Putting exceptions for Laravel JWT into middleware

Im following a tutorial on using JWT-Auth with Laravel, its telling me to create a middleware with the following handle() method;

public function handle($request, Closure $next)
{
    try {

        $user = JWTAuth::parseToken()->authenticate();

    } catch (Exception $e) {

        if ($e instanceof \Tymon\JWTAuth\Exceptions\TokenInvalidException){

            return $this->returnResponse('Token is Invalid');

        }else if ($e instanceof \Tymon\JWTAuth\Exceptions\TokenExpiredException){

            return $this->returnResponse('Token is Expired');

        }else{

            return $this->returnResponse('Authorization Token not found');

        }
    }

    return $next($request);
}

Then in my controller create a method called getAuthenticatedUser() with the following code;

public function getAuthenticatedUser()
{
    try {

        if (! $user = JWTAuth::parseToken()->authenticate()) {
            return $this->errorNotFound('User not found');
        }

    } catch (Tymon\JWTAuth\Exceptions\TokenExpiredException $e) {

        return $this->errorWrongArgs('Token is Expired');

    } catch (Tymon\JWTAuth\Exceptions\TokenInvalidException $e) {

        return $this->errorWrongArgs('Token is Invalid');

    } catch (Tymon\JWTAuth\Exceptions\JWTException $e) {

        return $this->errorNotFound('Authorization Token not found');

    }

    return $this->respondWithItem($user, new UserTransformer);
}

The problem im having is;

Isn't middleware always run BEFORE a request? thats the point of it. So the try catch in the getAuthenticatedUser method is redundant and doubling up on code. If i changed the getAuthenticatedUser() to the following, wouldn't that be doing the exact same thing;

public function getAuthenticatedUser()
{
    if (! $user = JWTAuth::parseToken()->authenticate()) {

        return $this->errorNotFound('User not found');

    }

    return $this->respondWithItem($user, new UserTransformer);
}

via Chebli Mohamed