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A D.C. man convicted of raping and murdering a woman in 1982 has been exonerated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office due to new DNA testing that proved his innocence.

According to a release, Kevin Martin pleaded guilty to and was convicted of one count of manslaughter while armed in 1984 for the rape and murder of Ursula Brown. Martin entered an Alford plea, in which the defendant doesn’t admit guilt, but instead agrees that the government has enough evidence to convict.

Martin was sentenced that year to a prison term of 15 years to life for manslaughter and two consecutive terms of 10 years to life on robbery charges. He was paroled in 2009. As the Post points out, Martin’s “case marks the fifth time in as many years that federal prosecutors in D.C. acknowledged that errors by an elite FBI forensic unit have led to a wrongful conviction.”

According to court documents, Brown was raped and killed on November 1, 1982, when she was driving along Route 295. A car intentionally bumped her from behind, and when she got out to investigate the damage, she was abducted and taken to a home on the 4300 block of Martin Luther King Avenue SE. She was raped at the home, and when she tried to escape, she was shot in the head and stabbed. Her body was discovered near a dumpster next to an elementary school in Southeast, where it had been discarded.

Brown’s rape and murder was part of a string of attacks in October and November of 1982 in which several motorists were bumped by another vehicle and then robbed and assaulted when they got out to investigate. Although Brown was the only victim murdered, eight victims—seven women and one man—were robbed and/or assaulted.

Originally, Martin—along with two other suspects, William Davidson and Kevin Williams—pleaded guilty to taking part in the robberies, but Martin denied taking any part in the rape and murder of Brown. However, microscopic hair fragments found in Brown’s shoes matched hair samples taken from Martin. Moreover, Davidson testified that he acted as a look-out while Martin raped and killed Brown. Though Martin pleaded guilty, his lawyer said he was afraid of getting convicted of greater charges if he didn’t comply. “I understand that I was wrong in committing the robberies, but I never took part in the murder,” Martin said in court.

Martin and his defense counsel filed a motion to withdraw his original guilty plea and vacate the conviction in 2001, but when the Metropolitan Police Department searched for the physical evidence of the case, it came up empty-handed. In 2006, Martin’s defense negotiated a resolution with the government to reduce his sentence and he was paroled in 2009.

After the 2009 exoneration of another D.C. man wrongly convicted of rape and murder, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. began to review similar older cases and, after MPD located the necessary physical evidence in January of this year, tested the DNA that proved Martin didn’t kill and rape Brown.

“Thirty years ago, Kevin Martin was unjustly branded a rapist and murderer,” U.S. Attorney Ron Machen said in a statement. “Although Mr. Martin had been justly convicted of a series of armed robberies, the system failed us all when he was wrongfully convicted of a brutal rape and murder and, as a result, spent far too long in prison. DNA analysis has now provided evidence that a serial rapist—not Mr. Martin—committed this outrageous attack… This exoneration reinforces the importance of the task force we created in early 2010 to pore through old records to identify wrongful convictions. We continue to urge defense lawyers to come forward with any information about wrongful convictions where DNA testing or other evidence could remedy a wrong that was committed in the past. It is never too late to do justice.”

Here’s more from the Post on the review of an FBI unit that led to an exoneration.

The hearing came as Machen’s office nears the end of a 2-1 / 2 year review of all local convictions involving FBI hair matches that was launched in 2012 after demands by the D.C. Public Defender Service. The service has worked to exonerate four men convicted by such matches since 2009. And the troubling problems exposed in the FBI lab’s methods have led the FBI and Justice Department to undertake a nationwide review of more than 2,100 convictions in the 1980s and 1990s.