In 1989, he was convicted at age 23 of being the driver of a 1988 armed robbery in South Florida. The sentence pronounced was very heavy, 400 years in prison. Yet Sidney has always claimed his innocence.
In 2020, thanks to his lawyers, he was able to appeal to the Broward County Conviction Review Unit to defend him. And this time, his complaints paid off. Justice reviewed his judgment and considered that the charges against him are not sufficient.
What calls this condemnation into question are the identification practices used at the time. First, the main eyewitness of the facts was unable to recognize Holmes among six pictures presented to him. His face will then be integrated into a selection of photos of several suspects, where the witness will eventually point to him. And it was on the basis of this testimony that Sidney was sent to prison for many years. But his vehicle, a brown Oldsmobile Cutlass, also incriminated him by being identified by witnesses as the car that had been used in the robbery. While this model was very widespread in the United States at the end of the 1980s. The sentence initially requested by the courts was 825 years in prison, because Sidney had already been convicted in the past of armed robbery.
The Broward State’s Attorney’s Office concluded that ‘there is no evidence linking Holmes to the robbery’, citing ‘misidentification’ by the then-witness, and confirmed Holmes’ innocence. the man. The victims of the armed robbery, too, finally recognized the fragility of the file and demanded that the detainee be released. He was then able to find his relatives, including his mother. “I can’t have hate, I just have to move on. I never lost hope”, he told reporters upon his release.
