00:00:00
Speaker 1: This episode of Wrongful Conviction contains discussion of sexual assault and suicidal ideation. Please listen with caution and care. On November twenty second, nineteen seventy five, a three year old boy was reported missing in Richmond, Virginia. A twenty year old neighbor named Marvin Grimm joined the search party, mentioning that he may have seen the boy while running an errand after the body was recovered, investigators question Marvin, threatening him with the death penalty until they got a statement that corroborated what they already believed that the boy had died by exphyxiation related to a sexual assault, and any evidence that arose to the contrary was summarily ignored. This is wrongful conviction. The Fox Foundation is proud to support this episode of wrongful Conviction and the work of After Innocence, a nonprofit that helps hundreds of people nationwide rebuild their lives after wrongful incarceration. Each year, innocent people are released after spending years behind bars for crimes they didn't commit. Nearly all of them leave prison with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, with no help or compensation from the state, as they face the steep challenges of rebuilding their lives after wrongful imprisonment. After Innocence is changing that After Innocence helps exoneries get and make good use of essential services like health care, dental care, mental health support, legal aid, financial counseling, and more. Since twenty sixteen, they've brought that help to more than eight hundred exoneries across forty six states, working tirelessly to ensure that no one released after wrongful incarceration is left behind. Learn more at after dashinnocence dot org and join after Innocence to set support exoneries as they rebuild their lives. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction, where we have a Virginia case related to the subject of a twenty twenty three podcast called Admissible. They covered twelve wrongful convictions related to one Virginia forensic examiner named Mary Jane Burton, some of which have been covered here, Thomas Hainsworth, Marvin Anderson, and the list is longer than twelve.

00:02:36
Speaker 2: Well now several on the list. I knew Julius Ruffin, I used to play ball with him, and I can't think of the other ones I only knew if Thomas Haynesworth. I met him at the AG's office when I was brought in after right after my exoneration, and he was working in the Attorney General's office.

00:02:51
Speaker 1: That is our guest of honor, Marvin Grimm Junior, welcome and to help tell his story. We have this attorney from Arnold and Porter Angelique celebrity.

00:03:02
Speaker 3: Thank you for having us.

00:03:03
Speaker 1: So, Marvin, you're from Richmond, Virginia and had three sisters. Where did you fall in the sibling lineup? I was top dog, so three little sisters, all right, I thought, So tell me a little bit about yourself as a kid.

00:03:20
Speaker 2: I played hardball as a kid. I played up about the fifteen year old. Because we were moving around, I couldn't get it to stay situated. Because my father, he was a salesman. We had time in Richmond, Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Ohio, back to Richmond, being up to Mason City, Iowa, and Moorhead, Minnesota. That's where mom and Dad divorced. And when we came back to Richmond, and I felt that I was going to be a drain on the resources. So I said, I'll just go in the Navy. I'm old enough to do it. So that's what I did.

00:03:50
Speaker 1: And this was in nineteen seventy three, when the Vietnam War was still ongoing.

00:03:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm going in boot camp getting ready to graduate. Says, hey, we need some people go to Japan. I said, cool, I'll go to Japan because I did not want to wind up in Vietnam. Well, I didn't know at the time when I volunteered for Japan it's just across the bay from Vietnam. Well, I was impulsive. Our first cruise, we went to the Philippines and while we were in dock, there was an explosion in one of the engine rooms and a couple of the guys that were working in the electricians got burned alive. And I've witnessed it all because I passed right through it. I don't care how strong of a person you are. You see somebody on fire, it can rattle your brain.

00:04:33
Speaker 1: I can't even imagine that. You started having panic attacks and anxiety. So you were honorably discharged because the anxiety and the panic attacks were getting worse.

00:04:48
Speaker 2: That's what the psychologist said.

00:04:50
Speaker 1: So Marvin returned from the Navy, got married to his wife Jan and with a baby on the way. Marvin picked up a second job doing maintenance work at their apartm and complex, and they lived across the hall from the victim and his family, with whom Marvin had two trivial run ins, like accidentally running over a few small toys with the lawnmower. The family also had a dog.

