Sidney Holmeswho was sentenced in 1988 to 400 years in prison for an armed robbery in the boward countyto the north of Miamiit will be set free probably this Monday after spending almost 35 years behind bars, local media reported. Holmes, now 57, is expected to be released following a request issued by the South Florida county prosecutor’s office’s Sentencing 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 picked up.
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Holmeswho 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 assaulted and robbed a man and a woman at gunpoint and stole the car from one of them. The Sentence Review Unit, in collaboration with the Florida Innocence Project, investigated and found that Holmes filed a “plausible” plea of innocence due to how he became a suspect and “the precarious identification of the eyewitness that was the main evidence against him in the trial,” the outlet noted.
Investigators found that an eyewitness identification of Holmes was “likely a misidentificationin part due to the photo-line-up and line-up practices used by law enforcement at the time. Broward Circuit Judge Edward Merrigan today signed an order approving the Broward District Attorney’s office’s request and the Innocence Project to vacate the conviction and sentence against Holmes.