After nearly three decades of claiming his innocence, Guy Miles was officially exonerated Friday of robbing a Fullerton bank in 1998.
In 2017, Miles’ conviction was overturned on appeal and, rather than face a retrial, his attorneys struck a plea deal that immediately freed him from prison after more than 18 years — a deal that left a “guilty” mark on his record.
On Friday, that mark was wiped clean by an Orange County Superior Court judge at the request of District Attorney Todd Spitzer and the San Diego-based Innocence Center. In court parlance, Miles’ plea was vacated. His name was cleared. No longer must he note the bank robbery on job applications.
“I can do anything I want to do,” Miles, 61, said at a news conference after the hearing. “It felt good to be able to smile again today.”
Miles now lives in Cedar Hill, Texas, and works in ground operations at Dallas-Fort Worth airport.
He stood next to his mother at the podium Friday, Aug. 21, and offered up the court victory to his father, who didn’t live long enough to see the case come to an end. It was his family that got him through his time behind bars, Miles said.
“I was mad at the world the first couple years” in prison, he said. “But I knew that anger wouldn’t get me anywhere.”
After his release, “I had to learn how to be myself again, to be loved, to learn to be compassionate.”
The ruling comes five years after the California attorney general’s office investigated Miles’ claims of innocence and supported his request for nearly $1 million in state compensation for being wrongly incarcerated.
The district attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit followed with its own probe.
“The People have concluded they have lost confidence in Miles’ conviction and wish to take immediate steps to exonerate him,” said the joint motion presented Friday to Superior Court Judge Kevin J. Haskins.
Spitzer said in a statement that when the system fails, he must work to correct it.
“Justice exists only when the quest for truth never ends,” he said. “We have an absolute obligation to continue to seek the truth and ensure that we can continue to have confidence in our convictions. … While 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.”
Michael Semanchik, executive director of the Innocence Center, said that he never thought it would take nine years after Miles’ release to get an exoneration.
“At the same time, you couldn’t be happier when you have a success like this, someone like Guy who gets all of his freedom back and can go on and live his life without this hanging over his head,” Semanchik said. “It is just a remarkable, awesome day.”
Miles was living in Las Vegas at the time of the robbery. His association with a Carson street gang landed him in a photo lineup from which he was picked by an eyewitness to the robbery.
The California Fourth District Court of Appeal that overturned Miles’ conviction pointed to new evidence supporting his claim of innocence and to potential misconduct by an Orange County prosecutor. Miles originally had been sentenced to 75 years to life.
Instead of retrying Miles, prosecutors at the time struck a deal with him, what Miles’ attorneys called a “dark plea.” Miles agreed not to fight two charges of second-degree robbery in exchange for a sentence of time served. It was recorded on his record as a “guilty” plea.
But Miles never waivered from his contention that he was innocent, that he was in Las Vegas at the time of the bank robbery.
Prosecutors after his release insisted Miles was indeed guilty and had received mercy from their office.
“This is not a story of an innocent man who got his freedom but one of a guilty man who finally accepted responsibility but was granted some mercy,” said an unsigned statement from the district attorney’s office in 2017.
Miles took his pleas of innocence to the California Victim Compensation Board, which pays people who have been wrongfully imprisoned. After a lengthy investigation by the state attorney general’s office, the board in 2021 granted $965,000 in compensation to Miles — $140 for each of the 6,895 days that he was wrongly incarcerated.
Miles’ attorneys at the Innocence Center have long argued that he was the victim of mistaken identity by eyewitnesses in the June 1998 robbery, when two men stormed the office of Fidelity Financial in Fullerton while a getaway driver waited outside.
Three prison inmates have confessed to the crime since Miles’ conviction, saying he had nothing to do with it. And at least 10 people are supporting Miles’ story that he was in Las Vegas at the time of the robbery.
In an addendum to the 2017 appellate ruling, Justice Eileen C. Moore wrote that there is a “strong likelihood” that Miles is factually innocent and that prosecutors and police acted improperly to win the case.
The addendum referred to evidence that a prosecutor showed a mug shot of Miles to a witness, during a break in the trial, an act described by Moore as a photo lineup “with one photo.”
“I believe there were significant problems with the eyewitness identifications, including suggestive photographic lineups and improper prosecutorial tactics, which resulted in Miles’ conviction,” Moore wrote.