00:05:15
Speaker 2: I was going back here with the ride lawnmower, and I knocked on the door and asked him to take the dog in because I didn't want to run him over the lawnmower. So that night and I came back, the stepfather was standing there on the car and he threatened me behind, saying I'm going to run his dog over. And I said I adn't saying running your dog over. I walked away from him and kept going. The running over the toys was an accident by the lawnmower too.

00:05:39
Speaker 1: Later on, this interaction became an alleged motive in the death of the neighbor's three year old son, who was reported missing by the mother on November twenty second, nineteen seventy five.

00:05:53
Speaker 3: She calls the Richmond Police and she says that she last saw her boy at about one point thirty headed into a wooded area behind the apartment complex. She caused the cops to report him missing at two forty pm. The officers respond pretty quickly and they show up at the apartment complex at two forty five pm. They don't know the exact location, so they just randomly happened to knock on Marvin's door, who lived in the same apartment complex as the boys family.

00:06:22
Speaker 2: So I'm watching the game when I get a knock on the door. This guy doesn't identify himself. He just asked me who in the building has children? I said, well, the only ones across the hall. After the game, that's when I go out straight down the road to the highway. I thought I saw the victim and his a dog jump out from behind a car. I didn't think of anything. So when I come back, Channel twelve is set up and there's people running around everywhere. So I go over and see what's going on. They told me the victim was missing. I said, well, I just thought I saw him such and such. Well take us there and then we searched all around the area, and then I was going down to see my wife at night hospital. So we did it for about an hour. Then they thanked me and I went home got ready to go down to the hospital.

00:07:05
Speaker 1: Marvin's pregnant wife, jan was dealing with preclampsia, sometimes known back then as toxemia, so she was being monitored at the hospital. Meanwhile, a massive search operation was underway, which ended four days later when the little boy was found lying face up, fully clothed in shallow water in the James River, about nine miles from the apartment complex.

00:07:31
Speaker 3: The medical examiner saw what she described to be a white gelatinate material at the back of the boy's throat, so she swabs the boy's throat, puts it under a microscope and reports seeing sperm and so she ultimately concludes that the boy asphyxiated, with the implication being that he was orally sodomized and choked to death during the assault. Detectives were under a lot of pressure to solve this crime. I know the father of the boy had provided a list of individuals upon the request of the officers, but when they went weeks without any suspects or leads, they zeroed in on Marvin because he was a neighbor to the boys family.

00:08:12
Speaker 1: And Marvin had mentioned to the initial responders that he thought he had seen the boy while driving that afternoon.

00:08:19
Speaker 2: That and plus the even parents had told him that we'd had problems in the past. Here's the FBI knocking on my door. Write this statement saying you saw this, victims such and such, such and such, no problem. Then all of a sudden, the Richmond Police Department kept coming over to my house talking to me, and they kept trying to get me to say something about somebody else, and I said, I don't know anything about this. I can't say who did what or did not do what.

00:08:44
Speaker 1: Unwilling to create a different target, Marvin was asked to take a polygraph.

00:08:50
Speaker 2: I had nothing to hide, but that polygraph was strange because they gave me asked me about five questions. Then he just started strutting the thing off, jerking things around and said, man, you're lying. The police come running in and start screaming at me. So I took it as a setup, and that's when I figured out, hey, there after me, can.

00:09:07
Speaker 1: You also explain to me, just for somebody who doesn't really understand what it's like to deal with panic disorder, what goes through your body, like how your heart.

00:09:18
Speaker 2: Rate will increase, you will sweat, so you know, the polograph takes your breathing. It does your heart and everything. So if I got a racing heart and I'm breathing heavy and sweat, and They're going to think I'm lying about something. So that's when I told the police I have problems with anxiety depression and I forget things. The Navy they call them blackouts, because I call them blackouts. I don't know if I can explain that exactly I would be doing stuff. Then I come back. Oh man, I didn't know was that time like that? So that's when I told the police about it, and I guess that's when everything changed.

