According to the center,<\/a> two men \u2014 later identified as Jason Steward and Harold Bailey \u2014 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.<\/p>\nPolice initially struggled to identify suspects, as the descriptions given were generic and a detective compiled an error-ridden photo lineup, according to the center.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne employee identified Guy Miles from the lineup, even though there were issues with the identification process,\u201d the center said in a statement. \u201cThe other, influenced by the detective\u2019s statement about an arrest, also identified Guy.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s office. They all said Miles could not have been in Fullerton during the crime because he had picked up his son from his parents\u2019 Carson home the night before the robbery and traveled to Vegas the following morning. <\/p>\n
Miles also presented scientific studies on the flaws of eyewitness identifications, and collected DNA evidence didn\u2019t match him, according to the Innocence Center. Nonetheless, a jury deliberated for five days and ultimately found Miles guilty.<\/p>\n
Years later, after the statute of limitations had expired, the three actual perpetrators \u2014 Steward, Bailey and Teamer \u2014 all confessed, according to the center. <\/p>\n
In 2017, a California Court of Appeal reversed Miles\u2019 conviction, acknowledging that new, credible confessions would have changed the outcome of his trial.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
He was later awarded nearly $1 million from the Victim Compensation Board of California for his wrongful imprisonment. However, his conviction remained in place.<\/p>\n
That was until Friday, when the O.C. district attorney\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cJustice exists only when the quest for truth never ends,\u201d Spitzer said in a statement Friday. \u201cWhile 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Audrey McGinn, senior staff attorney of the Innocence Center, said she was thrilled the district attorney\u2019s office decided to dig deeper into the case and do the right thing. <\/p>\n
\u201cAlthough Guy came home in 2018, he still lived under the shadow of this wrongful conviction,\u201d she said in a statement. \u201cAll the while, the hallmark of this case stared back at us: a flawed eyewitness identification procedure that never should have led to a conviction.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For 6,895 days, Guy Miles sat behind bars for a crime he didn\u2019t commit. He lost years of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":440426,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164,2873,48025,723,217,7359,174608,174609,174607,1421,1555,137485,346,7756,59581,72],"class_list":["post-440425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-armed-robbery","tag-conviction","tag-crime","tag-day","tag-district-attorney","tag-guy-miles","tag-harold-bailey","tag-innocence-center","tag-las-vegas","tag-man","tag-miles","tag-office","tag-son","tag-truth","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440425\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/440426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}