Julie Hambleton
Julie Hambleton
December 9, 2022 ·  4 min read

Innocent Man Freed From Prison After 35 Years, Thanks To An Old Episode Of Mythbusters

When he was 18-years-old, John Galvan was wrongfully incarcerated for a murder that he did not commit. After 35 years in prison, he was finally freed thanks to a detail he noticed while watching a rerun of Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters from 2005. Accused based on a trope you often see in Hollywood films, this is what proved that Galvan was innocent all along.

Man Freed From Prison Thanks To A Mythbusters Re-Run

John Galvan was watching an old episode of the Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters from his prison cell one day in 2007. He was already 21 years into a life sentence without parole for his involvement in the ignition of an apartment fire that had killed two people. He, however, had maintained his innocence that entire time. It was this episode of Mythbusters that finally gave him the tip he needed to prove it: That you can’t start gasoline fires using a lit cigarette. (1)

The Fire

In September 1986 in Southwest Chicago, a fire broke out in an apartment. Two  brothers, Guadalupe and Julio Martinez died in the fire. Their two siblings, however, managed to escape. They told the police that a female neighbor had previously threatened to burn down the building for the killing of her brother, who was a member of a rival gang. (2)

Galvan, at the time, was at his grandmother’s house at the time of the fire. Witnesses and video camera footage, however, claimed he was there. The reports say that gasoline was tossed into the apartment through the window and that Galvan lit the fire using a cigarette that he had been smoking. Police arrested 18-year-old Galvan, along with some other young men, as suspects. What followed was a brutal interrogation where the police physically and emotionally abused the young men into confessing, despite them being innocent.

Galvan later tried to rebuke his confession, explaining where he really was at the time of the fire and how the officer who interrogated him beat him into submission. His plea, however, was thrown out, and in 1989 he was sentenced to a life in prison. That is, until 21 years later when he saw the Mythbusters episode that eventually would set him free.

You Can’t Light A Gasoline Fire With A Cigarette

A common Hollywood trope is someone flicking a lit cigarette into gasoline and having the whole place go up in an explosion of flames and smoke. In 2005, Mythbusters decided to do an episode to see if some things commonly seen in film can actually happen in real life. One of those was the cigarette-gasoline fire trope. The show’s hosts repeatedly tried to start a fire by dropping a lit cigarette into a pool of gasoline. No matter how many attempts they made, however, none of them would work. From this, and some scientific looks into reasoning, they determined that it was highly unlikely that a gasoline fire could be started from a cigarette.

Galvan immediately called his attorney Tara Thomposon, who was on his case as part of the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago Law School. Thompson represented Galvan throughout the entire process, including when she transitioned to The Innocence Project in 2021. When he saw the episode, he was already working with his attorneys on his third exoneration petition. This time, much of it was based on the abuse he had faced at the hands of his interrogating officer, who essentially used physical force to make him “confess”, regardless of whether or not it was true.

“I remember I was excited, I was extremely happy because that just added to the other things that were coming together at that time. I felt like finally this is starting to all come out,” he recalled.

Thompson, his attorney, was also excited. She happened to have seen the same re-run and thought that this might be the ticket that would seal the deal for them.

“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,” she said. “When I watched this Mythbusters episode, as a lawyer, it made me realize 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.”

Reviewing The Science

They decided that it would be prudent of them to review the science behind the claims regarding cigarettes and gasoline. In 2007, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) reviewed the Mythbuster’s claim. They tried more than 2000 times to light gasoline on fire using a lit cigarette. Not once were they successful.

In 2017, Galvan’s lawyers presented all evidence, including those who witnessed and knew of the torture that Galvan and several others were put under to force a confession out of them. Still, it took several more years before they were granted new hearings and new trials. Finally, this year, 35 years after he was locked away, Galvan, along with two others who were also wrongly convicted for this crime, were exonerated. All of this, because of an episode of an old TV show.

Sources

  1. How Discovery Channel’s ‘MythBusters’ Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence.” Innocence Project. Daniele Selby. October 5, 2022.
  2. JOHN GALVAN.” UMICH.  Maurice Possley. August 8, 2022.