00:09:53
Speaker 1: However, Marvin's momentary alertness lapses, as well as police allegations of deceit fullness, were not enough to make an arrest. After all, our audience is quite familiar with the use of polygraphs as cudgeled to coerce false confessions, and it hadn't worked, so they took another stab a few days later when they picked up Marvin from work at around four forty pm for more questioning.

00:10:20
Speaker 3: Marvin had worked a nine hour shift and they proceeded to interrogate him for nearly ten hours without ever turning on the tape recorder.

00:10:29
Speaker 2: We was in a room about the size of your bathroom, four of them sitting around me. I was fenced in. All they said was, you know you're being questioned. You can have a lawyer if you wanted. I knew I hadn't done anything, so why do I need a lawyer. They started getting upset with me, getting loud, hollering at you don't tell us what happened. If we convict you, we're going to give you a death penalty and all that stuff like that. So I started having a panic attack at that time. So it was around eleven o'clock. They just finally said, man, I'm trying to get out of here. I want to get away from this. What do you want me to say?

00:11:01
Speaker 3: At this point, Marvin, who is twenty years old, he's young, He's been awake for nearly twenty four hours.

00:11:08
Speaker 1: And suffering with PTSD and anxiety.

00:11:11
Speaker 3: Attacks exactly, he just wants to go home. So he finally tells them what they want to hear.

00:11:17
Speaker 1: And not only that, but parents back details that only they knew at that point or thought they knew.

00:11:26
Speaker 3: If you listen to the confession, even if you read the transcript, there are several red flags that stand out that this is not a reliable confession. So, for example, Marvin is unable to supply any of the details, and so the officer has to supply the details of the act.

00:11:45
Speaker 2: They asked me, did you sexual assaultant? I'm like what that was? When I was stuttering, but la la la lah, and he said, you put his mouth over your privates. I didn't even know he was sex and exulted.

00:11:56
Speaker 3: To that moment, the officers ask Marvin what he did to the boy, and Marvin responds, I forced sexual assault. To me, that sounds like language that a detective would use rather than a twenty year old man.

00:12:12
Speaker 2: And by the way, I never took them to where the body was found. They played it up that I took them, but they really took.

00:12:17
Speaker 1: Me right after the interrogation.

00:12:19
Speaker 2: Right, this is two about two thirty in the morning. I've been up almost twenty four hours.

00:12:25
Speaker 1: And when do you realize that you've confessed to something you didn't do?

00:12:29
Speaker 2: The next day, when they pulled me in the rain me, I guess it was around six o'clock. They took me over to a courtroom in front of the magistrate and he told me I'm charged with murder and asked me in my financial situations before appointing me an attorney. My son was born ten days before I was arrested. I only knew him for ten days.

00:12:48
Speaker 1: How did you explain the fact that you had confessed to something that you didn't do to your family, to your wife.

00:12:56
Speaker 2: They visited me in the jail, I think the second day I was there. I told him I didn't have nothing to do with it, and I said, I don't understand how they can charge me. And then Jan spoke up and said, you know, they came through and took all their medication.

00:13:08
Speaker 3: So in Virginia, it's not enough to have a confession from somebody to achieve a conviction. You also have to have evidence that corroborates the confession. So after they got what they wanted from Marvin, they had to go execute a search board and then they collected the evidence that they would then use to corroborate the confession in the autopsy report. The toxicology report that came back showed high levels of alcohol and Cler's oxyzone, which is a prescription muscle relaxant in the boys' system.

00:13:38
Speaker 2: My wife had toxemia, but they took all of her medication at the hospital that gave her for that.

00:13:43
Speaker 1: Because they wanted to claim that.

00:13:45
Speaker 2: The drugs and the alcohol, which I had no idea what happened.

00:13:49
Speaker 3: Marvin never mentioned that in his confession. We think that the officers were trying to get that information out of him by asking, well, how did you get the boy to comply? But Marvin never makes any mention of the drugs or the alcohol.

