It does! Basically the defence argued that the door wasn't locked, and since the eyewitness testimony was from women who had been working in the factory, their observations were dismissed with "well it was smoky and everyone was panicking, they must have been mistaken." And the primary witness for the prosecution, Kate Alterman, was torn apart on the stand by the defence attorney, who claimed that she had been coached to say that the door was locked. Basically it was a case of a good defence attorney and a sympathetic judge, who instructed the jury that they could only convict if the factory owners had known that the door was locked. So: the door wasn't locked, but if it WAS locked, the owners didn't know about it. (The judge in the case had lost his job as a tenement inspector over a fire five years earlier, so he wasn't exactly neutral.)