Virginia Exonerates Marvin Grimm, Jr. in 1975 Murder Case After 45 Years of Wrongful Incarceration – Innocence Project

The State’s Flawed Case

On March 15, 1976, to satisfy the need for corroboration of the plea, the circuit court heard a summary of the state’s evidence against Mr.Grimm. In addition to testimony from police and  Mr. Grimm’s confession, the state presented forensic evidence analyzed by Ms. Burton. 

This evidence included Ms. Burton’s lab report with results from microscopic testing of the eight   hairs found on Mr. Grimm’s car floorboards and on a child’s sock in the car, as well as on a pea coat found in his apartment. Ms. Burton visually inspected slides made from swabs of the pharynx, epiglottis, esophagus, nasal passage, and oral cavity and a towel recovered from Mr. Grimm’s car that had a stain indicating the presence of what she believed to be sperm. Dr. Fierro, who performed the autopsy, also testified, erroneously, that there was spermatozoa on a “thick white gelatinate material” in C.H.’s mouth. 

After hearing this forensic evidence and the testimony from officers who obtained Mr. Grimm’s confession, the circuit court accepted Mr. Grimm’s guilty pleas on all three counts and sentenced him to life in prison on the murder and abduction charges, plus 10 years on the sodomy charge. 

New Evidence of Mr. Grimm’s Innocence

After years of post-conviction litigation, in April 2023, attorneys from the Innocence Project and Arnold & Porter submitted a petition for writ of actual innocence before the Virginia Court of Appeals, seeking to vacate Mr. Grimm’s murder conviction based on newly discovered DNA and non-biological evidence.

The Virginia Office of the Attorney General joined the petition. On June 18, 2024, the Virginia Court of Appeals granted the petition, based on the newly discovered evidence, including: 

DNA Evidence: In 2011, the Virginia Department of Forensic Science performed DNA analysis of the eight hairs found in Mr. Grimm’s car, a sock in the car, and a peacoat in his apartment that were previously attributed to C.H. Through this testing, C.H. was excluded as the source on six of the eight hairs. Testing on one of the two remaining hairs was inconclusive, and the other lacked sufficient mitochondrial DNA to make a meaningful comparison. Thanks to changes in Virginia law, the two remaining hairs were sent to a private, accredited laboratory that was able to analyze the two remaining hairs. C.H. was excluded as the source of both the hairs, and they were determined to be from different sources. 

Post-conviction DNA analysis also eliminated Mr. Grimm as a possible contributor of the genetic material detected in the swabs taken from the epiglottis, esophagus, oral cavity, and non-sperm fractions of the pharynx swabs. Further, examinations by the Virginia Department of Forensic Science and two leading private labs of the white substance that had been collected on swabs found no spermatozoa, disproving the medical examiner’s theory of the case. 

Toxicology Report: Dr. Jeffrey Brent, a board-certified medical toxicology

physician with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, reviewed the toxicology reports developed during

the autopsy of C.H. In conducting this review, Dr. Brent considered the quantities of the substances present in C.H.’s system, the amount of food identified in his stomach, and his physical size. When all these factors are taken together, Dr. Brent concluded it was more probable than not that C.H. ingested the alcohol, chlorzoxazone, and acetaminophen found in his system at least 90 to 150 minutes prior to his death. This timeline of events would have made it impossible for Mr. Grimm to have committed the crime, since it was undisputed that he was alone in his apartment within 75 minutes after the mother of the child claimed she had last seen her child walk off alone into the woods. 

A Long Fight to Prove Innocence Post-Conviction

The campaign to prove Mr. Grimm’s innocence was fought in the courtroom and the statehouse. 

Mr. Grimm initially requested DNA testing in the late 1980s, but faced a number of hurdles. At that time, Virginia law did not allow post-conviction DNA testing, and a writ of innocence for new biological and non-biological evidence was only available to people who went to trial, not those who accepted a guilty plea, as Mr. Grimm did. 

Years of lobbying legislators in Virginia, an effort led by former Innocence Project Directors of Policy Michelle Feldman and Rebecca Brown, the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project and the Innocence Project at the UVA School of Law, led to changes in Virginia law. 

Because of their efforts, Virginia permitted access to post-conviction DNA testing, lifted the guilty plea bar for those seeking a writ of innocence for new biological and non-biological evidence, and allowed people accused of crimes to get testing at private, accredited labs. Without these reforms, Mr. Grimm would have been unable to make his case for innocence. 

Mr. Grimm’s exoneration took decades of painstaking investigation and litigation by a long list of attorneys at the Innocence Project and Arnold & Porter, in particular Ms. Friedman and former Innocence Project attorney Olga Akselrod. These two lawyers spent a combined two decades working on behalf of Mr. Grimm. Innocence Project’s Senior Staff Attorney Tim Gumkoski also joined Ms. Friedman. More recently, Mr.Neufeld and Innocence Project’s Director of Special Litigation Vanessa Potkint added their expertise to the Innocence Project team. Arnold & Porter collaborated with the IP for many years, led by Partner Jeffrey Horowitz and now retired Partner Glenn Pogust, Senior Attorney Robert Grass, and Senior Associate Angelique Ciliberti.

From 2008 to 2017, the University of Richmond School of Law’s Institute for Actual Innocence, directed by Professor Mary Tate, also supported the legal efforts. 

“Working to exonerate Mr. Grimm was truly a team effort involving not only our Arnold & Porter team, but also multiple attorneys over the years from the Innocence Project, and could never have been accomplished without the unwavering support of Marvin’s sisters and entire family.” said Mr. Horowitz. 

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Innocence Project

The Innocence Project works to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone. Our work is guided by science and grounded in anti-racism. For more information, please visit www.innocenceproject.org.  

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