Articles Posted in Drug Crimes

The U.S. Department of Justice under the Obama administration has indicated an opposition to the current disparities between sentences in crack cocaine cases versus powder cocaine cases in the federal criminal system. Currently, as a result of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, mandatory sentences in federal criminal cases are harsher for crack cocaine cases than powder cocaine cases. This is true even though crack cocaine and powder cocaine are basically the same. The primary difference is that crack comes in a form that is smoked while cocaine comes in a form that is snorted.

The difference in federal sentences for these two drug crimes has had a major effect on who has been going to prison for long periods of time as opposed to getting relatively minor sentences. For instance, a person convicted of the crime of distributing 5 grams of crack cocaine faces a mandatory sentence of 5 years in prison while it would take the distribution of 500 grams of powder cocaine to get the same mandatory sentence in federal court. Studies show that crack cocaine is more often used by lower income individuals and minorities. In fact, more than 80% of the people prosecuted for crack cocaine charges in federal court are African-American, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

No law has yet passed to address the difference in sentencing between crack cocaine crimes and powder cocaine crimes in federal court. However, there is clearly a shift in criminal and sentencing policies with the Obama administration and some indication that a new law will be passed to eliminate this difference.

When police in Jacksonville, Florida and other areas of Florida stop a vehicle and find drugs such as marijuana, crack cocaine or methamphetamine somewhere in the vehicle, they will try and attribute those drugs to one or more individuals in the vehicle and make drug arrests accordingly. Police claim that even though the drugs were not found on a person, the person was in constructive possession of the drugs. However, police often extend the meaning of constructive possession beyond its legal application and arrest someone for drugs without just cause.

For instance, in a recent drug case near Jacksonville, Florida the police pulled the defendant over while he was driving a vehicle rented to another person. There was another passenger in the vehicle. The police had a tip from a confidential informant that the defendant was carrying illegal drugs. The police officer observed that the defendant made a move to close the center console and was nervous and shaking. The police arrested the defendant based on information from the CI and searched the vehicle. The police officer found cocaine and Xanax in the center console.

After the defendant was arrested for possessing the cocaine and Xanax, he went to trial and was convicted. The police and prosecutors argued that he was in constructive possession of the drugs. However, he appealed that conviction and won his appeal. The appellate court noted that in order to prove constructive possession of drugs the state needs to prove that the defendant knew the drugs were in the center console and had the ability to exercise control over the drugs. The state did not prove constructive possession of the drugs. The car did not belong to the defendant, and there was insufficient evidence to prove that the defendant knew the drugs were in the center console. Those drugs could have just as easily belonged to the passenger or the person who rented the vehicle. The fact that the defendant was nervous and shaking could be explained by any number of factors including the fact that he had been stopped and was being investigated by the police. Closing the center console may seem suspicious in hindsight, but it does not prove that he did it to conceal drugs in there.

It is not uncommon in Jacksonville, Florida or other areas in Florida for police to make a drug arrest based on a tip from someone commonly referred to as a Confidential Informant (CI). These tips can come from a variety of different people and can be anywhere from very general to very specific. Some CI’s are more reliable than others, and some of the tips are more thorough and accurate than others.

For instance, consider a case where a CI tells a Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office (JSO) officer he saw a man conduct a hand to hand drug transaction on a street corner in downtown Jacksonville, Florida. The CI is someone who has provided reliable information to the Jacksonville police officer in the past that resulted in drug arrests. The CI described the street corner, the clothes the man was wearing and said the drugs were in his left front pocket. The Jacksonville police officer then goes to that street corner, sees the man and makes an arrest. The police officer finds a bag of crack cocaine in his left front pocket.

