For 6,895 days, Guy Miles sat behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit.
He lost years of freedom, along with the opportunity to watch his son grow up.
But now, authorities have officially exonerated him — acknowledging his innocence in the 1998 Fullerton heist that robbed him of nearly two decades of his life.
“I always knew the truth,” Miles in a statement Friday. “I just needed the system to catch up to it.”
Miles said he was grateful the truth mattered, even after all these years, but that he wishes more than anything his dad were alive to see his name cleared.
He was originally convicted of two counts of armed robbery and a firearms charge in 1999 following the robbery of a Fidelity Financial Services office, and given a “three strikes sentence” of 75 years to life.
His conviction was based in part on the false testimony of two eyewitnesses, despite the fact that five people testified Miles was in Las Vegas on the day of the crime, according to the Orange County district attorney’s office.
He was separated from his young son and spent more than 18 years incarcerated, all while maintaining his innocence.
In 2010, he filed a habeas petition to challenge his detention with assistance from the Innocence Center, a San Diego-based nonprofit law firm dedicated to freeing people who have been wrongly convicted.
According to the center, two men — later identified as Jason Steward and Harold Bailey — pulled firearms on two Fidelity employees and demanded money in June 1998. They made off with $1,410 in cash and $4,138 in personal checks in a getaway car driven by another man, Bernard Teamer.
Police initially struggled to identify suspects, as the descriptions given were generic and a detective compiled an error-ridden photo lineup, according to the center.
“One employee identified Guy Miles from the lineup, even though there were issues with the identification process,” the center said in a statement. “The other, influenced by the detective’s statement about an arrest, also identified Guy.”
During trial, Miles presented an alibi defense that included testimony from his parents, 12-year-old son, a neighbor in Las Vegas and the manager of his Las Vegas apartment, according to the district attorney’s office. They all said Miles could not have been in Fullerton during the crime because he had picked up his son from his parents’ Carson home the night before the robbery and traveled to Vegas the following morning.
Miles also presented scientific studies on the flaws of eyewitness identifications, and collected DNA evidence didn’t match him, according to the Innocence Center. Nonetheless, a jury deliberated for five days and ultimately found Miles guilty.
Years later, after the statute of limitations had expired, the three actual perpetrators — Steward, Bailey and Teamer — all confessed, according to the center.
In 2017, a California Court of Appeal reversed Miles’ conviction, acknowledging that new, credible confessions would have changed the outcome of his trial.
He faced the possibility of a retrial, but instead opted to accept a plea deal that allowed him to be released based on time already served.
He was later awarded nearly $1 million from the Victim Compensation Board of California for his wrongful imprisonment. However, his conviction remained in place.
That was until Friday, when the O.C. district attorney’s office decided to set aside his guilty plea and vacate the conviction, following a review from its Conviction Integrity Unit. This unit was formed by Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer in 2019 to review claims of wrongful conviction.
“Justice exists only when the quest for truth never ends,” Spitzer said in a statement Friday. “While the conviction of Guy Miles did not occur on my watch, I am proud to say that the decision to move to have it dismissed did.”
Audrey McGinn, senior staff attorney of the Innocence Center, said she was thrilled the district attorney’s office decided to dig deeper into the case and do the right thing.
“Although Guy came home in 2018, he still lived under the shadow of this wrongful conviction,” she said in a statement. “All the while, the hallmark of this case stared back at us: a flawed eyewitness identification procedure that never should have led to a conviction.”
The post ‘I always knew the truth’: Man falsely imprisoned for 18 years exonerated of O.C. robbery appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
