How “Curb Your Enthusiasm” Cleared a Man of Murder Charges
I want to tell you about one of the craziest cases of injustice that I’ve ever come across and how a man who was wrongfully accused of murder had his charges finally dismissed all thanks to a TV show.
Juan Catalan was just a normal guy going about his daily business working and providing for his family when he was wrongfully accused of committing the murder of someone he had never met.
A sixteen-year-old girl by the name of Martha Puebla was gunned down outside of her home in California because she had testified against someone else in a gang-related murder.
When Catalan was questioned about it he produced a ticket stub that had demonstrated that he was not at the scene of the crime that night but instead was at a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game. So, you would think that that would be enough to get him off of the hook, right? Well, it wasn’t.
His attorneys try to look over all of the footage from the baseball game that night that would show him on video and while they could find him it wasn’t in enough detail to prove that it was him and not someone else even though that exact seat was being filled. Theoretically I guess you could say that he could have given his ticket to someone else and they would have been sitting in that seat during the game instead of him.
But then there was one detail that was remembered about that night and it would be the detail of that would get him cleared of all charges.
On that very night Larry David happened to be filming his show Curb Your Enthusiasm at that very baseball game and on top of that it just so happened that the location where he was filming was in the exact spot where Catalan had been as well.
“I went through about 20 minutes of tape, and I was beginning to get disheartened because I didn’t see Juan in any of the tapes,” remembered Melnick. “And then, all of a sudden, there he was!”
In several shots, Juan Catalan is seen in the stands eating a hot dog or watching the game with his 6-year-old daughter.
“He [Melnick] did the job the police were supposed to have done and are paid to do,” said Gary Casselman, the attorney representing Catalan in the police misconduct lawsuit.
“It was incompetence; they took the easy way out,” said the civil rights attorney. “It is in their manual that they are supposed to check out an alibi or a defense.”
But let me tell you something else that’s so crazy about all of this. The prosecution admitted that they lied, yet both of them are still working to this day and in fact one of them even received a promotion. That is the injustice of America and something that needs changed as soon as possible.
Take a look at this video below and it will really show you how messed up this whole thing was.