After 45 Years of Incarceration, Marvin Grimm, Jr. Celebrates Christmas Without the Shadow of Wrongful Conviction

This Christmas, Marvin Grimm, Jr. will finally experience what he has long dreamed of — a holiday free from the shadow of a wrongful conviction. For the first time in decades, this holiday season will not be marred by the restrictions of a sex offender registry, the forced family separations that resulted, or the stigma of a false conviction. 

“It’s been a long journey,” Mr. Grimm said, reflecting on the 45 years he spent fighting to return home to his family. “When it was time for me to go back to my cell [after a family visit], it was always a letdown, because I had to go back and they got to leave.” 

Mr. Grimm spent more time in prison than any client exonerated by the Innocence Project for a crime he did not commit. He was released on parole in 2020 and required to register as a sex offender despite his innocence. In 1975, a young boy went missing and his body was found on the southern banks of the James River in Virginia. With no other lead, Mr. Grimm, who lived in the apartment across from the boy and his family, became a possible suspect simply due to “previous arguments and encounters” with the boy’s family.  After a nine-hour work shift and approximately nine hours of interrogation, Mr. Grimm falsely confessed that he had abducted, sodomized and murdered the boy. 

With the assistance of the Innocence Project and Arnold & Porter, he was finally exonerated in June. 

During Marvin’s incarceration, his sisters Sharon and Lisa Grimm, — along with their late sister Patty and parents — made holidays a priority. 

“There was not a holiday that we didn’t go to the prison that Marvin was at, whether it was Thanksgiving or Christmas,” said Lisa, who was only 10 years old when her brother was wrongly convicted. “He just always came first the morning of the holidays, and then the family would do something in the afternoon.” 

Even after his release, their holidays were celebrated in shifts because Marvin’s sex offender status at the time prevented him from attending certain family gatherings where young children were present. 

“My nephew, Scott, has a son, whom I was prohibited from seeing because of my charge and what I was convicted of,” he said. “So Sharon would spend the morning with Lisa and me then leave and head over there to Scott’s house for the afternoon.”

After Marvin’s exoneration and removal from the registry this year, the entire family will now gather for the first time in decades without restrictions.