Sidney Holmes, who was sentenced in 1988 to 400 years in prison for an armed robbery in Broward County, north of Miami (Florida, USA), will probably be released this Monday after spending almost 35 years behind bars, local media reported.
Holmes, now 57, is expected to be released Monday following a request issued by the South Florida county prosecutor's office's Sentence Review Unit.
Holmes contacted this unit in November 2020 and claimed that he was innocent of the 1988 armed robbery of two people at a convenience store that he had been accused of, the local channel NBCMiami reported.
Holmes, who was a resident of the city of Lauderhill, received a hefty sentence for being the alleged driver of the vehicle in which two unidentified men were traveling who robbed and robbed a man and a woman at gunpoint and stole the car from one of them. they.
The Conviction Review Unit, in collaboration with the Florida Innocence Project, investigated and found that Holmes pleaded "plausible" innocence due to how he became a suspect and "the poor eyewitness identification that was the primary evidence in against him in the trial," said the outlet.
Investigators found that an eyewitness identification of Holmes was "likely a misidentification," in part due to the photo-alignment and line-up practices used by law enforcement at the time.
Broward Circuit Judge Edward Merrigan signed an order Monday approving the Broward District Attorney's office and the Innocence Project's request to vacate the conviction and sentence against Holmes.
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