WASHINGTON, D.C. —October 6, 2026 —In a major victory for the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project (MAIP), the District of Columbia Court of Appeals (DCCA) has ruled in favor of Anthony Faltz for the second time, vacating the Superior Court’s denial of his petition under the District’s Innocence Protection Act (IPA) and ordering that his case be returned to Superior Court and reassigned to a new judge for further proceedings.
In its September 24, 2026, decision, the DCCA found that the Superior Court failed to properly consider significant exculpatory evidence presented at a 2022 IPA hearing and key portions of the record—including police statements that another suspect—not Mr. Faltz—was driving the vehicle involved in a fatal 2002 crash that claimed two lives.
The appellate court concluded that the Superior Court’s analysis was legally and factually deficient and held that Mr. Faltz’s IPA petition must be reconsidered in light of the totality of the evidence.
This marks the second time the DCCA has identified significant problems with the Superior Court’s handling of Mr. Faltz’s innocence claim. Given the repeated and similar errors with the Superior Court’s analysis, the appellate court took the unprecedented step of ordering that the case be reassigned to a different judge.
For Mr. Faltz, MAIP and co-counsel from Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP, the ruling represents a significant step forward in the ongoing effort to have the full evidentiary record considered—and to ensure that his claim of innocence receives the careful review required under the IPA.
THE CASE:
Mr. Faltz pleaded guilty in 2006 to two counts of involuntary manslaughter arising from the 2002 crash, after his court-appointed attorney advised him on the morning of jury selection that his DNA was “all over the [driver’s side] airbag” and that pleading guilty was the only way to avoid a maximum prison sentence. Although Mr. Faltz has consistently maintained that he was a passenger in the Ford and that another suspect was driving, he told the writer of his Presentence Report after entering his plea that he had pleaded guilty because he “didn’t think it was a winnable case,” per his court-appointed attorney.
The identity of the driver has been central to Mr. Faltz’s efforts to establish his actual innocence. In the moments immediately following the crash, police officers on the scene reported seeing another suspect emerge from the driver’s seat and flee into the woods on foot, identifying that person as the driver. Official police records describe the other suspect as the driver based on the officers’ observations and other physical evidence. Officers also reported seeing Mr. Faltz emerge from the back seat on the driver’s side, not the driver’s seat of the vehicle.
The Government reversed its theory of the case and charged Mr. Faltz as the driver only after DNA testing of the Ford’s driver-side airbag showed that Mr. Faltz’s DNA could not be excluded from a sample taken from the center of the airbag. Mr. Faltz subsequently pleaded guilty. The trial court sentenced Mr. Faltz to sixteen years on each count of involuntary manslaughter, to run consecutively, for a total of thirty-two years of incarceration.
In 2016, new DNA testing provided additional evidence: there was a second DNA sample from the right edge of the same airbag. Using probabilistic genotyping analysis that was not available in 2022, defense expert Dr. Norah Rudin concluded that the DNA additional sample likely belonged to the other suspect, the one police initially had identified as the driver. The government’s DNA expert challenged portions of Dr. Rudin’s methodology but ultimately agreed that both Mr. Faltz and the other suspect were likely contributors to the airbag-edge sample.
That evidence is significant because the government’s theory has relied heavily on the proposition that DNA found on the driver-side airbag demonstrates who was driving. But the presence of DNA from two individuals on the same airbag raises a fundamental question about whether DNA placement alone can establish the identity of the driver.
The case also involves competing accident-reconstruction testimony about whether only the driver could have struck the center of the airbag during the crash. Government experts testified that the nature of the collision and the design of the airbag made it effectively impossible for the driver to miss the center of the airbag. Defense expert C. Gregory Russell offered a different reconstruction, concluding that the forces of the collision would likely have thrown the occupants diagonally and caused the driver to miss or only skim the airbag. He also testified that the forces of the crash could have distributed DNA throughout the vehicle. Most importantly, Mr. Russell testified that in a high-speed “t-bone” collision, the placement of the DNA says little to nothing concrete about the location of the people in the car.
