00:00:01
Speaker 1: On a Saturday afternoon in July of nineteen eighty two, a young woman was walking home in Ashland, Virginia, when she was approached by a man on a bicycle. He offered to walk her home. She said no and kept walking, but a few minutes later she saw the man again. He attacked her and dragged her to a secluded wooded area, then beat and raped her over and over. The woman later described her attacker to police as a light skinned black man with short, kinky hair. She also told them something he'd said while assaulting her that he had had quote other white girls. Officer Roy Anderson knew of only one black man in town with a white girlfriend, eighteen year old Marvin Anderson. When police picked Marvin up a few days later, he insisted he hadn't attacked that woman. He had an alibi, and his mother and girlfriend backed him up. But the victim picked out Marvin I'm a bunch of photos police presented to her, and she also identified him in a live lineup of other suspects. All of that sealed Marvin's fate with a jury who sent him to prison for an unbelievable two hundred and ten years. But this is Wrongful Conviction. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction. I'm Ashley Fontce, sitting in for Jason Flahm. I'm an investigative reporter who's cover crime and police misconduct for decades. I've also reported extensively on police bungling rape investigations, and so I was very interested in this extraordinary and outrageous story you're about to hear. I'd love for you guys to introduce yourselves. Marvin, can you introduce yourself please?

00:02:01
Speaker 2: Yes, thank you for having me. My name is Marvin Anderson. I was born and raised in Hanover County, Virginia, and I spent fifteen years incarcerated and five years on parole for a crime and did not committee.

00:02:15
Speaker 1: Thanks Marvin. Vanessa can you introduce yourself please.

00:02:18
Speaker 3: My name is Vanessa Podcain. I'm the director of Special Litigation at the Innocence Project in New York City, and over the course of the past two decades, I've helped exonerate over forty people nationwide.

00:02:34
Speaker 1: That's extraordinary, Vanessa. Thank you. Marvin. I've never been to Hanover County. Take me back to your childhood in Hanover County.

00:02:43
Speaker 2: It was a close knit community and African American people. You know, everyone knew everyone. You know, my grandmother and my great grandmother, all of them and my cousins were all was you know, in the same community. And then of course my mom and dad. I have three sisters. I had one brother who had died in an accident car accident when I was incarcerated. We all was close. You know. We had a nice big yard, but we could run around and play. We had dogs, chickens. A lot of things that we did growing up was like, you know, playing sports.

00:03:14
Speaker 1: And what sport did you play?

00:03:15
Speaker 2: Marvin, baseball, football, basketball, softball, a little bit of everything.

00:03:20
Speaker 1: You know, what sport didn't you play?

00:03:22
Speaker 2: Marvin didn't play volleyball too much. I did run track, so it wasn't much that I didn't really do. And at the time I didn't live too far from a volunteer fire department, so I spent a lot of my time there. At the age of ten, I was always at the fire station, you know, doing something, washing trucks, watching the guys train. Not only was I learning something, but it was a means of keeping me out of trouble. So from that time I was able to join the fire service. At the age of thirteen. As a junior farreman, I was able to train. I was to receive the first set of five year I was able to ride the trucks, learn how to pump the trucks, basically do everything that a dart farmer would do. The only thing that I couldn't do was go into a burning building.

00:04:15
Speaker 1: What do you think drew you to want to be a firefighter? It's a very specific and demanding job.

00:04:22
Speaker 2: My mom, my dad, my grandparents. You know, they taught us if there's someone out there in need or help, always give help in hand, regardless what color they were. If you can help them, you help them. And for the fire service, that was for me was a way of helping people.

00:04:40
Speaker 1: The fire station. You had black people who worked there, white people who worked there, a mixture of different ethnicities. And what do you think that taught you as well?

00:04:51
Speaker 2: That we all are equal? Back then, racism existed, but I never really felt what it was until I got arrested for my crime. You know, most African American child to grow up knowing who they can be around. When it came to racism, I just knew people that didn't like my kind. But I knew to stay away from them. I've respected them, Whether they respected me, that was on them.

