By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
The State v. Sidney Lamar Holmes is finally over. After 34 years behind bars, he’s now two years out of prison. And with Gov. Ron DeSantis’s signature this month on a special appropriation to compensate Holmes, unanimously passed by the Legislature, Florida’s taxpayers are out $1.72 million.
The state paid Holmes, 59, after determining he was “wrongly incarcerated” for a June 1988 armed robbery in Lauderhill for which he was convicted.
But did Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor’s Conviction Review Unit (CRU), working with the Florida Innocence Project, get it right? It’s complicated.
Together, they made the case that led to Holmes’s freedom in 2023. Later, they both helped convince Florida’s Republican dominated Legislature and Republican governor – no mean feat – to pay him $50,000 a year for each of those 34 years.
The CRU reviews cases that meet certain criteria. Its application form, which Holmes filled out in 2020, says, “The petitioner must present a claim of actual innocence (and) the claim must be supported by information or evidence not previously litigated before the original trier of fact (judge or jury).”
Those criteria are intended to limit the review of past felony convictions to an examination of new evidence not previously considered at trial, and to preclude what would amount to a retrial based on the already adjudicated original evidence.
Holmes asserted his innocence in his 2020 application but presented no new evidence. His application names no new witnesses. He identifies no witnesses who recanted earlier statements. He listed no new forensic or documentary evidence to demonstrate his innocence.
Instead, Holmes reasserted his original alibi and claimed that two Broward Sheriff’s detectives had coerced the robbery victim to falsely identify him. He also suggested he was unfairly treated by the judge, stating he was “investigated many times for misconduct.” He provided no evidence to back up his assertions of official misconduct. The CRU appears to have given them no credence.
“There’s no new evidence,” wrote Holmes’s sister in a second petition to the CRU on her brother’s behalf in August 2021. Instead, Nicole Mitchell said her brother was at home the day of the crime, on Father’s Day, “riding go-carts and mopeds up and down the street.”
HOLMES CASE DIDN’T MEET THRESHOLD FOR REVIEW
So why did Pryor’s CRU decide to review a case that didn’t meet its threshold criteria, possibly diverting it from reviewing other more deserving claims from inmates who are actually innocent?
The unit’s 25-page “final memorandum” about the case doesn’t say. But shortly after it began its look, concerns arose.
“At the screening stage, the CRU determined that Mr. Holmes asserted a plausible claim of innocence –- given how he became a suspect in the first place and the precarious eyewitness identification that was the principal evidence against him at trial,” says the memo signed in February 2023 by Assistant State Attorney Sarah Gresham and her boss in the CRU, Arielle Demby Berger.
Holmes’s harsh sentence likely played a role in the CRU’s decision to take the case. Upon his conviction, Holmes – who’d recently gotten out of prison after serving nearly 28 months for two 1984 armed robberies – was sentenced as a habitual offender to 400 years under state sentencing guidelines then in place. The CRU’s memorandum mentions the 400-year sentence more than a half-dozen times.
Whatever the reasons, what Holmes got was a de facto retrial by a State Attorney’s Office under a new administration that assumed multiple roles while re-examining the same evidence the jury heard regarding witness identifications, a car used in the crime and Holmes’s alibi.
“It is very difficult to re-examine a crime 34 years after it occurred. While we do have the transcripts of the trial, we do not have the impact it impressed upon the jury, nor do we know the jury’s deliberative process,” the CRU memo says. “We are also cognizant that this matter was affirmed on appeal and all post-conviction relief has been denied. However, the facts in evidence that we have reviewed under contemporary standards of evidence are troubling.”
The CRU focused on the victim’s identification of Holmes as a suspect. Prosecutors, if you can call them that in such a situation, employed experts who took issue with how the sheriff’s office conducted lineups in 1988 while also raising issues regarding witness reliability. The CRU also reassessed Holmes’s alibi witnesses who, as before, said he was with them celebrating Father’s Day at the time of the robbery.
“While Holmes’s alibi is not definitive and there is no documentary evidence to support it, it does provide some additional support to his innocence claim,” the CRU memo says.
TRIAL PROSECUTOR: HOLMES WAS ‘DANGER TO COMMUNITY’
The prosecutor who tried Holmes’s case in 1989 is Peter Magrino. At the time he was in State Attorney Mike Satz’s career criminal unit. Today, he is a homicide prosecutor in Florida’s Fifth Circuit that’s headquartered in Ocala.
In an interview with Florida Bulldog, Magrino expressed dismay at the Broward CRU’s actions in the case because he believes the case was solid.
“There was no newly discovered evidence, that’s what I find aggravating. And of course, the other thing is, let’s face it…When you ask victims or witnesses questions 30 years after the fact or 20 years after the fact, are their memories going to be as succinct as they were back at the time of the crime and the time of the trial? Of course not,” he said.
