https://innocenceproject.org/discovery- ... innocence/
How Discovery Channel’s ‘MythBusters’ Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence
John Galvan was arrested at 18 and spent 35 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
In September 1986, a fire broke out in a two-flat apartment building in Southwest Chicago, killing brothers Guadalupe and Julio Martinez. Their siblings Blanca and Jorge managed to escape the fire and told police that a female neighbor had threatened to burn the building down as retaliation for her own brother’s death. The woman believed her brother had been killed by the street gang Latin Kings, of which Jorge may have been a member.
When police questioned the woman, she denied any involvement and instead pointed to Mr. Galvan. Police also interviewed neighbors in the area, including Jose Ramirez and Rene Rodriguez, who alleged that Mr. Galvan, his brother, and the brother of Arthur Almendarez (Mr. Galvin’s neighbor) had been involved in starting the fire.
Although Mr. Galvan had been asleep at his grandmother’s the night of the fire and no other evidence indicated his involvement in the fire, police ultimately arrested him and his brother, as well as Mr. Almendarez and his brother.
Detective Victor Switski, who led the interrogation, handcuffed Mr. Galvan to a wall and proceeded to interrogate and intimidate him for hours, pressuring the 18-year-old to implicate others in the crime in order for him to return home. Deceptive tactics — like offering leniency in exchange for a confession or falsely telling children they can go home if they confess — have been identified as risk factors for false confessions, and young people are especially vulnerable to falsely confessing as a result of these tactics.
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When Mr. Galvan asserted his innocence, Detective Switski beat him, Mr. Galvan said. Through the walls, his older brother Isaac listened helplessly to the detective’s yelling and John’s cries. Since then, several other people have testified to being tortured by Detective Switski and the other detectives who coerced confessions from John and Mr. Almendarez. Detective Switski also threatened John, telling him he would face the death penalty and end up “laying next to” his late father. Eventually, John couldn’t take it anymore and agreed to give a confession that was completely fabricated by the detectives to end the abuse.
The statement claimed that John, Mr. Almendarez, and Francisco Nanez (Mr. Almendarez’s brother-in-law) 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.
John, Mr. Almendarez, and Mr. Nanez — 18, 20, and 22, respectively at the time — were all convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
In his cell, a 39-year-old John watched as the hosts of MythBusters struggled repeatedly to ignite a pool of gasoline with a lit cigarette, despite fervent attempts. Based on the ignition temperature of gasoline and the temperature range of a lit cigarette, the show’s hosts had initially hypothesized that a lit cigarette might be able to ignite spilled gasoline as they had seen on TV and in movies. But after several failed attempts to start a fire, including rolling a lit cigarette directly into a pool of gasoline, the team determined it was highly unlikely that dropping a cigarette into gasoline could cause a fire.
“There it was,” John recalled thinking. “Once I saw it, I couldn’t wait to tell Tara,” he said, referring to his attorney Tara Thompson, who, at the time, had just taken on John’s case at the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago Law School. She continued to represent John when she joined the Innocence Project in 2021. John was also later represented by the Exoneration Project’s Joshua Tepfer, who also later represented Mr. Almendarez.
Science vs. the law
The show’s findings were confirmed in 2007, by experiments conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), which made more than 2,000 attempts to ignite gasoline with a cigarette under various conditions. The bureau’s experiments even included a vacuum that increased the cigarette’s temperature to the level it would typically reach when being sucked and spraying a mist of gasoline directly onto the lit cigarette. All of the attempts failed.
“Despite what you see in action movies, dropping a lit cigarette on to a trail of gasoline won’t ignite it, assuming normal oxygen levels and no unusual circumstances,” said Richard Tontarski, a forensic scientist and then chief of the ATF’s fire research laboratory.
“I find that very telling about the state of science and the law…”
In 2017, when John finally had his evidentiary hearing on his post-conviction claims, Ms. Thompson and his legal team presented multiple alibi witnesses, in addition to seven witnesses who testified to being tortured by the same officers who had coerced his confession, documents showing that police had fabricated probable cause to arrest him, and an arson expert who testified that John’s false confession was scientifically impossible.
“Even then, they really did not want to accept that this was not possible,” Ms. Thompson recalled. “I feel like that is the battle that we’re still fighting about science [in the courtroom]. Even though this is not really a disputed issue in arson science anymore, the prosecutor really wanted there to be a possibility that this could happen,” despite the expert’s testimony to the contrary.
“I find that very telling about the state of science and the law … that these things that we probably should accept as true in the legal space, the system does not always want to accept,” she added.
"Mickey Mouse and I grew up together." - Ruthie Tompson, Disney animation checker and scene planner and one of the first women to become a member of the International Photographers Union in 1952.