© Cindy Ord/Getty ImagesA Michigan man is suing Hertz for failing to provide him an alibi that cost him five years in prison. Here, an exterior view of Hertz Car Rental during the coronavirus pandemic on May 23, 2020 in New York City.
A Michigan man is suing the car rental company Hertz for failing to produce a receipt that would have proved his innocence, after he was wrongly convicted of murder in 2016 and served nearly five years in prison.
The man, Herbert Alford, was convicted of second-degree murder in the 2011 shooting death of Michael Adams. At the time of the killing, Alford was renting a car from Hertz at the Lansing airport, which is 20 minutes away from where the shooting took place.
The receipt detailed that Alford used his credit card at Hertz at 3 p.m. on October 18, 2011-six minutes before Adams was shot and killed, WLNS-TV reported.
"If anybody has ever traveled Lansing from Pleasant Grove to the airport, you know that is not possible to accomplish. You couldn't even do it in a helicopter," his attorney, Jamie White told WLNS on Tuesday.
But Hertz failed to produce a receipt proving Alford's innocence until 2018-after he had served several years in prison for the crime he did not commit, the Associated Press reported.
Now, Alford is suing Hertz and seeking financial compensation from the company. However, the case is expected to be delayed because of the company's bankruptcy reorganization, the Associated Press reported.
"There is no question that [Alford] would have avoided going to prison had they produced this documentation," White told WLNS.
White added that he believes it took Hertz so long to produce the receipt because Alford is a Black man.
"I think they looked at his situation, saw that there was a man, an African American man charged with murder, and this just wasn't worthy of their time," White said.
The conviction was thrown out, and charges against Alford were finally dropped in 2020.
For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below:
Hertz said it's "deeply saddened" about what happened to Alford.
"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," spokeswoman 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."
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