00:05:22
Speaker 1: According to census data, around fifty thousand people lived in Hanover County in the early eighties. Out of those, forty three thousand were white and less than seven thousand were black. So, Vanessa, I want to turn to you now. Can you tell us more about the racial climate in Hanover County at this time?

00:05:42
Speaker 3: Well, I think in general, it's important for people to understand, you know, we're talking about nineteen eighty two, and if we just go back twenty thirty years, we are in the fifties and the sixties Virginia, and we are in a period of racial segregation. This is before the Voting Writes Act, or just within a decade and a half of the assassination of Martin Luther King, and so it may seem like, you know, that's far in America's history. That was just a very brief period of time from when we're talking about you know, when Marvin was eighteen years old in Hanover, Virginia.

00:06:23
Speaker 2: You had certain parts of the town where there's mostly you know, African American people live in a certain part of the town where it just only white people lived at but I had to say this. I stood out in Nashville because during that time my fiance was a white woman, so that wasn't something that was well known or for most white people during that time to get used to seeing a black man with a white woman. Then look, they would give us. It would burn a hole through a wall. You know, how dare you? But as far as my people, it's just two people dating. They accepted it more than most white people did. So kind of kept my distance, but try to live a normal life as best as I could.

00:07:13
Speaker 1: So at this point, you're eighteen years old, You and your fiance have just moved from Richmond to Ashland, and you're about to pursue your dream of becoming a full fledged fireman. You must have felt like everything was going your way more than.

00:07:27
Speaker 2: The counter had just started the first fire program, Well you could become a professional fireman, and I had just signed up for it. It was supposed to start it that fall.

00:07:39
Speaker 1: And then on July seventeenth, nineteen eighty two, this incredibly horrific crime happened in Ashland. Vanessa, What do we know about what happened that day?

00:07:50
Speaker 3: The victim in this case was walking home. She was taking a shortcut through wooded area of rural over County and was approached by a man who rode up to her on a bicycle, threatened her with a gun, and proceeded to sexually assault her. And it was a very brutal attack that lasted over the course of a significant period of time, and when it was over, she was taken to the hospital, a rape kit was collected, her clothing was collected. The victim in this case was a white woman, and she described the assailant as a light skinned black man with a medium frame, short hair mustache, and there weren't a lot of clues as to who this person might be, but at some point she related that the man who attacked her said that he quote had a white girl, And so the officer started to think, hmm, who in town could it be that's black that we know that is in a relationship or involved with somebody who's white. And there was only one black man in town that the officer knew who was involved with a white woman, and that was Marvin Anderson.

00:09:18
Speaker 1: Marvin, Ashland was a pretty small, tight knit community, Like you said, at the time, did you hear anything about what had happened?

00:09:26
Speaker 2: The crime actually took place on a Saturday, and that Sunday I had a softball game, so some of the teammates of minds. They was talking about what had happened, and during that time, a few of my teammates knew the perpetrator that committed this crime.

00:09:44
Speaker 3: People knew about the crime itself because it had made the news. But I think you know what's so remarkable about Marvin's case is that from the beginning, the community was aware of who really had committed the crime.

00:10:00
Speaker 1: And we'll talk about that more and who that person was a little bit later, but first, Marvin, can you tell us about the moment that you realized you were a suspect in the case.

00:10:11
Speaker 2: I was at work at the time. I worked at Kingsmain par of my amusement park, and one of my supervisors came down to my posts and said they needed to see me an administration. And when I entered a room, there was the officer that I knew, and I actually called him by his first name. I said, Hey, Roy, how you doing you know? And he didn't say anything.

00:10:32
Speaker 1: And this officer was someone you knew pretty well.

00:10:35
Speaker 2: Knew him so well that I've actually had eaten dinner at his dinner table with his kids. When I was growing up, Roy kids plays sports, so of course we met playing sports. So it wasn't like he didn't know me. He knew me.

