Orange County Exonerates Guy Miles After 18 Years, 10 Months in Prison for Robbery He Didn't Commit

Guy Miles spent 18 years, 10 months and 15 days in California prisons for a robbery he says he never committed. On Friday, August 21, an Orange County Superior Court judge finally erased it from his record.

The case goes back to June 1998, when two men pulled guns on employees at a Fidelity Financial Services office in Fullerton and walked off with $1,410 in cash and $4,138 in checks, according to the Innocence Center, the San Diego-based nonprofit that took up Miles' case. Police struggled to identify suspects. A detective compiled what the Innocence Center called an error-ridden photo lineup, and one employee identified Miles despite problems with the process. Another employee, influenced by comments from the detective about an arrest, also picked him out.

Miles was living in Las Vegas at the time. Five people, including his parents, his then-12-year-old son, a Las Vegas neighbor and his apartment manager, testified he had picked up his son in Carson the night before the robbery and was back in Las Vegas by the next morning, according to the Orange County District Attorney's office. None of it mattered. A jury convicted him in 1999 on two counts of robbery and a firearms charge, and under California's three-strikes law, a judge sentenced him to 75 years to life.

According to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, one witness at trial initially told the court Miles wasn't the robber, then changed her story after a prosecutor showed her his booking photo in a courthouse hallway during a break. Three other men were later convicted in the robbery and said Miles had nothing to do with it.

Miles filed a habeas petition in 2010 with help from the Innocence Center, arguing false eyewitness testimony, third-party culpability and actual innocence. The petition included declarations from co-defendants confessing to the robbery and clearing Miles. Orange County Superior Court denied it. He then took the fight to the California Fourth District Court of Appeal, which held evidentiary hearings in 2013 and 2016. Retired trial judge Frank Fasel came back to preside over one of them. In 2017, the appeals court vacated all three counts, citing new exculpatory evidence, though it stopped short of declaring him factually innocent.

Facing the prospect of a retrial and another life sentence, Miles took a plea deal in June 2017 that got him out of prison immediately but left a guilty mark on his record, according to KESQ. A no-contest plea meant he didn't admit guilt but accepted the punishment to avoid rolling the dice again.

"I was just done at that point," Miles told reporters, recalling the decision. "I thought about my kids, my mother and father, and decided to take the plea."

Miles later took his claim to the California Victim Compensation Board, which pays people who have been wrongfully imprisoned. The state attorney general's office investigated his innocence claim and concurred with his request, and in 2021 the board awarded Miles $965,300 for his wrongful incarceration, according to the Orange County District Attorney's office. The Orange County District Attorney's Conviction Integrity Unit, created by District Attorney Todd Spitzer after he took office in 2019, ran its own review afterward. That review led to Friday's joint motion asking Judge Kevin J. Haskins to vacate the plea and formally exonerate Miles.

"The People have concluded they have lost confidence in Miles' conviction and wish to take immediate steps to exonerate him," the joint motion stated.

Spitzer, in a statement, said the conviction happened before his time in office but that fixing it fell to him anyway. "Justice exists only when the quest for truth never ends," he said. Michael Semanchik, executive director of the Innocence Center, said he never expected the exoneration to take nine years after Miles walked out of prison.

Miles, now 61, lives in Cedar Hill, Texas, and works in ground operations at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. He no longer has to disclose the robbery conviction on job applications, and he's now eligible to vote for the first time. "I don't know who I'm going to vote for, but I'm going to vote," he said.

The case surfaces alongside another exoneration that made national headlines: Glynn Ray Simmons, an Oklahoma man who spent 48 years in prison before his July 2023 release, saw the city of Edmond agree to pay him more than $7 million to settle a lawsuit alleging police falsified witness identifications and withheld evidence, according to the Associated Press. Miles has not filed a similar suit. In both cases, eyewitness identification procedures shaped by a detective rather than an independent process proved decisive.