Exonerated Man Has Waited for His $2.5M Since 2016

Michael Holmes says he wouldn't lie to shave decades off his sentence and ended up serving eight years for a crime courts determined he didn't commit. Holmes, now 66, is speaking publicly for the first time about how a team of disgraced St. Louis officers derailed his life, and about the years he has spent since waiting for the $2.5 million a jury awarded him as a result, reports St. Louis Public Radio.

Arrested in 2003 after officers claimed he was dealing crack from a relative's home, Holmes refused a plea bargain. He hoped jurors would see the truth at his 2006 trial: "Their own specialist said, 'Mr. Holmes' fingerprints wasn't on anything in that house,'" he says. "Now, if I live there, and my fingerprints isn't on anything in that house, how is that possible?" Instead, he was sentenced to 25 years. His conviction was vacated in 2011 after federal corruption cases exposed officers who planted evidence, stole cash, and lied. But Holmes' quest to "regain my innocence" didn't end with his exoneration. He filed a civil rights lawsuit in 2012 and was awarded $2.5 million four years later. He's still waiting to be paid.

Holmes' case is stuck in a tug-of-war over who must pay old police judgments: the state, which once ran the department, or the city, which later did and then lost control again. A Missouri appeals court likened Holmes to a "duped mark" in a street scam—"holding an empty bag instead of one filled with his affirmed money judgment." He's now waiting on a decision from the state's high court, which heard his case in February. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports it's actually the second time the Missouri Supreme Court has heard the case. The court previously ruled the state wasn't on the hook for Holmes' judgment and returned the case to the circuit court level—where the city of St. Louis argued it wasn't on the hook either.