MIAMI — After spending nearly 35 years behind bars in South Florida, Sidney Holmes will be a free man.
The 57-year-old was exonerated Monday after a wrongful conviction for a 1988 armed robbery in Broward County. Family members caressed each other as they shed tears of joy in Courtroom 6870 of the judicial complex in Fort Lauderdale following Circuit Judge Edward Merrigan’s order authorizing Holmes to be let out of prison.
He is expected to be released from the county’s Main Jail within hours. He had been moved there from Everglades Correctional Institution in West Miami-Dade.
“There is no evidence tying Mr. Holmes to the robbery other than a flawed identification,” said Arielle Demby Berger, assistant state attorney for the 17th Judicial Circuit. “No fingerprints, no physical evidence. Nothing but one witness ID that we, your honor, believe was a bad ID.”
If the Lauderhill man hadn’t been exonerated, he would’ve likely spent the rest of his life in prison serving a 400-year sentence. He was 23 at the time of his arrest.
Tears streamed down Mary Holmes’ face as she glanced at her son in the courtroom Monday. He was stunned as the judge overturned his conviction and sentence.
“I was so elated,” Mary said. “I just kept praising God.”
She said she plans on taking him out to eat as soon as he’s released, which should be later Monday, pending paperwork from the Florida Department of Corrections.
Despite decades of challenges, the family never lost hope, said Nicole Mitchell, Holmes’ sister. And in that time, she never let her brother lose faith.
“It’s over,” she said. “It’s a long, long, long time overdue. A long awaited day.”
As the family fought for Holmes, they lost loved ones, including Holmes’ father and grandparents, said Jacqueline Dixson, a relative. But finally, his innocence came to light.
“God has been with this family for the 34 years,” Dixson said. “We just thank God for allowing this opportunity to come forward.”
Fighting for Holmes’ freedom
Holmes’ exoneration comes after a 2 1/2-year investigation with the Broward State Attorney’s Office, said Seth Miller, executive director of Innocence Project of Florida, a nonprofit that helps innocent prisoners in the state obtain their freedom and rebuild their lives. Holmes wrote to the organization in 2019, asking them to look into his case.
“In a lot of places, we need to fight tooth and nail just to even get to this point,” Miller said. “It sometimes takes 5 or 10 or 15 years just to vindicate someone.”
The organization took on the case because of “indicators of actual innocence,” such as car and photo lineup misidentifications, Miller said. Investigators also disregarded Holmes’ whereabouts, even though they were verified by several family members.
“When someone’s been in prison for three decades telling everyone ‘I’m innocent,’ ‘I’m innocent,’ — for many of these men and women, no one’s listened to them the entire time,” Miller said.
Holmes, Miller said, was flooded by emotions. Someone was finally listening to him — and fighting for his freedom.
“When he was brought out, he didn’t know that his conviction had been vacated already and that the state was going to drop charges.”
Faulty evidence led to Holmes’ conviction
Holmes had been accused of being the getaway driver for two unidentified men who robbed a man and a woman outside a convenience store in unincorporated Broward, just west of Fort Lauderdale, on June 19, 1988. He was convicted after a jury trial in April 1989, and sentenced the following month.
No one other than Holmes was arrested or convicted for the crime.
In November 2020, he contacted the state attorney’s Conviction Review Unit, a team tasked with identifying plausible claims of innocence on behalf of convicted defendants. After CRU determined that Holmes had a plausible claim of innocence, it conducted a thorough post-conviction reinvestigation with the help of the Innocence Project.
Following this collaborative review of the case, the CRU determined there was reasonable doubt Holmes was guilty because his conviction relied heavily on an eyewitness that likely misidentified him partly due to the photo and live lineup practices commonly used by law enforcement at the time. Broward State Attorney Harold F. Pryor and an Independent Review Panel also reached the same conclusion.
“Prosecutors do not believe there was any intentional misconduct by witnesses or law enforcement as the identification practices and technology have vastly improved since 1988 and deputies followed the accepted standards at the time,” the state attorney’s office said in a news release Monday. “The methods used would not be acceptable practices today.”
Despite the tortuous journey to prove he was innocent, Holmes said he never gave up.
“I never lost hope, and I knew this day would come,” Holmes said in the statement. “I cannot wait to hug my mother in the free world for the first time in over 34 years.”
