A measure of justice arrives 34 years too late

The judge in Fort Lauderdale who sentenced Sidney Holmes to 400 years in state prison for an armed robbery that he denied committing talked as if he was doing him a favor.

Prosecutor Pete Magrino had asked for 825 years, more than 10 lifetimes, “to ensure that he won’t be released from prison while he’s still breathing.”

“I think that 800 years is perhaps a little bit much,” Circuit Judge Mel Grossman said. That was in 1989.

Holmes, 57 and with much of his life behind him, became a free man Monday — and he’s still breathing. The shackles came off in a Broward courtroom after another judge voided his conviction and the state dropped the robbery charge, 34 years later.

Take heed, lawmakers

State legislators should be gravely concerned. This case highlights what too often goes wrong in the criminal justice system and why it is so wrong to demand more death sentences, as the governor and his allies want.

Holmes was freed on the recommendation of Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor, his conviction review unit, and an outside panel. They found Holmes was “highly likely” innocent and was the victim of misidentification by one of the two robbery victims, whose car was hijacked. Some questionable police practices were at fault. There was no other evidence against him, and he had alibi witnesses who swore he was elsewhere at the time.

“Nevertheless,” said the findings, “police forged forward with pursuing Holmes … because he (a young Black man) generally fit the description of the perpetrators and his car generally fit the description,” and he had also served time for two robberies that did not resemble the one in question.

Five presidents have been elected during the 34 years Holmes spent in Florida prisons, consistently denying guilt and refusing to bargain for his freedom by accusing other people. The car used in the crime was an Oldsmobile, which haven’t been made since 2004.

Grossman, a fixture for decades in the Broward courthouse, died in December. Magrino, no longer with the Broward prosecutor’s office, still defends the conviction and sentence. It was an armed robbery, a serious crime — but no one was killed or wounded in the crime outside a convenience store.

Injustice abounds

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of Holmes’ horrifying ordeal is how commonplace such miscarriages of justice are.

According to the National Registry of Exonerations at Michigan State University, 3,206 other present or former prisoners have been exonerated since 1989, the year Holmes was convicted. Of those, 30% owed in whole or part to mistaken or deliberate misidentification by witnesses.

There’s no knowing how many other innocent people remain imprisoned.

Thirty of the exonerees had been on Florida’s death row, more than any other state. According to the Innocence Project, whose Florida branch helped free Holmes, there have been 191 death row exonerations nationwide. Among them was Clifford Williams Jr, of Jacksonville, who spent 42 years in prison, six on death row, solely because of a mistaken or lying witness. He was released in 2019 on the findings of the conviction integrity unit at Jacksonville,

There’s no knowing how many innocent people have been put to death.

Lessons to be learned

There are lessons to be learned from the Holmes case.

For police: Remember how easy it is to be wrong.

For jurors: Be wary of convicting on an eyewitness ID alone, especially if it’s by someone who didn’t already know the suspect.

For the Legislature: End the crusade to give Florida the harshest death sentencing regime in the U.S. Because the Parkland killer won’t be executed, Florida may put innocent people to death.

And follow best practices for eyewitness identification.

In Holmes’ case, police showed his picture to the key witness in two successive photo lineups, a highly suggestive tactic. He identified Holmes only after seeing his picture a second time, and again in a lineup at the county jail. But everything after the first lineup was tainted because of repetition. Moreover, the officer conducting the lineups knew who the suspect was. Best practices forbid that. Everybody else in the lineups was noticeably lighter skinned than Holmes. That too was improper.

The armed robbery for which Holmes was wrongly convicted was not eligible for the death penalty. But Gov. Ron DeSantis and legislators are now irresponsibly rushing to allow as few as eight of 12 jurors in a capital case to recommend death — the most lenient standard in the country.

Only Alabama allows executions after a non-unanimous recommendation, but the minimum in that state is 10 jurors.

This is an overreaction to understandable outrage over the Parkland verdict, in which three jurors voted for a life sentence instead of death. One bill in Tallahassee (House Bill 555) would require a death sentence to be mandatory if eight jurors say so.

Avoid a ghastly mistake

Florida is “going in a direction that most states have gone away from,” said Richard Dieter, director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center in Washington.

In a groundbreaking study three years ago, the Center found a “heightened risk” that innocent people will be sentenced to death when one or more jurors have voted for life. That was true in at least 24 of Florida’s death row exonerations.

Jurors chosen for capital trials must have testified that they would be willing to impose the death penalty, so their reluctance to actually do it often signifies lingering doubt as to the defendant’s guilt.

In Florida, such doubts have often proved justified, and it would be a ghastly mistake for the Legislature to ignore that chilling reality.

CARLINE JEAN/ SOUTH FLORIDA SUN SENTINEL Sidney Holmes, 57, hugs his mom and aunt as he leaves the Broward County Jail on Monday. Holmes was exonerated after serving more than 34 years of a 400-year sentence for a 1988 armed robbery.