Getting stopped by the police is already a high-stress situation. It’s always important to remember to stay calm and know your rights. In some instances, when a police officer stops you for one offense, it can lead to several more serious offenses if they find something illegal on you. Florida is known for being extremely strict when it comes to …

Supreme Court Allows Law enforcement to Conduct Warrantless Video Surveillance Amicus briefs filed by the Institute of Free Speech, the Institute for Justice, the Cato Institute and Rutherford Institute, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the American Islamic Congress and Muslim Public Affairs Council urged the Supreme Court to grant the petition for certiorari in the case of United States v. …

Mental health courts are a special kind of court aimed at helping repeat offenders with untreated mental illness. Florida courts recognize that their jails and prisons are “not designed, equipped, or funded to deal with serious mental illness, so the creation of mental health court was a logical response.” Often, mental health courts will order offenders to attend treatment facilities …

Getting pulled over is already an extremely stressful situation. Spotting the red and blue lights in your rearview mirror never produces a good feeling. No one wishes to be in trouble with the law, however, these things happen. A missed stop sign, running a red light, or driving with too-dark tint on your windows. These are all valid reasons for …

Recent United States Supreme Court Decision Holds that Tribal Police Can Detain Non-Tribal Individuals Suspected of Violations of Federal and State Law On June 1, 2021, the United States Supreme Court decided the case of United States v. Cooley. The Court held that a tribal police officer has the authority to temporarily detain and search non-tribal individuals “traveling on a …

On July 1, 2021, The Supreme Court of Florida decided case Cruz v. State[1], affirming the defendant’s convictions for first-degree murder. However, the real importance of this case is their decision to reverse the defendant’s death sentence and remand (send the case back down to the trial court level) for resentencing. Factual Background of the Case In 2019, a unanimous …

In 1973, the Florida Legislature passed the “Florida Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act” in order to “comprehensively address drug abuse prevention and control in this state.” This was codified as Florida Statutes § 893, and now serves as the controlling drug law in the state. Regardless of what the goal cited, this act has served to create criminal …

Because Florida’s 1,350 miles of coastline is the second-longest in the nation, the state has long been a common destination for people seeking to import drugs into the United States. While numerous federal agencies have increased their efforts in recent decades to prevent importation of controlled substances, several people are charged every year with bringing illegal drugs into the Sunshine …

Under the Drug Abuse Prevention and Control in the Florida Statutes, the term manufacture is defined as “the production, preparation, propagation, compounding, cultivating, growing, conversion, or processing of a controlled substance, either directly or indirectly, by extraction from substances of natural origin, or independently by means of chemical synthesis, or by a combination of extraction and chemical synthesis, and includes …