Guy Miles spent 6,895 days in California prisons for a robbery he did not commit, and this past Friday, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office finally acknowledged what he had been saying since his arrest in 1998: he was innocent. Prosecutors formally vacated his conviction and set aside the guilty plea he had accepted years earlier just to get out of custody, closing a case built on a flawed police lineup and mistaken eyewitness testimony.
Miles was convicted in 1999 of two counts of armed robbery and a firearms charge tied to a June 1998 heist at a Fidelity Financial Services loan office in Fullerton, according to the Los Angeles Times. A jury found him guilty after deliberating for five days, and under California’s Three Strikes law, a judge sentenced him to 75 years to life. The actual robbers, Jason Steward and Harold Bailey, had pulled firearms on two Fidelity employees and demanded money while Bernard Teamer waited outside as the getaway driver, per the Times report. Together the three men stole $1,410 in cash and $4,138 in personal checks.
Miles was hundreds of miles away that day. He had picked up his 12-year-old son from his parents’ home in Carson and traveled to Las Vegas, where he presented an alibi built around his parents, his son, a Las Vegas neighbor, and his apartment manager — five people who testified he was in Las Vegas on the day of the crime, according to the Orange County District Attorney’s account cited by the Times. None of it stopped the case from unraveling into a wrongful conviction.
A Lineup Built to Point at Him
Police compiled what the Times describes as an error-ridden photo lineup, and one Fidelity employee identified Miles from it. A second employee identified him only after being influenced by a detective’s comment about an arrest having already been made, according to the newspaper’s reporting. Orange County prosecutors later determined that two eyewitnesses had provided false testimony against Miles…