00:14:02
Speaker 1: Remember, the victim's mother had reported that the last time she'd seen her son was around one thirty PM, and then first responders knocked on Marvin's door just seventy five minutes later, around two forty five PM.

00:14:18
Speaker 3: So we worked with a toxicologist to calculate how long it would have taken for the alcohol to reach the levels that it did in the boy's system, and a toxicologist puts that time period at ninety to one hundred and fifty minutes, which is well outside the seventy five minutes that Marvin would have had to commit all the acts that he states in his false confession.

00:14:39
Speaker 1: The police search turned up a few other items, a pair of shoes which Marvin said were torn up while dumping the body. There's also blonde hairs from Marvin's car and the pea coat.

00:14:51
Speaker 3: So he says that he wrapped the boy in a pea coat and tossed the boy forty feet into the river.

00:15:00
Speaker 2: I don't care. Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn't throw a dead body forty five feet. It was physically impossible.

00:15:05
Speaker 3: The other thing is that the boy's body was found with his arms crossed, as though he had been placed in the river. So it doesn't make sense that the body would land with its arms crossed if tossed in the way that Marvin described.

00:15:18
Speaker 2: And then when my lawyers first brought me the statement I had seen where I had said something about the pea coat and the shoes, and I explained them my shoes were destroyed at work. And then I says that pea coat was not even in my possession. My sisters had been using and my mom would wear it was my pea coat from the Navy. My sister's Patty used it to most. Now she's blind, and so is my little sister Lisa.

00:15:40
Speaker 1: But this was nineteen seventy five. DNA testing was not available yet, so the state's expert, Mary Jane Burton, sent the throat swabs for serological testing to find the blood type and then examine the hares under a microscope.

00:15:57
Speaker 3: Hair of my cross copee has now been debunked. It's a junk science, but at the time it was considered valid, and so Mary Jane Burton concluded that the hairs matched the three year old boy, placing the boy in Marvin's car. The other evidence that they obtained from Marvin was two towels from his car, and Mary Jane Burton said that there was ejaculate on one of the towels, which would seemingly corroborate the sexual assault theory.

00:16:22
Speaker 1: So, while they awaited the results of the serological testing from the victim's throat swabs, Marvin awaited trial under the care of a state appointed psychiatrist, all while his appointed attorney failed to develop any of the issues that discredit his statement or the state's theory.

00:16:43
Speaker 2: My lead attorney he was Robert Dooling. The police chief's name was Frank Louling. He was the family member of the police chief that was prosecuting me.

00:16:51
Speaker 1: That would seem like a bit of a conflict.

00:16:53
Speaker 2: Right at the time that he was representing me, he was up for judgeship in Virginia.

00:16:58
Speaker 1: And then the prology results came back.

00:17:01
Speaker 2: My attorney said, ed the saliva, and here's samples that it took from you. Inconclusive, they can't make a determination. Beth was the reason I entered the guilty piece. Said we didn't have anything to prove your innocence with. So he said, what's the only way we will save your life? So you should take the plead.

00:17:17
Speaker 1: But there are two issues with this advice to plead guilty, one of which we'll address now.

00:17:24
Speaker 3: So in Virginia at this time, the death penalty was only available for certain types of murder, murder for higher murder where there is extortion, and then murder by an inmate in prison. The crime that Marvin was accused of very obviously did not fall into any of those categories, and so there was no way death penalty would have ever been on the table for this crime.

00:17:44
Speaker 1: So the threat of death touted by both his interrogators and now by his own attorney didn't exist. Nonetheless, to seal the deal, the evidence underlying his guilty plea still needed to be heard by a judge, so hearing was held in March nineteen seventy six, where the medical examiner, Doctor Fierro, testified about the existence of sperm on the throat swabs as well as the towel, followed by Mary Jane Burton's findings that the hair from the pea coat and car were consistent with the victims, at which point the serological report was submitted to evidence, and importantly, doctor Fierro represented that the report did not change her conclusions from the preliminary report. Additionally, Marvin's attorney, Robert Doolan, did not challenge that assertion, and Mary Jane Burton was not called to testify about her findings or the sorology report. Then a detective took the stand to testify about Marvin's confession.

