Three men. 35 years. A confession beaten out of a teenager who did nothing.

On July 13, 2022, after more than thirty-five years of wrongful imprisonment, John Galvan was exonerated in Chicago when the Cook County State's Attorney's Office moved to dismiss all charges against him. He and Arthur Almendarez had been released from Cook County Jail the previous night, in the late hours after court proceedings concluded. By that morning, three men — Galvan, Almendarez, and Francisco Nanez — were finally, formally free.

John Galvan Wrongful Conviction Exoneration — image 1

The case began in early September 1986, when a fire broke out in a building on 24th Place in Chicago. All three defendants' families lived in the neighborhood — a fact that would attach itself to the investigation and never quite let go. Police treated the fire as arson. More than nine months would pass before they formally pursued the matter. In June 1987, officers interviewed a man named Mr. Partida, who said he had seen three young men walking through the alley near the burned building on the night of the fire. On June 8, 1987, police interviewed Jose Ramirez, who identified one of those figures as 18-year-old John Galvan.

What followed was a textbook anatomy of a wrongful conviction. During his interrogation, Galvan was handcuffed to a wall and beaten by police officers. The physical abuse produced a confession. In that coerced statement, Galvan implicated Francisco Nanez and Arthur Almendarez — the 20-year-old brother of Michael Almendarez, another young man whose name had come up during the investigation. Arthur Almendarez gave a statement of his own, and the prosecution had what it needed to take three men to trial.

The case rested on two pillars: Galvan's confession and forensic arson testimony. Both would eventually be exposed as worthless. But in 1987, they were enough to take three innocent men's futures away.

At trial, a witness offered testimony that should have stopped the conviction before it happened. The woman, who lived directly across the street from the burned building, told the court she had been watching the alley on the night of the fire. She described the group she observed. John Galvan, she stated explicitly, was not among them. That direct contradiction of the prosecution's entire theory was apparently not enough. The jury convicted him anyway.

John Galvan Wrongful Conviction Exoneration — image 2

Galvan entered prison at 18. He would not leave until he was 53.

The decades passed, and the evidence quietly crumbled. The arson science used to establish that a crime had even occurred was reassessed by modern fire investigators and found to be unreliable. Methods that had seemed authoritative in 1987 had since been shown to produce false positives — to mark accidental fires as deliberate ones, to construct the predicate for a prosecution where none actually existed. When that forensic foundation collapsed, so too did everything built upon it.

Legal advocates and defense attorneys worked the case for years. In the summer of 2022, the Illinois Appellate Court vacated the convictions of Galvan and Almendarez, recognizing constitutional violations that had tainted the original proceedings from the start. The Cook County State's Attorney's Office reviewed what remained of the case and moved to dismiss all charges on July 13, 2022. Francisco Nanez was freed as well.

Three men. More than 35 years each behind bars. A coerced confession beaten out of a teenager who had done nothing. A forensic determination that modern science would not recognize as valid. And a witness who watched the alley that night, who went to court and said John Galvan was not there — testimony that did not save him.

Following their release, Galvan, Almendarez, and Nanez pursued civil accountability for what the system had taken from them. The three men reached a combined settlement of $48 million for their wrongful imprisonment. It was acknowledgment, rendered in the language the system speaks most fluently, that something irrecoverable had been done.

John Galvan was 18 years old when police handcuffed him to a wall and beat a confession out of him. He gave them what they demanded. It cost him 35 years.

Today in True Crime by CaseBond — 2026-07-13