A Michigan man who spent nearly five years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit is suing Hertz after the rental car company misplaced a receipt that would’ve proven his alibi and cleared his name.
Hertz finally located the receipt in 2018, proving once and for all that Herbert Alford was innocent of the 2011 crime.
The new evidence was later presented to a judge, who threw out Alford’s conviction and ordered him released from an Ingham County lockup in December.
Alford filed a civil action suit early this week, seeking financial compensation, but the company is mired in a bankruptcy reorganization that might again delay justice for the man.
Alford was convicted of second-degree murder in 2016, five years after the fatal shooting of 23-year-old Michael Adams, according to Alford’s defense attorney Jamie White.
Prosecutors convinced a jury that Alford shot Adams in the back over a 50-pound bag of marijuana.
The receipt from Hertz, however, showed Alford had been renting a car at a Lansing airport 20 minutes away from where Adams was found shot to death.
“There is no question that (Alford) would have avoided going to prison had they produced this documentation,” White told news station WLNS-TV.
A spokesperson for Hertz said the company was “deeply saddened” by Alford’s wrongful conviction and subsequent incarceration.
“While we were unable to find the historic rental record from 2011 when it was requested in 2015, we continued our good faith efforts to locate it,” Lauren Luster said Wednesday. “With advances in data search in the years following, we were able to locate the rental record in 2018 and promptly provided it.”
