A man who served more than 34 years of a 400-year sentence for an armed robbery was released from a Florida jail this week after prosecutors dismissed charges against the wrongly convicted man.
“I never lost hope and always knew this day would come,” Sidney Holmes, now 57, said when he learned he would walk free, according to a statement from the Innocence Project of Florida, which worked on his case. “I cannot wait to hug my mother in the free world for the first time in over 34 years.”
The Broward County state attorney’s office said Holmes contacted its conviction review unit in November 2020, saying he was innocent of the 1988 crime.
Based on the recent review of the case, prosecutors “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,” the state attorney’s office said.
The Broward state attorney’s office would not have charged Holmes if the case were presented today,” the conviction review unit wrote in its final memorandum on the case.
A judge on Monday approved the request from the state attorney’s office and the Innocence Project to vacate Holmes’ sentence and conviction, and prosecutors dismissed the charge, the state attorney’s office said.
That afternoon, Holmes walked out of a Broward County detention facility and into the emotional embrace of his mother and family.
“We have one rule here at the Broward state attorney’s office — do the right thing, always,” Broward County State Attorney Harold F. Pryor said, adding he commended the “candor and assistance” of the victims, witnesses and officers in the reinvestigation of the crime.
Innocence Project of Florida Executive Director Seth Miller, a co-counsel for Holmes, thanked Pryor and the conviction review unit in a statement for looking “objectively at old cases” and “giving Sidney his life back.”
