Recent Blog Posts
Florida’s Sentencing Guidelines For Youthful Offenders
People in their late teens and early 20s are legally adults. They can engage in adult activities such as marriage and getting tattoos, but the current version of you probably resembles your 25-year-old self more closely than it resembles your 20-year-old self. The criminal justice system acknowledges that the defendant’s age makes a difference;… Read More »
Theft From The Trust Of A Deceased Person
Estate planning is a big business. People will pay a lot of money to keep people from stealing their money, or otherwise using it in ways other than what the client wants, after the client dies. You could chalk people’s efforts to micromanage from beyond the grave to a fear of mortality. They are… Read More »
Does Hearsay Count As Evidence Or Gossip?
Talk is cheap, even when it is big business. These days, it seems like everyone aspires to make a living by running their mouth on social media, giving their reactions to other people’s reactions to videos depicting events that, in the grand scheme of things, are inconsequential. It is to everyone’s benefit that these… Read More »
Credit Card Theft
Some people are outspoken about their caution regarding letting other people know their credit card numbers or bank account numbers. These same people do not hesitate to enter their credit card numbers online and agree to recurring charges when they subscribe to a service. They also do not hesitate to send checks in the… Read More »
Criminal Charges For Leaving Children Unattended
Florida law does not indicate a specific age at which children can stay home alone or for how long parents can leave children home alone before their behavior counts as neglect. Disagreements over when and for how long it is appropriate to leave children home alone are a frequent source of co-parenting disputes among… Read More »
Problem-Solving Courts Are All Around You
For years, lawmakers introduced more and more punitive responses to repeated minor offenses until people were serving life sentences for minor crimes. For example, Leandro Andrade is serving a life sentence in California for stealing VHS tapes from K-Mart because of three strikes laws that were on the books at the time of his… Read More »
Copper Theft Is A Felony In Florida
It makes sense why people would want to steal gold. If this were not the case, then screenwriters would have to come up with new movie plots, and filmmakers would have to set the climactic sequences of action films somewhere besides a bank vault, even if it meant building new film sets. Likewise, it… Read More »
Supreme Court Ruling Offers A Second Chance For Defendants Convicted Before The First Step Act
A popular setup for fish out of water stories is that the protagonist returns home after spending a long time isolated from the outside world and finds out how much everything has changed; in some such stories, the protagonist has been in prison for a decade or more. In a documentary about a man… Read More »
The Trouble With Tianeptine
You know not to mess with heroin. Ever since your grandparents were old enough to read the newspaper, people have been dying of heroin overdoses or of apparently minor ailments at the bottom of a downward spiral caused by heroin addiction; heroin is also a Schedule I controlled substance, meaning that it is always… Read More »
Turkey Hunt Fraud Leads To Criminal Charges For Four Florida Men
If you want to know how much the world has changed in the past 25 years, rewatch the movie Knockaround Guys, in which four tough guys from New York city end up going on a series of misadventures in Montana. Today, if some dudes from New York were holed up in a hotel room… Read More »
