Featured Image Credit: Innocence Project
Topics: Science, Crime, TV and Film
Jess Battison
A man ended up proving his innocence thanks to an old MythBusters episode, getting him released after 21 years behind bars.
John Galvan was given a life sentence for first-degree murder at the age of 18 after Chicago brothers, Guadalupe and Julio Martinez, were killed in a fire at their two-bed apartment building in September 1986.
Their siblings, Blanca and Jorge, had managed to escape the fire and told police a female neighbour had threatened to burn the building down. She believed her own brother had been killed by the local street gang Latin Kings. It’s thought Jorge was one of its members.
But when the woman was questioned by police, she denied any involvement and instead blamed someone else – Galvan.
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Two other neighbours in the area also alleged that he, his brother, and the brother of his neighbour were involved in starting the deadly blaze.
Despite Galvan having been asleep at his grandma’s that night, police arrested him and the others accused. There was no other evidence indicating his involvement and yet he was interrogated for hours, with the teen being subject to deceptive tactics.
Here, he says he was beaten by a detective and ended up giving a false confession to put an end to it. The statement claimed they had started the fire by throwing a bottle filled with gasoline at the building and then tossing a cigarette into the pool of gasoline on the porch to ignite it.
Galvan and the other two men were convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
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Fast forwarding to 2007, the man was watching an old rerun of a 2005 episode of MythBusters when he found a way to prove his innocence.
In the episode, the show’s hosts hypothesised that a lit cigarette might be able to ignite spilled gasoline as they had seen in Hollywood.
But after several failed attempts, they determined it was very unlikely that dropping a cigarette into gasoline could cause a fire.
Watching it made Galvan ‘excited’ as he realised it could help in his favour and contacted his lawyer, who had seen the same re-run.
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His attorney Tara Thompson told the Innocence project: “It was honestly shocking to me … I feel like all of us have seen movies — like Payback is a famous one — where they light the gasoline in the street with a cigarette and a car explodes, and I really had never given much thought to whether or not that might be real.
“When I watched this Mythbusters episode, as a lawyer, it made me realise that there are things you have to look deeper into — you can’t assume that you understand the science until you’ve looked into it.”
In 2017, when Galvan had his evidentiary hearing on his post-conviction claims, Thompson said the prosecutor ‘really wanted there to be a possibility that this could happen’.
He was eventually exonerated in 2022 thanks to new appeals. At the end of the day, Galvan’s ‘false confession was scientifically impossible’.