00:18:50
Speaker 3: The prosecution at the hearing describe how Marvin took the officers to the boy's body, but really it was the officers who took Marvin to where the box was found. The other point is that this was a highly publicized crime. There were details about the crime and the newspapers, including a detailed map of where the body was found.

00:19:11
Speaker 1: But Marvin's attorney didn't point that out either, or any of the other issues that could have discredited his false confession, and somehow an already terrible situation was made worse during that time.

00:19:26
Speaker 2: I was not in touch with reality. The psychiatrists I was seeing appointed by the state and he was keeping me on senequon value and something else. I forget what it is.

00:19:35
Speaker 1: Do you even remember the verdict?

00:19:38
Speaker 2: I remember as the judge was saying something, he seemed to be highly pissed. I want to say. During the guilty plea hearing, my attorneys warned me to keep my mouth shut, don't go in and a running my mouth because I was telling them I was innocent. They said, if you go and run in your mouth, the judge ain't going to accept you guilty, please, and you go get the death penalty.

00:19:58
Speaker 3: But the death plony was never on the table. It wasn't available for the crime with which he was charged. But Marvin, he was afraid of dying, and he was promised that he would be out in fifteen years. Of course we know that didn't happen.

00:20:11
Speaker 2: I was promised orally promised by both sides I'd be out in fifteen years, but they didn't put it in writing. I tried to keep the emotions out of it, because I knew if I got the emotions in anxiety would come about, and so with my depression, I was trying to stay away from that because during that time I had thought about it and actually tried at the city jail to commit suicide. Remember I told you Amy on Senequan. So I figured if I kept enough huh saved up, then i'd take it all one time. There I could probably get out of this situation. And don't ever think people are doing it because they're guilty of something they're not. You've ever been in a situation where nothing seems to go right, No matter what you do, it goes wrong. That was the kind of situation where I was living in at that time. So I was tired of life. I didn't want anything more to do with life. But all I did was sleep for two days and then I woke up. I spent my first five or six years in protective custody the administration. They didn't want my death on their head.

00:21:33
Speaker 1: I would assume that you're looked at as a bit of a pariah by the other inmates. With a much more uncomfortable than typical prison experience, Marvin began studying the law god his trial transcripts as well as the related records in which he found the serology report for the throat swabs.

00:21:54
Speaker 3: When Mary Jane Burton did that blood testing, Marvin is type A, the boys type Oh, the results come back showing type of secretions excluding Marvin, and that's something that they knew back in seventy six.

00:22:09
Speaker 1: Yet Marvin's own attorney never raised this clearly exculpatory report while advising him to plead guilty and save himself from certain death. I think it's worth mentioning that this attorney, Robert Doolan, accepted a judgeship in Virginia soon after Marvin's conviction. Anyway, this sorology report seems like it should have been very useful on appeal.

00:22:34
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:22:34
Speaker 3: So, I think one of the most fascinating facts about Marvin's case, in equally infuriating, is that Marvin had raised a lot of the same arguments that we ultimately raised in the petition in twenty twenty three that ultimately led to his exoneration, but he was denied on procedural grounds, or because that there were certain archaic statutes still on the books that made it very difficult for somebody like Marvin to prove his innocence. So for example, in Virginia, it used to be that if you had fled guilty, you could not petition for a writ of actual innocence. Of course, we know there are lots of reasons why somebody might plead guilty to a crime. They did it too, and that hurdle was not removed until twenty twenty.

00:23:21
Speaker 1: And here it was barely creeping into the nineteen eighties. But by the end of that decade we had the advent of DNA testing, at which point Marvin petitioned to test his evidence, but Virginia did not have a statute that allowed for it until two thousand and one, and Marvin hired an attorney named Mike Brickhill to handle his proceedings.

