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.
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.