Magrino said that Holmes’s three-armed robbery convictions made him consider him a danger to the community, and he wanted Holmes to stay behind bars for the rest of his life. (Holmes had another robbery conviction as a juvenile, Magrino said.) He said he told CRU chief Demby Berger in 2022 that he deliberately didn’t ask for a life sentence for Holmes because under the sentencing scheme at the time he would have been eligible for parole after 25 years. Judge Mel Grossman sentenced Holmes to 400 years, which filled the bill for Magrino.
“I always thought those sentences were kind of nuts, and I suppose at this stage of the game the guy probably deserves to get out,” Magrino said, though not because he thinks Holmes is innocent.
Holmes’s lawyer at trial was Mitchell Polay. He told the CRU in September 2022 that he asked the court for a 40-year sentence upon conviction. “He said that he cannot definitely say if Holmes was innocent or not. Polay thought that if Holmes did not have him put on an alibi, he would have won,” the CRU memo says.
In the end, after concluding it was “highly likely” that Holmes was misidentified by the victim, Pryor’s office substituted its 2025 verdict for that of the six-person jury who found Holmes guilty of armed robbery after a three-day trial from April 24-26, 1989.
That’s not the way the system is supposed to work. But is Holmes nonetheless innocent? Or was Florida snookered out of paying $1.7 million to a convicted violent offender?
Holmes has insisted all along he’s innocent. “I did not commit the crime,” his CRU application says.
PRYOR: HOLMES WAS INNOCENT
State Attorney Pryor agrees. “My friend, Sidney Holmes is getting compensated for 34 years he spent in prison as an innocent man,” Pryor recently wrote on social media. “I went against conventional wisdom and advice and decided to sit next to Sidney and give him a big hug because it felt right. When I look into his eyes, I truly believed that I was looking at an innocent man.”
But neither the Legislature nor the CRU itself went quite that far.
In its 25-page final memorandum on the case written in 2023, the CRU said its findings, and the parallel findings of a six-member “Independent Review Panel” it named and convened, “gives rise to a reasonable doubt as to his culpability and the Broward State Attorney’s Office would not charge him today based on these facts.”
The Legislature, in measures championed by Sen. Jason Pizzo, I-Hollywood, and Rep. Michael Gottlieb, D-Davie, ratified in the claims bill that is now law both the prosecution’s new opinion that it is “highly likely” that Holmes was misidentified as well as Broward Judge Edward Merrigan’s subsequent order dismissing the case. It also declared “the state’s system of justice yielded an imperfect result” and apologized to Holmes for taking away his freedom. In addition to the $1.7 million it approved, the state waived for him tuition and fees for 120 hours of instruction at any career center or state college or university.
Still, the Legislature hedged its bet by including these words in the bill that became law: “If any future judicial determination concludes that Mr. Holmes, by DNA evidence or otherwise, participated in any manner in the armed robbery for which he was incarcerated, the unused benefits to which he is entitled under this act are void.”
Understandably, there’s a lot of sympathy for a man who spent 34 years locked away in prison. It is apparent in the solicitous 2023 motion on Holmes’s behalf asking Judge Merrigan to vacate his conviction. Among other things, it says the “CRU’s memorandum and the conclusions therein constitute newly discovered evidence.”
NEWLY DISCOVERED EVIDENCE?
Newly discovered evidence, of course, is key to not only getting a case reviewed by the CRU but to convincing others to buy into it. That’s likely why that sentence is in the motion. But a plain reading of the CRU memo reveals there was no new evidence that meets the Florida Supreme Court’s definition.
“In order to be considered newly discovered, evidence must have been unknown by the trial court, by the party, or by the counsel at the time of trial, and it must appear that defendant or his counsel could not have known of it by the use of diligence,” the court has said.
Yet the information and conclusions in the CRU’s memorandum, material that the Innocence Project of Florida’s Brandon Scheck told Judge Merrigan “constituted newly discovered evidence,” was all considered decades ago at trial.
Undue sympathy for Holmes is also apparent in the two special master reports to the House and Senate that adopted the CRU’s conclusions. For example, neither mentions that the jury’s verdict on Holmes was twice upheld unanimously on appeal by a three-judge panel of the Fourth District Court of Appeal, or that Holmes also lost a separate attempt to blame his lawyer for his conviction.
Holmes’s claim went to the Legislature because he was ineligible for compensation under state law. The Victims of Wrongful Incarceration Act, enacted in 2008, allows people whose conviction and sentence have been vacated based upon exonerating evidence to petition the court to seek compensation as a “wrongfully incarcerated person.”
But the act also had what’s known as a “clean hands” requirement. Persons convicted of a violent felony or more than one nonviolent felony were ineligible. Holmes was ineligible because of his two previous armed robbery convictions in 1984 – both defined by law as violent felonies.
The law was changed this year to remove the “clean hands” provisions and allow a person with a prior conviction, who is otherwise eligible, to receive compensation under the act.
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