John Galvan has recently been released from prison after serving 35 years for a crime that he didn’t commit. He was finally able to prove his innocence thanks to an old episode of Discovery Channel popular science show “Mythbusters” starring Adam Savage, Grant Imahara, Kari Byron, Tory Belleci, and Jamie Hyneman.
In September of 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 Martinez managed to escape the fire, and told police 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 Galvan. Police also interviewed neighbors in the area, who alleged that Galvan, his brother, and their neighbor had started the fire instead.
Although Galvan had been asleep at his grandmother’s that night, and no other evidence indicated his involvement in the fire, police ultimately arrested him and his brother. Detective Victor Switski, who led the interrogation, handcuffed 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. According to The Innocence Project, Switski and the other detectives proceeded to beat Galvan after their initial intimidation did not yield results. Eventually, Galvan agreed to sign a confession that was completely fabricated by the detectives to end the abuse.
This story is all too familiar, especially since laws against using deceptive tactics against suspects only started going into effect in 2021. However, this story features a happy scientific twist.
The coerced statement police made Galvan sign claimed he and several others 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.” However, as anyone who has watched “Mythbusters” episode “Hollywood on Trial” (which originally aired in 2005) can tell you, it’s impossible to ignite a pool of gasoline with a lit cigarette.
In the episode, the show’s hosts had initially hypothesized a lit cigarette might be able to ignite spilled gasoline as they had seen on tv and in movies. Especially since there’s plenty of overlap between the ignition temperature of gasoline and the temperature range of a lit cigarette. 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. After seeing a rerun of the episode, Galvan quickly contacted his lawyer, Tara Thompson, who had coincidentally seen the same 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,” Thompson 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.”
The show’s findings were confirmed in 2007, by experiments conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). They 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. These findings, in conjunction with multiple testimonies about Switski’s abuse and the illegal tactics of the police department, ultimately led to Galvan’s exoneration.
This is overwhelmingly cool, and we hope that the entire “Mythbusters” team is incredibly proud. Their dedication to science education, especially in examining popular conceptions and misconceptions, have literally saved a man’s life. We can only hope that others will continue to advance the various ways we look at science and bring a critical eye to how people have been falsely imprisoned. Galvan is not the only person who has been falsely convicted and, who knows, maybe there’s an old episode of “Mythbusters” that can help them out.