00:23:44
Speaker 2: By this time, my father had passed and he left me a bit of an inheritance, so I paid mister Brickhill to get my first runt of DNA testing done. And the judge that was presiding over the case for the DNA testing, he didn't know me, but he's telling my attorney all about the case. Well, then Brickhill found out Robert Dooling, my ex attorney. It was now judge was sitting in the back of the courtroom so the judge wasn't going to grant it, but the Commonwealth job said no, no, no, y're are we agree. Let's get this settle once and for all.

00:24:17
Speaker 1: The first round of testing for the throat swabs either excluded Marvin or were inconclusive, but the victim could be excluded from the hares on the PEA code they were all female, but the hares from the car could not yet be excluded.

00:24:34
Speaker 2: The problem was is they didn't get a sample of the victims, so they couldn't identify whose DNA it was they had. So the Commonwealth said they were not going to recognize the results of the DNA testing. Furthermore, they're going to oppose any more DNA testing that you request.

00:24:51
Speaker 3: And so the Supreme Court of Virginia denied the relief a on a procedural grounds as untimely. But then they also pointed to the fact that Marvin had pled guilty and that there were still some swabs that hadn't been excluded by DNA tests, and it still some of the hairs hadn't been excluded as the boys.

00:25:09
Speaker 1: Soon mister brick Hill enlisted the Innocence Project, who tried to access a vial of blood that could provide a DNA profile for the victim. But still the fact that Marvin pled guilty was a major obstacle to relief. So they also went to work on lobbying for legislation and eventually the team at Arnold and Porter also came on board.

00:25:32
Speaker 3: When we joined forces with the Nison's project on this case, our first goal was to prepare the clemency petition, but we knew that that was a long shot, and so we continued to collaborate with the ennosonce project working to get Marvin released on a role while we would continue to fight for his innocence. And so our strategy was really to understand the facts of the case, not just the DNA what was the timeline?

00:25:59
Speaker 1: So they I enlisted renowned false confession expert doctor Richard Leo to develop the evidence that discredited the false confession, as well as the toxicology expert who we mentioned earlier. Meanwhile, Marvin visited the parole board for the twenty seventh time in twenty twenty, where perhaps some of the new evidence had an effect as he was released after nearly forty five years.

00:26:24
Speaker 2: Well, I went in December and I came out in November, so it's forty four years and eleven months.

00:26:31
Speaker 1: That is your entire adult life to a certain extent. I know that you were compensated ultimately, right, But money.

00:26:44
Speaker 2: I don't care about the money. They should take the money to build the time machine and take me back to the day before I've arrested and leave me the hell alone. That's the way I think about it. I'd rather have the time back than the money. I wasn't at here as the world evolved when I came out in April twenty twenty. I was still thinking it was nineteen seventy five. Perfect example was when I made parole in Virginia. If you're a registered sex offender and they drop you off at your parole office, she gives me the rules and then they put a monitoring ankle bracelet on me and gave me this box GPS trackers, and she was explaining how it can pinpoint you on the map. So we go to leave take off down the road. The thing starts ringing and I don't know what it is, so I hit the button turned it off. It started ringing again, so I turned it off again. All of a sudden, my sister's phone rings and if my parole officer telling her tell him to answer that phone. I said that he' supposed to have the phone. He's been in prison for the last forty five years. So anyway, she called me again and I answered it, and we talked for a minute, and then she said, by the way, tell your sister to.

00:27:48
Speaker 1: Slow down, because they knew exactly how fast she was driving. After Marvin was paroled in twenty twenty, the fight to clear his name continued, and through the efforts of the Innocence Project in New York as well as the UVA School of Law to educate legislators on the issues facing many of the wrongfully convicted. New legislation passed first in twenty twenty, making Marvin's guilty plea no longer an obstacle to a wrint of actual innocence, and then another breakthrough happened in twenty twenty one.

