April 23, 2026 • 38 mins
On July 17, 1982, in Hanover County, VA, a white woman was raped by a black man who was a total stranger. During the rape, the man beat her and threatened her with a gun, and also mentioned that she was not the only white woman he had had sexual relations with. Based on this statement alone, police immediately suspected 18-year-old Marvin Anderson to be the perpetrator because Marvin lived with his white girlfriend at the time. Despite a complete lack of evidence linking him to this crime, and evidence pointing to another more viable suspect, Marvin was convicted of rape by an all white jury, and sentenced to 210 years in prison.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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,
(00:22):
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
(00:46):
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
(01:08):
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.
(01:35):
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
(01:56):
to introduce yourselves. Marvin, can you introduce yourself please?
Speaker 2 (02:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Thanks Marvin. Vanessa can you introduce yourself please.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
That's extraordinary, Vanessa. Thank you. Marvin. I've never been to
Hanover County. Take me back to your childhood in Hanover County.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
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.
(03:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
And what sport did you play?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Marvin, baseball, football, basketball, softball, a little bit of everything.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
You know, what sport didn't you play?
Speaker 2 (03:22):
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,
(03:44):
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
(04:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
What do you think drew you to want to be
a firefighter? It's a very specific and demanding job.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
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?
Speaker 2 (04:51):
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
(05:14):
like my kind. But I knew to stay away from them.
I've respected them, Whether they respected me, that was on them.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
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?
Speaker 3 (05:42):
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
(06:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
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
(06:46):
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
(07:08):
kind of kept my distance, but try to live a
normal life as best as I could.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
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?
Speaker 3 (07:50):
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
(08:12):
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
(08:33):
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,
(08:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Marvin, Ashland was a pretty small, tight knit community, Like
you said, at the time, did you hear anything about
what had happened?
Speaker 2 (09:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
And this officer was someone you knew pretty well.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
So these two officers, Roy Anderson and Marshall Bailey are
questioning you.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
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,
(11:16):
you know, would you be willing to take a polograph test?
And the course I agree to do.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
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?
Speaker 2 (11:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
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
(12:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Vanessa, what do we know about Royan Marshall's training at
that time? Are they beat cops? How big was Ashlan
Police Department?
Speaker 3 (12:36):
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
(12:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
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
(14:02):
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
(14:23):
recognizing Marvin from the lineup or from the incident.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
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.
(15:26):
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
(15:47):
a forensic testing and that testing was unable to exclude
Marvin as the assailant.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
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
(16:41):
really talking about what happened. They got the wrong person,
this who did it?
Speaker 3 (16:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
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,
(17:46):
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
(18:06):
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
(18:29):
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
(18:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
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
(19:40):
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
(20:00):
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,
(20:22):
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,
(20:44):
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
(21:06):
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.
(21:29):
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,
(21:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
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
(22:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
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
(23:38):
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
(24:01):
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
(24:36):
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
(24:58):
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?
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Marvin, how did you survive? How did you protect yourself
in there?
Speaker 2 (25:21):
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
(25:41):
locked up, and he never asked me. But we became
good friends, almost like brothers, and we kind of looked
out for one another.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
And what about your fiance? Did she stay in your life.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
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
(26:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Which he did at a state court hearing before the
same judge as the first trial, Richard Taylor.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
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
(27:23):
DNA to corroborate it. The confession of the actual assailant
is just not believed.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
So here we have another jaw dropping, unbelievable moment in
this story, Vanessa, When did the Innocence Project get involved
in Marvin's case.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
And did you have any idea what you were looking for?
Speaker 3 (27:57):
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.
(28:19):
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
(28:39):
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
(29:02):
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
(29:24):
file and made a startling discovery.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
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
(30:03):
off to storage with closed cases and was in a
box in a file room for years to come.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
And when you had those swaps tested, what did they
tell you?
Speaker 3 (30:15):
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
(30:35):
the start and who had even confessed to being involved
twenty years before.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
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?
Speaker 2 (31:01):
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.
(31:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
So thinking about that officer, Roy, was he still around
when you were fully exonerated.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
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
(32:06):
what happened between.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Us, Vanessa, Were there any consequences for anyone, including that officer,
for the way that this case was handled.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
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
(32:39):
the alternate suspect. I mean, that is a conflict. That
evidence should have been presented to the jury, but it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
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,
(33:08):
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?
Speaker 3 (33:20):
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
(33:42):
wrongfully convicted people, but also have flaws in her work
at the same time, and it seems like those two
truths might coexist.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
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
(34:15):
you'd like listeners to take away from your story.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
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.