That issue is central to Mr. Faltz’s claim. The crash was a significant T-bone collision, the available evidence did not establish the vehicles’ speeds with exact precision, and the defense presented evidence that the forces generated by the collision could have affected the occupants’ positions and distributed biological material throughout the vehicle. Under that evidence, the mere location of DNA on an airbag cannot necessarily establish who was sitting in the driver’s seat.
THE OPINION:
In its September 24th opinion, the DCCA upheld the Superior Court’s decision to admit the government’s accident-reconstruction experts but found significant problems with the Superior Court’s subsequent evaluation of the evidence supporting Mr. Faltz’s innocence claim.
Most importantly, the DCCA concluded that the Superior Court failed to meaningfully address the police eyewitness evidence identifying another suspect—not Mr. Faltz—as the driver. The appellate court described that evidence as “the single most important piece of exculpatory evidence” in the case and explained that, if believed, the eyewitness accounts would establish Mr. Faltz’s innocence of the offense for which he was convicted.
“The DNA evidence in this case has never been the magic bullet that the government claimed and Mr. Faltz’s own trial lawyer apparently believed,” said Jay Millikan, Staff Attorney for the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project and lead counsel for Mr. Faltz. “The Court of Appeals has now made clear that the police eyewitness evidence identifying another suspect–not Anthony Faltz–is not a minor piece of evidence to be brushed aside but must be properly considered as evidence that could establish Mr. Faltz’s innocence.”
The DCCA also identified weaknesses in the trial court’s treatment of the competing expert testimony, including the failure to adequately address defense testimony about the possibility that the Ford’s movement during the collision could have caused the occupants to miss or skim the airbag. The appellate court also noted that the government did not perform a true accident reconstruction at the time of the crash, using estimates and doing its analysis after most of the scene evidence was gone; nonetheless, the trial court failed to adequately explain why it credited those conclusions despite those acknowledged limitations.
The DCCA further concluded that the Superior Court improperly evaluated portions of Mr. Faltz’s testimony, finding that it had mischaracterized or placed undue weight on aspects of Mr. Faltz’s account, including his uncertainty about his precise position in the back seat, whether he struck the airbag, and how he sustained his injuries.
The opinion also emphasized that the District’s IPA expressly contemplates claims by individuals who pleaded guilty but maintain that they were actually innocent. Accordingly, Mr. Faltz’s guilty plea, standing alone, cannot be treated as evidence defeating his actual-innocence claim.
The circumstances surrounding Mr. Faltz’s guilty plea will also be relevant to the new proceedings. Mr. Faltz has maintained that he felt his defense did not adequately investigate his case, particularly the government’s claims about the scientific evidence, and that his decision to plead guilty must be understood within that context.
Because the Superior Court had made nearly identical errors in its earlier consideration of the case, the DCCA ordered that the matter be reassigned to a different judge on remand, citing concerns about the trial judge’s prior comments questioning whether an innocent person would ever plead guilty, as well as the repetition of significant analytical errors identified in the Court’s earlier 2024 decision.
The new judge will now be required to reconsider Mr. Faltz’s IPA petition based on the existing record and the totality of the evidence. The DCCA specifically stated that it was not holding that Mr. Faltz must prevail. Rather, the new proceeding must properly consider the eyewitness testimony, DNA evidence, competing expert opinions, and Mr. Faltz’s explanation for his guilty plea.
“This is a major step forward for Anthony Faltz, but it also speaks to a broader problem in our criminal-legal system: even though nearly a quarter of all exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations have involved people who pleaded guilty, too many judges are unwilling or unable to recognize and grapple with that reality,” said Shawn Armbrust, Executive Director of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project. “This opinion says that they must.”
Mr. Faltz’s case now returns to the Superior Court for a fresh consideration of his IPA petition. “After everything I’ve been through, I’m grateful for the opportunity to have my claim heard again,” said Mr. Faltz. “I’m staying hopeful, trusting the process, and believing that the truth will lead to justice, finally.”
As of the date of this release, Mr. Faltz remains incarcerated in a federal prison in Kentucky.
Case: Anthony Faltz v. United States, No. 25-CO-0361
Court: District of Columbia Court of Appeals
Decision: September 24, 2026
Prior appellate decision: Faltz v. United States, 318 A.3d 338 (D.C. 2024)