00:10:50
Speaker 1: So these two officers, Roy Anderson and Marshall Bailey are questioning you.

00:10:55
Speaker 2: The other officer mostly did all the talking. And that's when he started to questioning about, you know, where was I at on the seventeenth of July around six thirty seven o'clock that afternoon. And I gave him my honest answer and I said, hey, I could have been anywhere, which is true. I could have been playing sports. I could have been at the fire station, you know, I just could have been anywhere. And he was asking about, you know, would you be willing to take a polograph test? And the course I agree to do.

00:11:21
Speaker 1: So, Marvin, throughout all of that experience where you're being questioned, you're cooperating with them. Did you ever think I should get a lawyer?

00:11:32
Speaker 2: No, you know, not once doing that entire question and even going down to the county lockup, did I think about a lawyer? You know, because I knew I didn't do what they said had happened.

00:11:47
Speaker 3: You know in cases like this, you know, you have Marvin, he's eighteen years old. They're law enforcement from his community. So they're people who you know, he's been raised to give a certain amount of deference to, and people that he knows, and they're coming at him from a perspective of, you know, we need your help in this investigation. And so he's not thinking that people are out to get him or that he is going to be railroaded for something that he didn't do. And we see this in wrongful conviction cases where people trust in the police, they trust in the system, they trust in the process, and are totally betrayed by it.

00:12:27
Speaker 1: Vanessa, what do we know about Royan Marshall's training at that time? Are they beat cops? How big was Ashlan Police Department?

00:12:36
Speaker 3: I don't really have the answers to that, but I think that it's helpful to contextualize that. You know, we're talking about very small towns, you know, a population of around seven thousand, eight thousand people, you know, and when you consider police forces in more rural areas, they're not really trained or have experience often times in handling serious crimes. And so when something like a rape or a murder happens a lot of times. We see in wrongful conviction cases that you have forces that just don't have the training or experience to really go about these more serious investigations.

00:13:16
Speaker 1: Right, So let's get back to that day. They didn't end up doing the polygraph test, but there was a photo array and a live lineup.

00:13:24
Speaker 2: And in front of thing about it. When I first walked into that room, I saw a picture, a photo of me in a photo and I knew I'd never been in trouble, so I was just curious, how did he get this photo of me? That photo was my job ID photo.

00:13:40
Speaker 3: His picture was the only color photograph among other black and white photographs that were mug shots, and so it's a standout. While it's a photo array that has many choices, in reality, because of the suggestiveness, there's only one right choice of who the suspect is, and once that identification was made from the photo ray, he's then put in an in person lineup. And what's so problematic about this is that he's the only person from the photo array who's repeated in the in person lineup, and so it's it's obvious who the suspect is when she sees the lineup, and this is referred to in cases as unconscious transference. You know, we don't know at this point is she recognizing Marvin from the lineup or from the incident.

00:14:29
Speaker 2: You know, my thought after the fact is that you know, if someone has shown you a photo of a person, regardless who that person may be, and within ten minutes you see that same person standing directly at front you, you're going to remember that phase of that photo. And that's what happened, Vanessa.

00:14:51
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the rape kit for a moment. Where was the rape kit tested and the significance of the zerology. Of course, this is a era before we get to DNA.

00:15:03
Speaker 3: At that time in sexual assault cases, the type of testing that was used was called ABO blood typing, and all it could do was include an individual among a large relatively large percentage of the population that could have been the source of biological evidence at a scene. So it was flight years far less precise than DNA testing. The victim in this case, after the sexual assault was taken to the hospital, a rape kit was collected, Zeman was recovered, and the evidence went to the Virginia Division of Forensic Sciences, which is the State Crime Laboratory for zerological testing, and an analyst there, Mary Jane Burton, did a forensic testing and that testing was unable to exclude Marvin as the assailant.

