Wrongly Convicted and Jailed Man Suing Hertz Over Lost Alibi Receipt in Murder Case that Resulted in Five Years in Prison
After spending five years in prison for a murder he did not commit, Herbert Alford, 47, was set free. Alford, who was convicted in 2016 of second-degree murder, is now suing Hertz car rental over a lost receipt that proved his alibi.
Alford spent five years in prison without the vital receipt that proved he was far from the murder when it occurred.
The plaintiff is suing for unspecified monetary compensation. Simultaneously, Hertz is undergoing a bankruptcy reorganization so that the lawsuit will take longer to reach the court.
The lawsuit against Hertz car rental alleges the company failed to produce the receipt proving Alford could not possibly have been at the scene of the 2011 murder of 23-year old Michael Adams.
Without the receipt, Alford states, he was found guilty of second-degree murder and two weapons charges, with a sentence of thirty years to life.
Alford filed the lawsuit last week in the Circuit Court located in Ingham County, Michigan. Court papers say Alford would not have been sent to prison "had the defendants not ignored and disobeyed numerous court orders requiring them to produce the documentation that eventually free [sic] Mr. Alford."
Jamie White, Alford’s attorney, said Hertz was subpoenaed to produce the car rental receipt in 2015, but after “multiple requests” for two years by him and the court, there was no response from the car rental company.
In an ABC News interview, White said Hertz ignored their pleas to produce the alibi receipt. White also said he did not understand why Hertz did not reply and that perhaps it was racially motivated.
"At no point in time did they ever respond," White said. “We were left to wonder why that was the case. Why that was, folks can speculate. I think they saw an African American man charged with homicide and chose that it wasn't worth their time."
Hertz denied the claims about possible racism as the reason for not producing Alford’s receipt that proved his alibi. In their statement, Hertz avers, “We were in communication with Mr. White well before 2018 and let him know we could not locate the rental agreement given the length of time that had elapsed. With advances in data search in the years following, we were able to locate another record associated with the rental in 2018 and promptly provided it.”
Without proof of his alibi, Alford spent five years in prison, calling it a “surreal” experience.
Hertz finally located and produced the 2011 receipt in 2018. The receipt proved Alford rented a car at the Lansing airport when the murder occurred, establishing his alibi.
The court overturned Alford's conviction, releasing him from prison in 2020.
The assistant chief prosecutor of the Michigan case Michael S. Cheltenham said in a statement that “the Hertz evidence was a substantial factor in our decision not to re-try Mr. Alford.”
Attorney White said it was “reprehensible” Hertz refused to even reply to their pleas to produce the receipt when a man’s life was at stake.
"I think it's an important point: We were not asking them to mine millions of documents over the years that were unrelated to this incident and unrelated to someone they had done business with,” said Alford. "This was their customer. He spent money with them. And I think our requests were quite simple, and I think those requests of the court were quite simple.”
