Category Archives: Criminal Law
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 »
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 »
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 »
Emojis As Evidence In Criminal Cases
People who are old enough to remember face to face communication and real time phone conversations can tell you how frustrating it is to communicate by text message. The same words can have multiple meanings depending on context, and when someone is texting you, you cannot rely on the person’s tone of voice or… Read More »
Can Young Adults Catch A Break In The Criminal Justice System?
The law gives judges a range of possible sentences to hand down for each offense of which a defendant might get convicted. Likewise, if the jury convicts the defendant of several separate offenses that each carry prison time, such as wire fraud and drug possession with intent to deliver, the judge might order the… Read More »
To Prevent LSD Freakouts, Florida Lawmakers Go After Spores
Last summer, two boys from Indian River County, ages 12 and 14, went to the emergency room because they were experiencing psychotic symptoms. The boys had ingested hallucinogenic edibles, sold under the pretense that they contained psilocybin, a hallucinogenic compound found in psilocybin mushrooms. When police tested the edibles in the crime lab, though,… Read More »
