On April 12, 2011, Calvin Wayne Cunningham was exonerated by DNA evidence when the Virginia Supreme Court finally granted his petition for Writ of Actual Innocence. Working with Zach Beasley and Andrew Dulberg—our dedicated co-counsel at WilmerHale—MAIP’s Virginia DNA Staff Attorney John Hardenbergh has been fighting to prove Calvin’s innocence since 2009, and is ecstatic that Calvin is finally cleared of a rape for which he was wrongfully convicted of in May of 1981, nearly three decades ago.

Although Calvin is incarcerated on other (nonviolent) charges, this exoneration only reaffirms the importance of Virginia’s Old Case Testing Project. In 2006, MAIP worked with then-Governor Mark Warner to secure DNA testing in hundreds of cases from the Virginia Department of Forensic Science in which biological evidence, leftover from 1973 to 1988, was found to be saved. And today, Calvin became the 6th exoneration since the project was implemented five years ago.