Thomas got a trial the next year — on May 24, 2004. The prosecutor was Assistant State Attorney Megan Newcomb and the judge was Rex Barbas. One guilty verdict was recorded the following day. Based on sentencing documents from Hillsborough County Circuit Court filed June 24, 2004, Thomas was “committed to the custody of the Department of Corrections for a term of Natural Life” and that the “10 year Minimum Imprisonment provisions” [ten-year minimum mandatory sentence] is imposed because a firearm was used in the crime, even though no shots were fired.
But Thomas maintains his innocence. And now someone has come forward confessing to the crime and saying that Thomas was not involved.
“With somebody actually coming forward and confessing and they got him, I felt like I would be out already, but it’s over a year later and I’m here,” Thomas told me from Tampa’s Orient Road Jail when I interviewed him by phone in February.
Thomas has asked that the name of the person who confessed not be disclosed in case he gets cold feet before testifying in person before a judge, so I’ll refer to him as “the confessor.” The confessor hand-wrote a three-page affidavit from Martin Correctional Institution in Indiantown and had it notarized on March 20, 2015. He is an inmate who says he does not know Thomas, and in the confession he details the 2002 Hollywood Video robbery. He describes plans for a “lick” in which the four people involved anticipated splitting an expected $10,000 windfall. But they ended up finding only “a couple grand” in the safe before driving back to Fort Myers.
In the affidavit, the confessor says he had blocked the robbery “out my mind for the last 12 years, until knowing a innocent man is in prison for what I did.” He describes the roles of the four people involved. His friend was the driver. Another person apparently was employed at the Hollywood Video and would be working inside when they arrived. The confessor would bring his “bee-bee gun” and go inside the store “to get the bread, and videotape” with a person he describes as “a tall mixed cat.” The confessor says he “put a powder make-up on to lighten my skin” before they drove up I-75 toward Tampa.
Once inside the Hollywood Video, the confessor says he and the tall man were motioned to the back room by the employee-insider. The confessor writes that he brandished the BB gun and got the manager to open the safe. But since the haul looked like much less than the expected $10,000, the two escorted the manager to empty the cash register at the front of the store. The two then headed out the side door after taking the security camera’s “video tape and the phone receiver.”
That’s where Jeremy Thomas comes in. According to Thomas’s mother, Roberta Thomas, the Hollywood Video employee who was in on the robbery “was going to the mall, going to the mall, going to the mall. Finally, one day at University Mall he spotted my son and he said ‘He looks like him.’ So, he called the detective and said: ‘I seen the guy that committed the crime.’”
Roberta Thomas maintains that despite the guilty verdict in the trial, her son is innocent. She says there was no physical evidence linking Jeremy Thomas to the robbery.
“None,” she said. “There was fingerprints on the site. The detectives lifted the prints and there was no comparison to my son. There was no videotape. There was seven employees at the time; four said it was not him, two said that they don’t remember and one said — which we know now was the inside gentleman — said that ‘I have a photographic memory, it was him,’” Roberta Thomas told me.
Jeremy Thomas said that his attorney at the time of the trial didn’t put up much of a defense.
“Since there was no evidence, there wasn’t too much defense. He was just like: ‘They don’t have a charge, so let’s go to trial and that would be that,’” Jeremy Thomas told me. “You know I was young, I didn’t really know. I was 22. So I went to trial and I lost. We didn’t really put on a defense like that, because, they didn’t have nothing and that’s what the lawyer said: ‘There’s no actual physical evidence and I would beat it fairly easy.’ …They put witnesses on the stand. Nobody picked me in court. Nobody did any court identification or nothing and I don’t know, they found me guilty.”
The link between Jeremy Thomas, languishing in jail for more than a decade, and the person who would end up writing a notarized affidavit confessing to the crime is a third inmate. This person serves as an “inmate law clerk,” an inmate who has legal training and helps other inmates with their cases. He wrote a notarized letter in July 2015 about how during his legal work he made the mental connection between a man who feels he was convicted unjustly for robbing a video store in Tampa (Thomas) and someone whose “‘thing’ had been robberies” and had robbed that Tampa Hollywood Video store in 2002 (the confessor).
“I began to believe he was in fact talking about the same exact store and, more than likely, the exact same incident that led to Jeremy’s conviction,” the inmate law clerk wrote.
Thomas also asked me not to disclose the inmate law clerk’s identity until the confessor testifies — for the same reason given earlier. The inmate law clerk asked Thomas to reiterate details of what he was convicted of and “they confirmed what I had been thinking while hearing [the confessor’s] story: that it was the same incident.”
It’s been more than two years since the written confession and Thomas hopes it means he won’t be behind bars much longer — though he does have moments of uncertainty.
“It was like a weight was lifted. It makes me feel like a lot of relief, at first. Just really happy because I was like, ‘Man, I’m finally gonna be liberated. I’m finally gonna be exonerated, my name is gonna be cleared of this’ and I was happy,” Thomas said. “Now, I’m feeling more disappointed. I’m worried because it is over a year and I’m still here and nothing’s happened. So, I am worried.”
And even though it’s unclear how long it will take, he looks forward to the ordeal being over.
“But, really, just a relief. It’s been a long 15 years away from everybody I love, everybody I care about, my family. My son was 2 months old when I was arrested. He looks at me eye-to-eye now. We wear the same size shoe.”
The confessor ends his affidavit with, “I don’t want no man to be punish for a crime he did not commit. I don’t know how or why Mr. Jeremy Thomas became a suspect. He should’nt be here for a crime he did’nt commit. I don’t know Mr. Thomas, and I have’nt been offered or received anything for this sworn affidavit. I am only cleaning the demons out of my closet [sic].”
Thomas’ current lawyer, Eric Kuske Leanza, would not agree to an interview, saying only, “No, I don’t want to talk about the case.”
Maybe the confessor is telling the truth. Or, maybe he has nothing to lose by making a false confession. Maybe he’s just trying to get Thomas out of trouble. It’s difficult to know what actually happened more than 14 years ago, but at least a judge may finally get the chance to consider this newly-discovered information. Jeremy Thomas has a status review hearing in Hillsborough County Circuit Court on May 22. His mother, Roberta Thomas, says she expects the confessor to be transported from the correctional institution to the court in order to testify before the judge.
Seán Kinane is assistant director of news and public affairs at 88.5 FM WMNF Community Conscious Radio in Tampa. This article is based on his reporting for WMNF, which is archived at wmnf.org/news.
This article appears in Apr 20-27, 2017.