Guy Miles spent 6,895 days—more than 18 years—behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit. On Friday, the Orange County district attorney’s office officially exonerated him, vacating his conviction in a 1998 Fullerton robbery that had stripped him of nearly two decades of his life.
Miles was originally convicted in 1999 on two counts of armed robbery and a firearms charge following a heist at a Fidelity Financial Services office. He received a "three strikes sentence" of 75 years to life. His conviction was largely based on false testimony from two eyewitnesses. This was despite five people, including his parents, 12-year-old son, a Las Vegas neighbor, and his apartment manager, testifying he was in Las Vegas on the day of the crime. Miles himself stated, "I always knew the truth." He expressed gratitude that the truth ultimately mattered, though he wished his father had been alive to see his name cleared.
According to the San Diego-based Innocence Center, which assisted Miles starting with a habeas petition in 2010, the identification process was deeply flawed from the start. Police initially struggled to identify suspects, and a detective compiled an error-ridden photo lineup. One employee identified Miles from this lineup despite issues, while another was influenced by the detective’s statement about an arrest. During the robbery, two men pulled firearms on two Fidelity employees, making off with $1,410 in cash and $4,138 in personal checks. DNA evidence collected during the investigation also did not match Miles.
Years later, after the statute of limitations had expired, the three actual perpetrators — Jason Steward, Harold Bailey, and Bernard Teamer, who drove the getaway car — all confessed to the crime. In 2017, a California Court of Appeal reversed Miles’ conviction, acknowledging that these new, credible confessions would have changed his trial’s outcome.
Miles then faced a potential retrial but instead accepted a plea deal, which allowed him to be released based on time already served. He returned home in 2018. He was later awarded nearly $1 million from the Victim Compensation Board of California for his wrongful imprisonment, though his conviction remained in place until this past Friday.
The O.C. district attorney’s office decided to set aside his guilty plea and vacate the conviction following a review from its Conviction Integrity Unit. District Attorney Todd Spitzer formed this unit in 2019 to review claims of wrongful conviction. Spitzer stated that the quest for truth must never end, and expressed pride in the decision to dismiss the conviction, even though it occurred before his tenure. Audrey McGinn, senior staff attorney of the Innocence Center, conveyed her relief for Miles, noting that he had lived under the shadow of this wrongful conviction even after his release, and pointed to the flawed eyewitness identification procedure as a key issue that should have prevented the conviction in the first place.