At the request of the Virginia Supreme Court, he helped establish and chair an annual Advanced Indigent Defense Training Seminar to draw top lecturers from across the country to train Virginia’s defenders at no cost. With his law partner, he won the non-DNA exoneration and release of a man serving a life sentence for a murder he did not commit, and he argued in the United States Supreme Court that a Richmond trespassing policy violated the free speech rights of public housing residents. He assisted the State Crime Commission in the creation of Virginia’s Writs of Actual Innocence, and after determining that criminal defendants throughout Virginia were routinely losing their appellate rights because of attorney error, he helped draft the procedure that was enacted by the Virginia General Assembly to restore those rights. When biological evidence was discovered in twenty years of old case files stored in Virginia’s crime laboratories, he helped persuade state political leadership to order statewide DNA testing. When the pace of that testing stalled, he worked to obtain the passage of two successive bills mandating effective notification of interested parties that this new evidence had been discovered. He is a recipient of the Virginia State Bar’s Lewis F. Powell Pro Bono Award in recognition of his years of indigent defense and efforts toward indigent defense reform. He is a frequent lecturer on criminal justice and defense issues.