I wonder how many white people in Florida get sentenced to 400 years in prison for being the getaway driver in an armed robbery in which no one was hurt?
That was the sentence imposed on Sidney Holmes in 1989, and he wasn’t even the getaway driver in the robbery. He was convicted on the flimsiest of evidence.
To wit: “One of the two victims described a car used in the robbery as a brown Oldsmobile Cutlass with a tan top and a hole in the trunk. Weeks later, the victim’s brother saw a brown Cutlass driving down a road and reported the license plate number to authorities. That car was registered to Holmes.”
That was about it, plus the fact that to some witnesses all black people look the same, so of course he bore a strong resemblance to the perps.
Even so, it took two photo lineups before one of the victims said, yup, that looks like him. “There was no physical or scientific evidence, nor any corroborating witnesses, linking Mr. Holmes to the crime,” the Innocence Project of Florida says. On top of that, “Holmes had an alibi, and his car had key differences from the perpetrators’ vehicle,” CNN says (here).
But none of that prevented Holmes from spending 34 years in Florida prisons for being black in a southern state. I’m sorry, but there’s no other way to explain this, because I can’t imagine this happening in, say, California or Connecticut.
How much money do you think Broward County should pay Holmes for stealing his life from him with shoddy police work and even shoddier criminal justice? Is half a million dollars per year of wrongful incarceration enough? Florida caps compensation at $50,000 a year, and $2 million total, but most freed inmates get nothing (see details here).
That could be Holmes’ fate, too. After all, he’s guilty of being a black man in a racist state, so he doesn’t have “clean hands.” But to be fair to Florida, they did execute Ted Bundy.
