In 2003, a man named
Juan Catalan was arrested for murder in Los Angeles. He repeatedly professed his innocence, and asked to take a polygraph test, a request that the police denied (note: polygraph tests aren't admissible in court). He also had an alibi. He swore that at the time of the murder, he was at Dodger Stadium with his little girl, watching the Dodgers vs. the Braves, but his lawyer was unable to find him in any of the Dodger Vision or FOX footage he subpoenaed. However, he discovered that there was another source of crowd footage: Curb Your Enthusiasm season four, episode six,
The Car Pool Lane (2004) had filmed at Dodger Stadium that night. Although Catalan did not make the final cut of the show, his lawyer was finally able to find him and his daughter in the outtakes, and determined from the timestamps on the tapes that Catalan could not have been the killer. When told that his show had released a wrongfully accused man from prison and a trial that could have led to the death penalty,
Larry David commented, "I tell people that I've now done one decent thing in my life, albeit inadvertently." The documentary
Long Shot (2017) is about these events.
