In an article titled “Woman Sentenced for Setting Forest Fire,” and published in the Casper, Wyoming Star Tribune, Associated Press writer Joe Kafka reports on the case of a woman accused of violating a plea agreement based on her having “failed” a polygraph “test.” Excerpt:
RAPID CITY, S.D. (AP) – The woman who started the largest forest fire in the recorded history of the Black Hills was sentenced in state court on Wednesday to 25 years in prison after the prosecutor said she lied during polygraph questions about an earlier fire that destroyed 15 homes.
Janice Stevenson, 47, of Newcastle, Wyo., had pleaded guilty May 8 in federal court to destruction of U.S. government property during last year’s Jasper Fire, and she was sentenced to 10 years in a federal prison.
She pleaded guilty May 25 in state court to second-degree arson for the destruction of a summer home lost in the blaze. In a plea agreement, Stevenson promised to tell the truth about other suspicious fires that took place before 1993.
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But Paul Bachand, assistant attorney general, said Wednesday he could no longer honor the agreement because she lied during questioning about the 1988 Westbury Trails Fire on the western outskirts of Rapid City. He instead asked that Stevenson’s state sentence be served after the federal prison term.
Taking somewhat of a middle ground, Circuit Judge Merton Tice ordered that Stevenson’s state sentence run at the same time as the federal sentence but that she serve the maximum 25 years in state prison. Although that is 15 years longer than the federal sentence, roughly half the extra time will be lopped off under the present state parole system.
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Stevenson, who was brought into the courtroom Wednesday in jail garb with her hands fastened to a chain around her waist, said she dropped the match just to see the fire burn.
“I don’t really know why I did it,” she told the judge. “I am very sorry.”
She also admitted setting three earlier fires near Osage and Newcastle, Wyo., – burning a barn, a pasture and a lodge. Stevenson said she had been drinking at the time she set all the fires, including the Jasper blaze.
Trevor Jones, a special agent for the state Division of Criminal Investigation, said Stevenson denied during lie detector testing that she set the Westbury Trails Fire, but the machine indicated she was lying.
“She failed the question involving the Westbury Trails Fire,” Jones insisted.
“Was it a close call?” Bachand asked. “No,” Jones replied.
The assistant attorney general said Stevenson is dangerous and should be locked up for a long time.
“She’s a fire bug. She likes to start fires,” Bachand said. “The longer she stays in prison, the safer society is.”
Stevenson’s attorney, Randal Connelly, accused the state of violating the plea agreement. His client did not set the Westbury Trails Fire, and he advised her to deny it on the polygraph test, Connelly said.
The investigative report on the fire indicated that a Sturgis woman, who has since died, was the prime suspect, the defense attorney said.
Connelly said Stevenson was sexually abused from an early age and was impregnated at age 8 by her father. She has an extensive history of mental problems, and such people fare poorly on lie-detector tests, Connelly said. He said she also had failed an earlier polygraph exam and had attempted suicide more than 30 times.
Jones agreed that people with mental problems are not good subjects for polygraph examinations because their answers are muddled and not easily judged to be truthful or false. However, he insisted that Stevenson clearly lied when asked if she set the Westbury Trails Fire, which forced hundreds of people to flee from their homes.
South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation Special Agent Trevor Jones cannot know that Janice Stevenson “clearly lied” when she denied setting the Westbury Trails Fire. As Prof. David T. Lykken notes at p. 66 of A Tremor in the Blood: Uses and Abuses of the Lie Detector (2nd ed., Plenum Trade, 1998):
A polygraph examiner who asserts that a respondent “showed deception” or “gave a deceptive response” on a particular question is making either a misstatement or a false statement. He may be entitled to say, based on the charts, that the respondent made a larger response to one question than to another, and the examiner may proceed to draw some inference based on that difference. But the myth of the specific lie response should be laid at last, permanently, to rest.