"John Galvan was arrested at 18 and spent 35 years in prison for a crime he did not commit," writes the Innocence Project, a non-profit organization specializing in legal exoneration;
“In 2007, John Galvan had already been incarcerated for about 21 years of a life sentence for a crime he did not commit. Then he saw something on prison television that he believed might finally help prove his innocence and secure his freedom: A rerun of an episode of Discovery Channel's MythBusters.”
At the time of his arrest, Galvan reports that he was handcuffed to a wall for hours, beaten, and eventually "agreed to give a confession that was completely fabricated by the detectives to end the abuse." So Galvan admitted to setting fire to an apartment building by "throwing a bottle full of gasoline into the building and then throwing a cigarette into the pool of gasoline that formed on the porch to ignite it."
21 years later John, 39, watched the MythBusters hosts repeatedly try to light a tank of petrol with a lit cigarette. Based on the ignition temperature of gasoline and the temperature range of a lit cigarette, the show's hosts had initially assumed that a lit cigarette could ignite spilled gasoline as they had seen on television and in the movies.
But after several failed attempts at ignition, including one by dropping a lit cigarette directly into a tank of gasoline, the team decided it was highly unlikely that a cigarette could be dropped into gasoline and start a fire.
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.
All attempts failed. "Despite what you see in action movies, dropping a lit cigarette into gasoline will not ignite it, assuming normal oxygen levels are present and no unusual circumstances," said Richard Tontarski, then-chief of the ATF investigation.
In 2017, when John finally had the hearing to present the new evidence, his attorney Tara Thompson and his legal team presented several witnesses for the defendant's alibi, in addition to seven witnesses who testified that they were tortured by the same police officers who arrested him. they had forced him to sign the confession.
After all, there were documents showing that John's false confession was scientifically impossible... In 2019, the appellate court acquitted John after concluding that without his false confession, which he did not voluntarily give, "the case was non-existent."
