The senators and representatives.

That pass this bill used my case to pass this compensation bill, and then you're going to basically retry me all over again.

So are they really trying to relitigate this case?

No?

They are not.

But as you go through the process, you fill out a compensation application and then they review it. So for them, they reached out to the prosecutor, and the prosecutor said, you know, no, we didn't have evidence at the time to retry this, but you know, we aren't going to say we made a mistake. They never want to say

Exonerate me, in order to show them that I am innocent and were of this conversation.

Twenty five years after the fact.

They are reviewing the application. They've been reviewing it since November.

Yeah, well, let's hope they come to their senses and come to the right decision, because I think the right thing to do is clear to everyone who's listening and to anyone with a heart and a soul. So let's get to what you're doing now. You started an organization called just is for just us.

Just is just like it sounds, because the situation just is and then it's for just Us, which means all of us exoneries. Justice for just Us was started by myself and another exonery that came from the Center on Wrongful Convictions and Juana and I just basically wanted to address what it was like because when people walk out, you don't have a toothbrush, you don't have the basic necessities. So j for Jay for short. You know, we're helping with boxes.

If somebody reaches out and says, hey, I need an outfit, I need basic hygienes, we put that together. We've helped take some axonneries to the Innocence Conference, sent out gas cards, cash cards, we've paid rent, we've paid bills, and our organization allows healthcare providers to donate services so they can get a dental visit or some counseling sessions or a physical things that are desperately needed when you return.

It's such an important thing, you know. I've tried to devote myself to doing as much as I can to help people coming out of the system, because it's exactly as you described. It's like I call it the second punishment, and what I mean by that is most people coming out have no support whatsoever. They may get forty dollars and a bus ticket and then you know, not even a good luck. So there are a number of wonderful organizations doing this work, and I encourage everyone to support

Well, first of all, thanks so much Jason for telling this story, for telling the other stories. It is so critically important to raise public awareness of these wrongful convictions. We have the best criminal justice system in the world, but it is run by human beings, and human beings are flawed. They make mistakes, They at times act in

Christine, when I go speak to the community and tell them how they can help with j for Jay, or how they can help the Innocence Project, or how they can step up and make changes within our system, because it is a great system.

It is designed to work.

And we have to take responsibility and make sure it works.

So I know that everybody is sitting.

There saying I don't have money to donate, but everybody does have to step up and say I have something.

To give here.

I can vote, I can educate myself so that when I'm sitting on a jury, I know what I'm listening to because the CSI you watch on TV that's not always accurate. So really learning about these issues, really raising your voice and.

Saying you know, we need to change some things. That's how we make the world better.

And I encourage all of you to learn about this and figure out if you can help by voting, by sharing our stories, by talking to an axonary, by just.

Being there, don't forget to give us a fantastic you wherever you get your podcasts, it really helps. And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project, and I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go to Innocence Project dot org to learn how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Wartis. The music in the show is by three