Letter Proving Innocence Frees Inmate After Years Behind Bars

A man who spent two years in jail for a robbery he did not commit has been freed after a fellow inmate wrote a letter exonerating him.

TWO YEARS IN THE PEN: Letter Proving Innocence Frees Inmate After Years Behind Bars from News X on Vimeo.

Businessman Vinicius Villas Boas, 37, was sent to the Provisional Detention Centre in Sao Jose do Rio Preto, Sao Paulo, Brazil, after the 2016 robbery.

Boas – who always protested his innocence – managed to get his nine-year sentence reduced to seven but ran out of appeal procedures, according to local media.

But while he was behind bars, he met an inmate who knew the identities of the real crooks and agreed to write a legal letter naming them.

Now after two years behind bars, Boas has been freed after judges accepted at a hearing on 21st March that he could not have carried out the crime.

Local media have not named the inmate who helped free him.

Picture shows the handwritten letter by a detainee helped prove the innocence of Vinicius Villas Boas, 37, undated. He was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for a robbery he did not commit, in 2016. (CEN)

Boas said: “The acquittal was the best victory of my life. Carrying the reputation of being a thief bothered me a lot.”

His nightmare started after he moved to Mendonca, a small town outside Sao Paulo, in 2013 to set up a pizza restaurant with his pregnant wife.

Without warning, he was arrested by police accusing him of robbing one home and of helping in the burglary of another.

The footage shows a man walking in the area on the day of the robbery in January 2016.

The victim of the burglary, who has not been named, said four men had broken into their home and stolen more than BRL 1,000 (GBP 160), as well as a mobile phone, a gold chain and two bottles of perfume, valued at BRL 1,400 (GBP 222).

Vinicius Villas Boas, 37, poses in undated photo. A handwritten letter by a detainee helped prove his innocence when he was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for a robbery he did not commit, in 2016. (CEN)

Boas’ lawyer Nugri Campos said the victim identified him from pictures shown to them by the police even though they did not match any description of the crooks.

And police ignored Boas’s cast-iron alibi and even showed the victim snaps of him in prison uniform to influence them, he added.

Boas’s acquittal ruling said: “In the absence of evidence produced in court to secure the authorship of the fact, with the conviction of the petitioner based on null and void evidence and with proof of his innocence, it remains for this Rapporteurship to grant the revisional request to acquit Vinicius Silva Villas Boas.”

Delighted Boas said: “I told my son that I was working when I was in prison. To this day, when I leave the house, he asks: ‘You’re going to come back, right, dad?”