00:28:35
Speaker 3: In Virginia, they would only consider DNA testing done by the state lab. And that's problematic because private laboratories sometimes have more advanced technology and they might be able to extract a DNA sample when the state lab might not be able to. And so that law changed in twenty twenty one and Virginia would allow for DNA testing by a private laboratory. So we had three labs look at the swaps that the medical examiner had taken from the boy's mouth that they said at that time had sperm on them, suggesting that the boy had been sexually assaulted. Three different labs looked at the swabs and could not find sperm, and that is problematic because sperm is one of the hardiest cells in the human body, and so experts have said that you can find sperm on a degraded sample long after the epithelial skin cells have degraded. You will find it on a sample that has been poorly kept. And so the fact that it wasn't there even though there was DNA from skin cells on the swabs, that DNA just happened to match the boy, not Marvin. That means that the boy likely wasn't sexually assaulted, and that the substance in the boy's throat was likely his own phlegm. So that was one piece of new evidence that we used in our petition. The same labs had also looked at the towel that Mary Jane Burton had said contained sperm on it. And had concluded there was also no sperm on the towel.

00:30:12
Speaker 2: The towel it was in my car, but I used on cold days wipe down the windshield instead of waiting for the defrostr I'd wipe the windshield down. That's what that towel was.

00:30:20
Speaker 1: So it appears that the state's experts presented false testimony to support the exphyxiation by sexual assault theory.

00:30:30
Speaker 3: And then the other DNA piece of evidence that we used. Modern DNA testing of the eight hares found in Marvin's car excluded the boy as the source from those hair, so no longer placing the boy and Marvin's car.

00:30:45
Speaker 1: Not only were the hares not the boy in.

00:30:49
Speaker 3: Question, they belonged to six six different people. Yes, yes, which just shows you how junk science hair microscopy is. Some of the hairs were female and the co Marvin's sisters had been wearing. The new evidence shows that Marvin confessed to an impossibility. What he pleaded to, what he confessed to did not happen. There's no evidence of a sexual assault. The new toxicology report shows that Marvin couldn't have done everything that he said in his statement in the seventy five minute window really is an impossible feat.

00:31:23
Speaker 1: As was the alleged forty foot launch of the body into a riverbed where the victim was found with his hands neatly folded on his chest. So they piled this new evidence into their filing in April of twenty twenty three.

00:31:39
Speaker 3: After we filed the petition in twenty twenty three, we had met with the Attorney General's office, had presented our case, answered some of the questions that they had, and I think left feeling good. But in these cases, you never want to assume that the other side is going to join your petition, no matter how strong of the case you think you have. And I should say that the Virginia Attorney General's Office did a fantastic job at doing their own investigation and in fact uncovered exculpatory evidence that we had no idea existed. So in Marvin's statement, he says that he tore his shoe on the river bank throwing the body into the river, And so they had taken his shoe and done testing of the dirt on the shoe to see if it matched the soil from where the body was found. And there is a report showing that it doesn't match, which is exculpatory.

00:32:32
Speaker 1: And while the state's reinvestigation continued through the spring of twenty twenty three, a podcast called Admissible Shreds of Evidence released twelve episodes covering twelve wrongful conviction cases tied to one Virginia LabTech Mary Jane Burton, who was initially lauded as a hero for having saved physical evidence from decades old cases that would have otherwise been destroyed.

00:32:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's unfortunate because people viewed her as a hero because her preservation of this evidence allowed people to test that evidence later on and clear their name. But then it also begs the question, well, were they wrongfully convicted in the first place because of Mary Jane Burton?

00:33:16
Speaker 1: And a whistleblower came forward who was positing exactly that one who had also tipped the podcasters to Marvin's case.

00:33:26
Speaker 2: Did you ever hear the thirteenth episode called the Fallout, where the podcaster found out through the whistleblower about my case. She described the whole case and she said that Mary Jane Burton is being under pressure to come to these conclusions. And they talked to the Attorney General and he told them about the investigation they did. They basically said they came away from the labs standing was this really a crime?

00:33:48
Speaker 1: After all, there was no evidence of sexual assault. There was the presence of prescription drugs and alcohol which may have been accidentally ingested, potentially leading to an unfortunate series of events ending in death, and perhaps the Attorney General's office came to the same conclusion, and they reached out to Marvin's team.

