Post by ck4829 on Oct 24, 2022 7:53:54 GMT
How Discovery Channel’s ‘MythBusters’ Helped a Wrongly Convicted Man Prove His Innocence
In 2007, John Galvan was about 21 years into a life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit when he saw something on the prison television he thought might finally help him prove his innocence and secure his freedom: A re-run of an episode of the Discovery Channel’s MythBusters.
The episode, “Hollywood on Trial,” which originally aired in 2005, sees the show’s hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage attempt to reproduce famous scenes and commonly used plot devices from Hollywood films with the goal of ascertaining their scientific validity. The pair and their team investigate whether a person can break down a door with four types of locks, whether a sinking ship — like the Titanic — can actually create a whirlpool, and whether a lit cigarette can really ignite a pool of gasoline.
It was the last of these questions that caught Mr. Galvan’s interest.
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.
...
“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,” John recalled. At the time John caught the re-run, he had been working on his third post-conviction petition and had recently learned of others who had been abused by Detective Switski.
Serendipitously, Ms. Thompson had caught the same re-run.
“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.”
After talking to John, Ms. Thompson realized that they needed to investigate the arson science aspect of his case further.
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.
Sciences are always evolving, but, unfortunately, laws do not always keep pace with innovations and discoveries. However, states can pass change-in-science laws to create mechanisms that allow people convicted based on now debunked or discredited forensic methods to have their cases reviewed.
“Mr. Galvan’s case speaks to the critical importance of establishing such mechanisms for people to get back into court when science changes or evolves, or when experts repudiate past testimony,” said Rebecca Brown, Innocence Project director of policy. “Without these mechanisms in many instances, innocent people are prevented from presenting forensic evidence of their innocence after their wrongful conviction.”
Two decades of fire research has debunked methods that were used to convict people of arson in the past — including the kind of faulty arson science used in John’s case. In 1992, the National Fire Protection Association released a consensus report that noted that many of the physical “signs” and characteristics previously thought to occur only in intentional fires could actually occur in accidental fires as well. The scientific community only began to widely accept this standard in the early 2000s.
innocenceproject.org/discovery-channel-mythbuster-john-galvan-wrongful-conviction-innocence/
In 2007, John Galvan was about 21 years into a life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit when he saw something on the prison television he thought might finally help him prove his innocence and secure his freedom: A re-run of an episode of the Discovery Channel’s MythBusters.
The episode, “Hollywood on Trial,” which originally aired in 2005, sees the show’s hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage attempt to reproduce famous scenes and commonly used plot devices from Hollywood films with the goal of ascertaining their scientific validity. The pair and their team investigate whether a person can break down a door with four types of locks, whether a sinking ship — like the Titanic — can actually create a whirlpool, and whether a lit cigarette can really ignite a pool of gasoline.
It was the last of these questions that caught Mr. Galvan’s interest.
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.
...
“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,” John recalled. At the time John caught the re-run, he had been working on his third post-conviction petition and had recently learned of others who had been abused by Detective Switski.
Serendipitously, Ms. Thompson had caught the same re-run.
“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.”
After talking to John, Ms. Thompson realized that they needed to investigate the arson science aspect of his case further.
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.
Sciences are always evolving, but, unfortunately, laws do not always keep pace with innovations and discoveries. However, states can pass change-in-science laws to create mechanisms that allow people convicted based on now debunked or discredited forensic methods to have their cases reviewed.
“Mr. Galvan’s case speaks to the critical importance of establishing such mechanisms for people to get back into court when science changes or evolves, or when experts repudiate past testimony,” said Rebecca Brown, Innocence Project director of policy. “Without these mechanisms in many instances, innocent people are prevented from presenting forensic evidence of their innocence after their wrongful conviction.”
Two decades of fire research has debunked methods that were used to convict people of arson in the past — including the kind of faulty arson science used in John’s case. In 1992, the National Fire Protection Association released a consensus report that noted that many of the physical “signs” and characteristics previously thought to occur only in intentional fires could actually occur in accidental fires as well. The scientific community only began to widely accept this standard in the early 2000s.
innocenceproject.org/discovery-channel-mythbuster-john-galvan-wrongful-conviction-innocence/