00:15:54
Speaker 1: And just a note for everybody listening, remember that name Mary Jane Burton, because she'll be very important to this case later on. So then, Marvin, on January twentieth, you get arrested.

00:16:09
Speaker 2: Of course, they took their first mug shot of me, fingerprinted me, and read me my charges that I was charged with rap, satomy, robbery, introduction and I was locked up that night, and that's when everything happened that kind of destroyed my youth. By this time, the community is really talking about what happened. They got the wrong person, this who did it?

00:16:44
Speaker 3: And all this From the very beginning, the community knew because Otis Lincoln had stolen a bicycle earlier that day, and that was the bicycle that was used in the attack.

00:16:55
Speaker 2: One of the guys that paid on my team said, yeah, you know, Pop stole my bike. There was a name that they called him, Pop Lincoln. He was referring to stole his bicycle, went off in the direction of where the crime had taken place and.

00:17:09
Speaker 3: People immediately made this connection between Otis Lincoln and the crime, but of course it was too lat because police had already focused erroneously based on this suggestive identification on Marvin.

00:17:22
Speaker 2: So we went to my attorney and informed him what the community is saying. They're saying that this John Pop Lincoln is the person they committed this crime. And my attorney sais well, I knew him. I represented him some years ago on a temporary rape on a female. So at that time, I'm thinking to myself that hey, okay, I got someone that's on my side now, someone that knows this man is capable of doing these things. So we'd hired him and met with him several times, and each time we met with him, we was bringing him new information about what happened that day. You know, we brought in more witnesses that testify that I was at a certain place, certain time. One of the witnesses that testified in my behalf was that Lincoln said that day that if he found a white woman and if they didn't want to give him any he would take it. And it's just sad to say it, but that's what he did that day. So fast forward, we went to our first put him in their hearing, and the victim came in and she described her attacker as a very very light, skinny complexing person, straight, white teeth, short kink of hair, maybe one hundred and fifty pounds, maybe five sixty five seven. Okay, Well, as you can see me today, I am not very very light skinny complexing person. And at that time I worked at kingsmani amusement park out in the sun all day long, so there's no way I could be a light skinned complexing person. That's not me. However, the person and she described was Johna's Lincoln, but yet she identified me as her attacker.

00:19:07
Speaker 1: So the trial began in December of nineteen eighty two before Judge Richard Taylor. Your attorney was Donald White. Take us back to that day, Marvin, if you can.

00:19:17
Speaker 2: I'm sitting there, I had my family behind me, my mom, dad, grandparents, and I look over at my jury. You know, It's consisted of eight women, four men, all white, and I'm thinking, I'm going to prison. No matter what happens, I'm going to prison. So they come off turning. Then called the victim O Ones to stand to testify, and he asked you know what happened. She said. I was returning from a restaurant, had a bucket of chicken in my hand. This black person approached me on the bicycle. He asked her if he could walk me home, and I said no, I don't live too far. He proceeded up the path, and when I approached him for the second time, he's laying on the side holding his knee like he hurt himself. And when I stopped to assist him, that's when he grabbed me. He dragged me in the woods, beat me, raped me, and he told me that you know, I wasn't his first white woman, that he had a white girlfriend and all of that, and he dragged me further into the woods and he beat me and raped me again, and then he left me there. So when it came to my attorney to question her, you know, he basically asked the same question that the cor attorney did. What happened? Is the person that you know did this to you? In his courtroom? She said yes, once again, she identified me as her attacker. So I'm still looking at the jury, you know, and every time it was almost like every word that came out of her mouth, they knew she was telling the truth. No matter who my attorney put on the stand was testified, what was gonna be a lie. I had my fiance testified that I picked her up from work one time, I went to my mother's house and washed the car. Return home, We ate dinner, We watched Fantasy Islands and The Love Boat that night, and we went to bed. I had my mother neighbors testified that I was there washing the car. And not only that, I had the two witnesses that overWe heard John's Lincoln at the car wash saying what he would do to a white woman if they didn't want to give him any So I'm thinking all of this in my favor. And once my attorney put Lincoln on the stand to testify that somehow it would tricker her memory of what happened, just by seeing him and hearing his voice. Well, my attorney didn't do that. He did not put Lincoln on the stand. And when I heard the judge ask my attorney if you had any more further questions, he said no, you're hona. I turned to my attorney and go, hey, wait a minute, what about me? I want to testify? When am I gonna testify his words? Were, Oh, everything's good, we don't need you to testify. He refused to put make it on stand, nor did he put me on stand.

