A prisoner who was facing 35 years behind bars was proved innocent 21 years into his sentence thanks to a rerun of an old MythBusters episode.
It all began when Chicago brothers Guadalupe and Julio Martinez were killed by a fire in their apartment in 1986.
wo other siblings – Blanca and Jorge – managed to escape the blaze, telling police that their female neighbour had threatened to burn down their building in retaliation for her brother’s death.
Jorge was thought to be a member of local street gang Latin Kings and the neighbour accused him of killing her brother.
When the neighbour was accused by police, she, instead, named John Galvan.
This is where it gets a bit complicated – so two other neighbours, Jose Ramirez and Rene Rodriguez, also named Galvan, alleged that Galvan was involved alongside his brother Arthur Almendarez – who was one of Galvan’s neighbours.
Stay with me, so although Galvan was asleep at his grandma’s house at the time of the crime, police arrested him and took him into interrogation, where he claimed to have made a false confession.
Despite the false confession, he was convicted of first-degree murder and was sentenced to life behind bars.
Right, so let’s fast forward to 2007.
Galvan was watching an old episode of MythBusters in prison and realised that there was a way to prove his innocence.
For those unaware, MythBusters (2003-2018) used to be a science-based TV show on the Discovery Channel, which followed special effects experts and hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, who used their expertise to test the validity of rumours, myths, movie scenes and news stories.
Now, Galvan was watching an episode called ‘Hollywood on Trial’, which would prove that his confession statement was false.
The prisoner admitted to lighting a Molotov cocktail with a cigarette, but the Mythbusters episode proved such a move was pretty much impossible.
Galvan contacted his lawyer, who had coincidentally also seen the episode.
“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,” his attorney Tara Thompson said.
“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.”
Galvan – who was later released in 2022 – told the Innocence Project: “It’s been hard, I feel out of place, there’s a lot to learn and I don’t know where I’m supposed to be.
“I don’t know what to do.”