(34:41):
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
(35:04):
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
(35:29):
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
(35:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
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.
(36:28):
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
(36:50):
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,
(37:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
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,
(37:56):
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
(38:17):
F A n t z dot com. Wrongful Conviction is
a production of Lava for Good podcasts and association with
Signal Company Number one
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,
(00:22):
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
(00:46):
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
(01:08):
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.
(01:35):
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
(01:56):
to introduce yourselves. Marvin, can you introduce yourself please?
Speaker 2 (02:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Thanks Marvin. Vanessa can you introduce yourself please.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
That's extraordinary, Vanessa. Thank you. Marvin. I've never been to
Hanover County. Take me back to your childhood in Hanover County.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
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.
(03:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
And what sport did you play?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Marvin, baseball, football, basketball, softball, a little bit of everything.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
You know, what sport didn't you play?
Speaker 2 (03:22):
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,
(03:44):
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
(04:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
What do you think drew you to want to be
a firefighter? It's a very specific and demanding job.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
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?
Speaker 2 (04:51):
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
(05:14):
like my kind. But I knew to stay away from them.
I've respected them, Whether they respected me, that was on them.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
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?
Speaker 3 (05:42):
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
(06:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
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
(06:46):
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
(07:08):
kind of kept my distance, but try to live a
normal life as best as I could.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
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?
Speaker 3 (07:50):
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
(08:12):
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
(08:33):
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,
(08:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Marvin, Ashland was a pretty small, tight knit community, Like
you said, at the time, did you hear anything about
what had happened?
Speaker 2 (09:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
And this officer was someone you knew pretty well.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
So these two officers, Roy Anderson and Marshall Bailey are
questioning you.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
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,
(11:16):
you know, would you be willing to take a polograph test?
And the course I agree to do.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
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?
Speaker 2 (11:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:47):
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
(12:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Vanessa, what do we know about Royan Marshall's training at
that time? Are they beat cops? How big was Ashlan
Police Department?
Speaker 3 (12:36):
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
(12:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
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
(14:02):
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
(14:23):
recognizing Marvin from the lineup or from the incident.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
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.
(15:26):
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
(15:47):
a forensic testing and that testing was unable to exclude
Marvin as the assailant.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
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
(16:41):
really talking about what happened. They got the wrong person,
this who did it?
Speaker 3 (16:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
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,
(17:46):
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
(18:06):
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
(18:29):
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
(18:49):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
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
(19:40):
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
(20:00):
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,
(20:22):
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,
(20:44):
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
(21:06):
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.
(21:29):
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,
(21:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
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
(22:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
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
(23:38):
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
(24:01):
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
(24:36):
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
(24:58):
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?
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Marvin, how did you survive? How did you protect yourself
in there?
Speaker 2 (25:21):
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
(25:41):
locked up, and he never asked me. But we became
good friends, almost like brothers, and we kind of looked
out for one another.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
And what about your fiance? Did she stay in your life.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
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
(26:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Which he did at a state court hearing before the
same judge as the first trial, Richard Taylor.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
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
(27:23):
DNA to corroborate it. The confession of the actual assailant
is just not believed.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
So here we have another jaw dropping, unbelievable moment in
this story, Vanessa, When did the Innocence Project get involved
in Marvin's case.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
And did you have any idea what you were looking for?
Speaker 3 (27:57):
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.
(28:19):
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
(28:39):
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
(29:02):
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
(29:24):
file and made a startling discovery.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
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
(30:03):
off to storage with closed cases and was in a
box in a file room for years to come.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
And when you had those swaps tested, what did they
tell you?
Speaker 3 (30:15):
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
(30:35):
the start and who had even confessed to being involved
twenty years before.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
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?
Speaker 2 (31:01):
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.
(31:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
So thinking about that officer, Roy, was he still around
when you were fully exonerated.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
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
(32:06):
what happened between.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
Us, Vanessa, Were there any consequences for anyone, including that officer,
for the way that this case was handled.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
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
(32:39):
the alternate suspect. I mean, that is a conflict. That
evidence should have been presented to the jury, but it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
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,
(33:08):
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?
Speaker 3 (33:20):
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
(33:42):
wrongfully convicted people, but also have flaws in her work
at the same time, and it seems like those two
truths might coexist.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
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
(34:15):
you'd like listeners to take away from your story.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
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.
(34:41):
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
(35:04):
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
(35:29):
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
(35:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
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.
(36:28):
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
(36:50):
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,
(37:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
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,
(37:56):
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
(38:17):
F A n t z dot com. Wrongful Conviction is
a production of Lava for Good podcasts and association with
Signal Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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