He got a 400-year sentence for a robbery. 34 years later, he’s exonerated.

Florida man exonerated after 400-year prison sentence for robbery - The Washington Post
Harold Pryor was a toddler in 1989 when 23-year-old Sidney Holmes was locked up. Holmes was sentenced to 400 years in Florida prison for allegedly driving a car connected to an armed robbery in which no one was injured. Prosecutors said weak eyewitness testimony took three decades from Holmes. Holmes is spending time with a daughter who wasn’t born when Holmes was locked up, said Seth Miller, executive director of the Innocence Project of Florida. Now Holmes has grandchildren to learn about outside the confines of prison. He wants to get his own home and possibly start a food truck. “It was grossly unfair and it was shocking,” Pryor said. “It truly shocked the conscience of not only me but anyone who came across this case.” Holmes applied in November 2020 to have his case reexamined by the Conviction Review Unit in Pryor’s office. The prosecutors in the unit wrote a 26-page memorandum that successfully explained why a judge should free Holmes with help from the Innocence Project of Florida. “The Broward State Attorney’s Office would not have charged Holmes if the case were presented today,” read the memo. About 6:30 p.m. on Father’s Day 1988, a man and a woman went to a One Stop convenience store near Fort Lauderdale to put air in their car tires, according to the filing. While the man was on one knee filling a tire, “two Black men ‘came out of nowhere;’ one of the men said ‘give it up’ and the other said ‘shoot him.’ ” The assailants pointed a gun at the woman and demanded money. Investigators wrote that the man who was filling his tires gave conflicting statements, which first came nine days after the incident, about a third person who drove up in a brown car and seemed to be with the two assailants who drove off with the car. No physical evidence tied Holmes to the crime, according to the memo, but the victims said Holmes had driven the brown car. When the current prosecutors contacted a deputy who worked the original case and told him that Holmes had been sentenced to 400 years, the memo said he responded with: “I’m in utter shock. He got that for this case?” The detective who worked the case responded that he was “shocked” because “the sentence is crazy,” according to the filing. Both victims, when interviewed by investigators in 2022, said they couldn’t have accurately described the driver of the brown car because he never got out. Neither picked Holmes out in initial photo lineups, but the male victim identified Holmes in smaller lineups. The memo said investigators did nothing wrong — just that research on lineups and identification has changed a lot since 1988, so this was likely a case of misidentification. Investigators wrote that a big issue is that the detective at the time had Holmes as the only person to appear in multiple lineups, which is something that witnesses pick up on. A criminology professor told the current investigators that Holmes should not have been included in the lineup because the alleged connection to the crime was not strong enough and that he shouldn’t have been the only one included in multiple lineups. “We now know it probably wasn’t the best practices and they shouldn’t have relied primarily on that,” Pryor said. Both victims told investigators they felt Holmes should be released. Holmes got wrapped up in the case because the victim’s brother said he’d also been robbed by someone driving an Oldsmobile that sounded like the description given. So, about two weeks later, the brother happened to be behind Holmes’s car and wrote down the plate number. He gave the plate number to his brother, who then handed it to the police. Today’s investigators spoke with the founder of the R.E. Olds Transportation Museum in Lansing, Mich. He told them the Oldsmobile Cutlass was “the best-selling car in the United States from 1976 to 1983.” In 1988 alone, he told investigators, Oldsmobile produced 15 variations of the Cutlass model for a total of nearly 400,000 vehicles. The memo said investigators likely overlooked the fact that the car descriptions between the brothers didn’t align because of confirmation bias, which they described as “the commitment to the belief that Holmes was the perpetrator irrespective of evidence to the contrary.” Jurors didn’t know any of that because the brother never testified to the jury, said Miller with the Innocence Project of Florida. “They had no idea the specious and strange nature that Sidney Holmes became connected to this crime,” Miller said. There was another factor: Holmes had been convicted of an armed robbery that had happened four years earlier. “I imagine the tunnel vision that exists in this case … that kind of confirmed to law enforcement that this is the guy,” Miller said. The memo quotes the prosecutor in the case, Pete Magrino, as saying during the pretrial sentencing investigation: “Based on his prior contact with the criminal justice system and his actions in this case, [Holmes] should not be released from prison while his body is still functioning.” Miller said he imagines tunnel vision can set in for law enforcement officers when they see a prior conviction. Magrino asked the judge to sentence Holmes to 825 years in prison to “ensure that he won’t be released from prison while he’s breathing.” The judge thought 825 years was too much, so he sentenced Holmes to four centuries instead. Magrino now works as a prosecutor in the quiet northern extremes of the Tampa Bay Area. When he got to the State Attorney’s Office in Hernando County, according to a 2003 story in the St. Petersburg Times, he displayed a placard a friend had given him on his desk that read: “I’m not prejudiced. I hate everybody.” Magrino was busy preparing for court, according to an employee at his office, and did not immediately respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment Thursday. When investigators writing the memo reached out to Magrino, he said he didn’t ask for a life sentence because he knew Holmes would have been eligible for parole in 25 years. “He does not believe there was anything wrong with the case,” according to the memo. Pryor said his office and the new Conviction Review Unit are committed to overturning bad convictions. The Unit has received inquiries from 311 people asking about their case between September 2019 to January 2023, according to data provided by Pryor’s office. “Prosecutors in general, we’ve always had that idea that our only function is to … lock people up and throw away the key. But there’s also other aspects to your job,” Pryor said. “We have to be unbiased,” Pryor said. “We have to make sure that we get it right.”