00:22:08
Speaker 1: Marvin. I can't even imagine how frustrating that was for you. Frustrating is just not really a strong enough word to capture that. But as you would learn many years later, your attorney had his own reasons for not calling Lincoln to testify.

00:22:24
Speaker 3: Donald White represented John Otis Lincoln in connection with another assault that Lincoln was accused of, and that was a conflict because Marvin's defense at his trial was I'm not the person who committed this crime. This crime was committed by someone else. That someone else was a mystery at the time of trial. But of course Donald White could have presented evidence that that person was John Otis Lincoln, and he chose not to.

00:22:55
Speaker 1: Wow, Vanessa, that is just unbelievable. Rather than disclose that he had a conflict of interest, which would have disqualified him as Marvin's attorney, Donald White just left John Otis Lincoln out of the trial totally. So pretty much all the jury had to go on was the victim's identification of you, Marvin.

00:23:17
Speaker 2: The jury went out for deliberation in about thirty to forty five minutes, came back guilty for two cancer rates, stotomy, robbery in aduction, and just ask them, do you have a recommendation for sentenzen They say yes, we'anna we do two hundred and ten years in prison. Everything in the courtroom went blank, went dark. I could hear everyone in the court room, but I couldn't see noone. My family were sitting directly behind me, and I turned around to look at my mom and dad, and I could not see them. It's like I had fell in a dark hole and there was no light anywhere. I could hear them talking to me, saying, you know, everything's gonna be all right. We're gonna get you out. I could feel that the officers putting sackles on round my wrists, round my waist and ran my ankles, but I couldn't see them. Everything was dark. That first week, I cried myself to sleep every night. I had no appetite, couldn't eat. After maybe four or five months later, that's when I was transferred to the state penitentiary. My first day in this state penitentiary, seven guys approached me in another nubie and they wanted to fight us all because he moved a jacket from out of his seat and put it on. I picked the table that was in the hall, and they wanted to fight us. You know. So my first day was basically preparing myself for what to come being in prison?

00:25:16
Speaker 1: Marvin, how did you survive? How did you protect yourself in there?

00:25:21
Speaker 2: You pick your friends wisely. The people's incarcerated. You can see who's trying to do better for themselves while they're there, and you just pick your friends wisely. One of my best friends that I met when I was there, I never asked him why he was incarcerated, why he was locked up, and he never asked me. But we became good friends, almost like brothers, and we kind of looked out for one another.

00:25:50
Speaker 1: And what about your fiance? Did she stay in your life.

00:25:53
Speaker 2: Doing my incarceration. I did married my fiance. We remained at married for over ten years. We mutually agreed to have a divorce because we both had discussed about having children before all this happened, and I was not going to deny her that privileged to be a mother, and we got a divorce. She did have a baby girl. She was still visit me when she came to visit me, she would bring her daughter.

00:26:23
Speaker 1: So you went to prison in nineteen eighty three, and then five years later, something pretty remarkable happened, Vanessa. Can you tell us a little bit about that.

00:26:34
Speaker 3: In nineteen eighty eight, Wenn at that time had been convicted and was in prison for another crime and decided to come forward and actually confessed to having been the actual assailant for the crime for which Marvin was wrongfully convicted, and he agreed to testify.

00:26:55
Speaker 1: Which he did at a state court hearing before the same judge as the first trial, Richard Taylor.

