On July 7, 982, a young woman was raped by a black man in Virginia, who approached her on a stolen bicycle, and beat her, threatened her with a gun, and raped and sodomized her. After reporting the crime, due to the perpetrator mentioning that he had a white girl at home and was black, a police officer singled out Marvin Anderson, who was an 8-year-old local black man with a white girlfriend. As Anderson had no criminal record, the officer obtained a colored employment ID from his employer as a photo which was later shown to the victim along with six other black and white mugshots of potential suspects. Marvin was falsely identified by the victim, and identified again in a live lineup, with the added detail of Anderson having a white girlfriend only confirming who she thought was the perpetrator. From the beginning of the case, the community suspected another man, John Otis Lincoln, who
had stolen the bicycle involved in the rape from a man half an hour prior to the incident. Although Anderson requested for both the owner of the bicycle and Lincoln as witnesses, his counsel denied. Anderson was convicted by an all-white jury on all accounts and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment, despite being his first conflict with the law and having an alibi, as his mother, girlfriend and neighbors saw him washing his mothers car at the time of the crime. Lincoln later confessed, but the same judge from the original trial refused to vacate the conviction. Only when his case was accepted by the Innocence Project in 994, and they were able to win access to DNA testing in 200, did DNA evidence exclude him as a suspect, was Anderson proven innocent. Then in 2002, Anderson received a full pardon by the Virginia Governor, Mark Warner, after spending 5 years in prison and 5 years on parole.