Black American man was jailed since 1988 for a crime he did not commit

A Black man in the United States was found wrongly serving a prison sentence, about 35 years after he was imprisoned following a conviction for an armed robbery, a charge he is now exonerated from. The victim, Sidney Holmes, now 57, was arrested in October 1988. He was convicted by a jury in 1989 for allegedly acting as the driver for two men who robbed a man and woman at gunpoint.

Holmes, who had served nearly 35 years of a 400-year prison sentence, was freed after the Florida state decided to reinvestigate the concerned 1988 armed robbery charges in which Holmes was accused of being the driver who ran away while carrying the robbers in a vehicle.

According to Broward county state attorney Harold Pryor, Holmes maintained that he had not committed the crime he was convicted of. Proyer then contacted the state attorney’s conviction review unit in November 2020, which considered and subsequently began reinvestigating the case.

"Prosecutors with the Conviction Review Unit (CRU) determined that Holmes had a plausible claim of innocence because of how he became a suspect and because of the precarious eyewitness identification that was the principal evidence against him at trial," Pryor said.

The Conviction Review Unit then found that eyewitness identification of Holmes was reportedly a "misidentification" and the techniques used by the law enforcement to identify Holmes were "scientifically unreliable.

The functionaries of law enforcement in Florida who performed the original investigation "expressed shock" that Holmes was sentenced to a crime did not commit.