John,

Every day, our teams work tirelessly to free people who have been wrongfully convicted — sometimes for decades. It often takes years of painstaking, meticulous work by our lawyers — like Tara Thompson — to win freedom for a wrongfully convicted person. Some 14 years ago, while working at the Exoneration Project, Tara took on the case of John Galvan. And she continued to represent John, who was wrongly convicted of aggravated arson and murder, after she joined the Innocence Project in March 2021.

The work Tara did on John’s case is incredibly inspiring. But before I continue to share that story, I’d like to humbly ask you to please make a year-end donation to support the Innocence Project’s transformative work. Once you finish reading this email, I know you’ll understand exactly why it’s so important to have you standing with us as we continue and expand our efforts to free innocent people and reform the criminal legal system.

Everything about this case was egregious. Just 18 at the time of his arrest, John was handcuffed to a wall, hit, punched, and kicked by a detective who told him that if he didn't confess, he would end up "laying next to his father," who was dead. John was also told that if he implicated others in the crime, he would be allowed to go home. Abusive and deceptive tactics like these — offering leniency in exchange for a confession or falsely telling people they can go home if they confess — are classic risk factors for wrongful convictions. Young people, like John, are especially vulnerable to giving false confessions, which is exactly what he did.

When Tara began working on his case, she knew it would be hard. There isn’t a template for finding compelling evidence of innocence and persuading courts to hear it, particularly when there are lots of witnesses and claims. He had already been denied a hearing on evidence gathered by his prior counsel, so Tara had to fight to get back in court to have John’s case heard.

Then she happened upon an episode of Discovery Channel’s MythBusters — that, coincidentally, John also saw in prison – that blew apart the prosecution’s argument that John set the fire by lighting spilled gasoline with a cigarette. The episode demonstrated that doing this was actually impossible.

“It was honestly shocking to me … 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.”

In May 2014, an arson expert confirmed that the scientific evidence used to convict John was bogus. Tara and John also had compelling evidence of an alternative suspect, ineffective counsel, and Brady violations (the withholding of potentially exculpatory evidence) that John had presented as early as 2001. But it wasn’t until the early hours of a July morning in 2022 that John walked out of prison with Arthur Almendarez and Francisco Nanez, the two men who were wrongfully convicted with him all those years ago.

Throughout those eight years, John’s legal team worked tirelessly to decide what to investigate, what witnesses to call, what testimony to elicit, and how to argue his claims both in the hearing and in the appeals. They ultimately had a 14-day evidentiary hearing over the course of 19 months, during which time the court heard from 23 witnesses; an appeal, a suppression hearing, another appeal, and so many status dates that they lost count!

This fall, John celebrated his freedom with Tara with highs and lows of a different kind — on a huge roller coaster at Six Flags in New Jersey.

This is just one example of the work that goes into freeing the innocent. During this year alone, we’ve helped to free or exonerate nine wrongfully convicted people, and we've passed more than 10 state policies to transform the criminal legal system and prevent practices that drive wrongful convictions.

Now more than ever, it’s important that we hold steadfast and deepen our commitment to helping people who were wrongly convicted and to fight against the injustices in the criminal legal system.

If you’re with me and this entire movement, then please make a donation to ensure that we hit our end-of-year fundraising goals and can keep doing this work for decades to come.

Tara’s extraordinary work on behalf of John Galvan — and the work that we do on behalf of wrongfully convicted people every day — reminds me of the profound words of civil and human rights activist Ella Baker: “We who believe in freedom cannot rest.”

We have a lot more work to do. Even after 30 years, we’re just getting started.

So please, continue in this fight with us and make a donation before the end-of-year deadline — this really is the best time to give.

With deep gratitude,

Christina Swarns
Executive Director
Innocence Project