00:27:02
Speaker 3: And the judge said, I don't find him credible. I don't believe him, and dismiss the evidence. And Marvin stayed in prison for another nine years after that before his release on parole. And this is something that we've seen in other wrongful conviction cases, where there's the true perpetrator confesses and courts dismiss it until there's forensic evidence like DNA to corroborate it. The confession of the actual assailant is just not believed.

00:27:29
Speaker 1: So here we have another jaw dropping, unbelievable moment in this story, Vanessa, When did the Innocence Project get involved in Marvin's case.

00:27:39
Speaker 3: Marvin wrote to the Nisence Project in the early nineties. We took on his case in nineteen ninety four and for the next five six years looked for the evidence from his case.

00:27:54
Speaker 1: And did you have any idea what you were looking for?

00:27:57
Speaker 3: The Innocence Project was searching for the rape kit itself to subject to DNA testing, and we couldn't find it. D Nnison's Project is a law clinic at Cardozo School of Law, so there were many law students who worked on Marvin's case. They were calling police departments, court clerks, the lab. Nobody could find the kid. It was gone. And this is the worst circumstance that we could have at the Nisonce Project. When we take on a case for DNA testing, our goal is to find the evidence to test it, and so to not be able to find the evidence, and this happens in about twenty five percent of our cases at the Innocence Project. We never get to testing. We have to close out the case for all purposes. Marvin's case should have been closed, but we had a dogged law student on his case, Bridget Burns, and she wouldn't give up. She said, you know, you can't close it out. And so at that time, Peter Nufel, the Innocence Project co director, knew the head of the Virginia Division of Forensic SCI's Crime laboratory, and so as a last ditch effort, he called the director just to say, hey, could you pull the case file from storage and take a look and maybe there's some type of notation, some type of paperwork in the file that could help us figure out if this evidence still exists and where it is. So the director pulled the case file, opened up Marvin's file and made a startling discovery.

00:29:28
Speaker 1: And that brings us back to Mary Jane Burton, the forensic analyst who performed those original sorology tests back in nineteen eighty two. Mary Jane, it turns out, wasn't exactly doing things by the book.

00:29:42
Speaker 3: So Mary Jane Burton, when her testing was complete, to cut off some of the tips of cotton swabs containing the evidence that was collected during the rape examination and taped those cotton tip swabs inside of her notebook. And that evidence that was saved inside of her notebook went off to storage with closed cases and was in a box in a file room for years to come.

00:30:10
Speaker 1: And when you had those swaps tested, what did they tell you?

00:30:15
Speaker 3: The test results came back and demonstrated that he was absolutely innocent, and the DNA was run through the DNA database and there was a hit. There was a match in the convicted offender database, and the person at match was John Otis Lincoln, the person who everyone knew from the start and who had even confessed to being involved twenty years before.

00:30:40
Speaker 1: Marvin. You had been granted parole in nineteen ninety eight and released, So by this time you were out of prison, but you were still living under the shadow of a wrongful conviction. And now in two thousand and one, thanks to that DNA test, your name was finally cleared. So what came next for you?

00:31:01
Speaker 2: Well, I went through the fire academy, I graduated top of my class, and within a year or so, I became a lieutenant. Two three years down the road, moved up ranks again. I just retired maybe two years ago from being the chief of the very sane fire department that I had joined when I was thirteen years old. And I'm still heavily involved in the fire service out there in that county. But yeah, I was able to achieve a dream that I had becoming a professional fireman after I got my name clear.

00:31:36
Speaker 1: So thinking about that officer, Roy, was he still around when you were fully exonerated.

00:31:44
Speaker 2: Yes, he never spoke to me. I would see him, you know, in restaurants or at the gas stations, and if he saw me coming across the parking lot, he would walk the opposite direction. Maybe his conscience had been eating at it over there that period of time, but he would never speak to me, or apologize or acknowledge what happened between.

00:32:07
Speaker 1: Us, Vanessa, Were there any consequences for anyone, including that officer, for the way that this case was handled.