00:34:09
Speaker 2: They told my attorneys that they're one hundred percent behind me. I'm innocent. I need to be granted rit of actual innocence. And then we finally got the oral arguments and I sat in I was very very unhappy with what I heard, and the judges when they got ready to close it, and he says, well, you'll be hearing from us soon rather than later. And sure enough, like twenty eight days later, here comes the decision of the court.

00:34:31
Speaker 3: Marvin got the order from the Virginia Court of Appeals that he was exonerated.

00:34:36
Speaker 1: So when was the first time that you really truly felt free?

00:34:40
Speaker 2: I was about two weeks later. I decided I'm going down to visit my friend in Virginia Beach. He's another Exgonnery that was in Greensville with me. He hasn't been officially exonerated yet, but he was granted parole based upon DNA testing. So I went down to seem and as far out as I'd been from the city was the airport. So as I passed by the exit, I was a little nervous. I kept I kept thinking, oh man, what's going to happen here? But that finally hit me by the time I got to the Virginia Beach. Hey, I can do anything I want to you now except break the law.

00:35:14
Speaker 1: Well, there's the first time for everything, right, since you hadn't broken the law ever before in your entire life. Right, So you know there are people who were at fault in this case, right, Mary Jane Burton, your attorney, those police officers who lied to you during the ten hour interrogation. What would accountability look like?

00:35:35
Speaker 2: That's a good question. I thought, maybe, okay, maybe they made a mistake. But when you find out how intentional it was. The time I was finally exonerated of the judge, three of the detectives, Mary Jane Burton, and one of my attorneys had already passed. One of the guys asked me he being a Christian, like I'm being a Christian. You know, they say that someday everybody's going to be judged by Guy. He asked me, what are you going to do when your attorney steps up in front of God to be judged. I said, I'm going to step back a few steps. Kay's lightning hits him.

00:36:10
Speaker 3: I mean, Marvin will never get those forty nine years of his life back. His family will never get that time back, and the same is true for the victim and the victim's family. Right the victim's family may never know what happened to their loved one given the passage of time. But I think we still try to achieve accountability. First, I think we need acknowledgment from the state, and as part of that, I think we need a public examination into the decisions, the incentives, the culture that led to this wrongful conviction in the first place, so that we can prevent it from happening in the future. And alongside of that, frankly, we need awareness of wrongful convictions, which is why I think conversations like this are so important, because we need people to understand that people confess to crimes that they don't do. We need people to understand that there is junk science being used in courtrooms to convict people. And we also need justice reform to change some of the archaic laws that are still on the books that make it difficult for people like Marvin to fight for the innocence.

00:37:20
Speaker 1: And so what do you hope that people take away from Marvin's case in particular?

00:37:26
Speaker 3: I think an open mind. There is still a lot of disbelief over the fact that somebody could confess to a crime that they didn't do, and so I think being aware of these cases and recognizing that it does happen, and that there are certain circumstances and that create an environment that is ripe for somebody to give a false confession.

00:37:49
Speaker 2: I'm like this. I believe that most wrongful convictions happen because you have a public defender, the state. They have ample amount of funds to prosecute you, and they only give attorneys ay fifteen hundred dollars to defend you, and they're not going to investigate the case. They're just going to assume you're guilty because the state charged you. So that's where I think most wrongful convictions come about. Thanks to DNA and other things, it's coming up. A lot of innocent people are sitting in prison.

00:38:27
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all Lava for Good podcasts one week early and add free by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kathleen Fink, as well as executive producers Jason Vlahm, Jeff Kempler, Kevin Wardis, and Jeff Clyburn. The music in this production was supplied by three time Oscar nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us across all social media platforms at Lava for Good and at Wrongful Conviction. You can also follow me on Instagram at Lauren Brightfchecko. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number One. We have worked hard to ensure that all facts reported in this show are accurate. The views and opinions expressed by the individuals featured in this show are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Lava for Good.