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.
Attorney Audrey McGinn said the case involved a flawed eyewitness identification procedure. Nationally, eyewitness misidentification is the single largest contributing factor in wrongful convictions, showing up in roughly 69% of post-conviction DNA exonerations tracked by the Innocence Project. That backdrop helps explain why Miles's case, built on shaky identifications rather than physical evidence, took so long to unwind — collected DNA evidence never matched Miles at all, per the Innocence Center.
Years of Legal Fights Before Any Relief
Miles filed a habeas petition challenging his detention in 2010, presenting scientific studies on the flaws in eyewitness identification as part of his case. For years the courts rejected his claims. That changed in 2017, when the California Court of Appeal found that new, credible confessions from the real perpetrators would have changed the outcome of his trial and reversed his conviction. Steward, Bailey and Teamer had confessed to being the actual perpetrators only after the statute of limitations on the robbery had expired, shielding them from prosecution, according to The Innocence Center, the San Diego-based nonprofit law firm that worked the case alongside the California Innocence Project.
Even with the appellate ruling in his favor, Miles wasn't fully cleared. To secure his release rather than risk a retrial, he accepted a plea deal allowing his release based on time already served, and he was released in 2018. It meant walking out of prison years later, but still carrying a conviction on his record. McGinn said Miles remained under the shadow of his wrongful conviction until it was finally vacated.
Conviction Integrity Unit Finishes the Job
The final step came through the Orange County District Attorney's Conviction Integrity Unit, which Todd Spitzer formed in 2019 to reinvestigate felony convictions involving claims of factual innocence. The unit reviewed Miles's wrongful-conviction claim, and on Friday, the district attorney's office vacated his conviction, set aside his guilty plea, and acknowledged that Miles was innocent.
“Justice exists only when the quest for truth never ends,” Spitzer said, according to the Times. Miles, for his part, put it more plainly: “I always knew the truth. I just needed the system to catch up to it.” He told the paper the ordeal cost him years of freedom and the chance to watch his son grow up.
Under California Penal Code Section 4900, exonerees like Miles are eligible for state compensation of $140 per day of wrongful incarceration through the California Victim Compensation Board. For his 6,895 days behind bars, that formula puts his potential statutory compensation at roughly $965,300, with claims allowed within ten years of release or dismissal of charges.