00:32:17
Speaker 3: No, And unfortunately that's not unusual in wrongful conviction cases. Almost never is anyone held accountable, not the officers that were involved, the prosecutors or defense attorneys. Like in this case. I mean, Marvin's defense attorney had an obvious conflict having represented the person who actually committed the crime and was the alternate suspect. I mean, that is a conflict. That evidence should have been presented to the jury, but it wasn't.

00:32:47
Speaker 1: You know, Vanessa, there's one thing that I do want to bring up here, Marvin's innocence case hinged on DNA testing, which wouldn't have been possible if Mary Jane Burton hadn't broken the rules at her job. In fact, her action of saving those samples has actually resulted in the exoneration of a dozen other wrongfully convicted men at this point, But there are other cases I believe where her playing fast and loose with policy may have caused some harm. So what should we think about Mary Jane Burton?

00:33:20
Speaker 3: Is she heroic? Is this visionary? Does that mean that there isn't any part of her work that could come under scrutiny? And so I think it's just, you know, an interesting thing about our society that doesn't see nuance or can't see that people can both do something great like save evidence that leads to the exoneration of many wrongfully convicted people, but also have flaws in her work at the same time, and it seems like those two truths might coexist.

00:33:53
Speaker 1: Thank you both Marvin and Vanessa for being here telling your story on wrongful conviction and what put a link to the Innocence Project in our bio in case our listeners want to help support the great work that they're doing. And now we've come to the part of the show that we call closing arguments. This is a chance for you both to say anything that's on your mind, whatever you'd like listeners to take away from your story.

00:34:19
Speaker 3: Towards the beginning, you would ask the questions about the racial dynamics of Handover or Ashland specifically. And I just, you know, wanted to add that Loving versus Virginia is a landmark case in the United States which held that laws that were banning in a racial marriage were unconstitutional. That is in nineteen sixty seven, so we're just talking about fifteen years before the incident that led to Marvin's wrongful conviction. And there have been thousands of wrongful convictions catalog by the National Registry of Exonerations which starts at nineteen eighty nine. But wrongful conviction didn't just start in this country in the nineteen eighties, right, And we could go back to the thirties and look at the Scottsboro Boys, right, who were young black teenage males who were wrongfully accused and convicted of raping white women in Alabama. And this nation has had a long history of wrongful conviction when it comes to black men who are accused convicted have been lynched of purported sexual assaults involving white women. And that's a context that exists in Marvin's case. He's convicted and tried by an all white jerry, and just the amount of process that went into this investigation and the sentence that he was given a life sentence right two hundred and ten years and so race pervaded his wrongful conviction in ways that have deep roots in American history.

00:36:05
Speaker 2: A lot of people ask me how to die. You know, I should be angry, I should be angry at the victim. And my response is, I can't be angry at the victim. For the separate fact what happened did happen. Everything that she described that happened to her that day, it did happen, But it wasn't me who did these things to her. While I was incarcerated, tried to take advantage of the system as far as you know, completing my education, going to college, taking up trades and all of this to keep moving forward. And if I were to go through that time period being angry and mad at the world, I wouldn't be where I'm at today because I've seen what anger can do to people. While I was there, you know, I chose to better myself, to move forward and to help those that I need, to be a voice for what happened. And once again, you know, what happened to me happens every day. We as a society, it has to be aware and accept that there are innocent people, men and women who are incarcerated for something or crimes they did not commit and we need to help and that is my goal to help change these laws and policy so we can have a better place for everyone.

00:37:35
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. You can listen to this and all Lava for Good podcasts one week early by subscribing to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'd like to thank executive producers Jason Flamm, Jeff Kempler, and Kevin Wartiz for inviting me to sit in today, and thanks to our production team Connor Hall, Annie Chelsea, Lila Robinson, and Kathleen Fink. 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, and you can follow me by going to my website Ashley Fonts dot com. That's Ashley A s H L E y F A n t z dot com. Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one