Is this a valid drug arrest for possession of crack cocaine by the Jacksonville police officer? We would say no. The law says that a police officer must have a reasonable basis to stop a person for suspected drug or other criminal activity and must have probable cause of drug or other criminal activity prior to making an arrest. In situations involving a tip by a CI, two primary factors come into play. First, how reliable is the CI? Has he/she provided reliable tips that led to arrests in the past or are his/her tips often, or even sometimes, unreliable? In this case, the CI was apparently reliable with his tips. The second important factor is how specific and thorough the particular tip is. In this case, the tip was too general and did not provide enough information to allow the officer to just walk up to the man and make a drug arrest. The tip did not describe in any detail the activity that the CI considered a “hand to hand drug transaction.” How is the police officer, and later the judge, supposed to know that this CI can accurately detect a hand to hand drug transaction from some other type of hand to hand transaction? And how does anyone know at what angle and distance the CI observed the man and for how long? Additionally, the CI did not indicate the type of illegal drug involved, the packaging or anything else about the alleged transactions. Finally, when the polcie officer saw the man, he did not conduct any surveillance to confirm the tip nor did he know anything about the history of the alleged drug seller.

Jacksonville police raided a home off of Ivey Road in the Southside area of Jacksonville, FL and ultimately made eleven drug arrests allegedly related to fraudulent prescriptions, according to an article on News4Jax.com. The article indicates that the owner of the home was arrested and accused of printing false prescriptions for Oxycontin and similar drugs on his computer and paying people to fill the prescriptions.

There are a variety of issues that arise from a large drug case such as this from whether the Jacksonville police had a legitimate basis for searching the home to the various levels of culpability of the eleven people arrested on the drug charges. When so many people are arrested pursuant to one case, Jacksonville police and prosecutors will always look to some of the defendants to talk and provide incriminating information about the others and themselves. This is often done at a time when defendants are not thinking clearly and do not fully understand their rights. Police and prosecutors may try and paint all defendants with the same brush, so to speak, by making those less involved (or not involved) think they are in the same kind of trouble as those most involved.

It is important for anyone who is either the target of a Jacksonville police or other law enforcement department investigation or has been arrested to consult a criminal defense attorney prior to making any statements that could jeopardize your case. Giving a statement without understanding the facts and your rights could give the police the information they need to make a case against you, when they only pretended to have that information before the statement.

As the number of people laid off and otherwise unemployed in Florida grows, one Florida legislator has proposed to require people to pass a drug test before they can receive unemployment benefits, according to an article at Rawstory.com. The Florida legislator claimed that he is concerned that the unemployment compensation fund is in danger of running out and this would be a way to limit unemployment benefits to those who were intended to receive them.

As the representative for the Drug Policy Alliance points out, the individuals who are seeking unemployment benefits after having lost their jobs have already paid their own money into the system in order to receive these benefits when unemployed. Additionally, when they paid that money for unemployment insurance while employed, they would not have been told that they could only recover their unemployment benefits on the condition that they passed a drug test. The article also raises the question that it is unfair to make people already out of a job to pay for drug tests they were never told they would have to take to receive unemployment benefits.

One other state has tried to require people to undergo drug testing prior to receiving public assistance. However, that policy was successfully challenged in federal court on the grounds that such blanket drug testing was a violation of the individual’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

When the police in Jacksonville, Florida and other cities throughout the country find what they suspect to be illegal drugs, whether it is marijuana, cocaine, GHB or the many other narcotics, they will often use what is referred to as a field test kit to quickly test whether the substance is the drug they think it is. These tests are called field tests because they can be performed “out in the field” presumably allowing the police officer to determine whether a substance is an illegal drug without having to bring the substance back to the lab. When field tests results are positive, the police use those results as a basis for further searches and seizures, arrests and as evidence in a criminal case to obtain a conviction.

The problem is that these field tests are significantly flawed according to many articles and studies. A recent report issued by a forensic expert and a former scientist for the FBI found that the field tests commonly used by police give false positives more often than not when testing non-narcotic substances. For instance, they administered the field tests on non-marijuana substances, such as oregano, and found that the field tests resulted in false positives approximately 70% of the time. The field tests were similarly inaccurate when testing non-cocaine substances.

Police use field tests for a variety of purposes, i.e. to obtain search warrants, to search vehicles and homes, to seize evidence, to charge people with drug crimes and as evidence in a criminal trial. The United States Supreme Court has prohibited the use of inaccurate tests to prosecute someone for a drug crime, or any other crime, for that matter. These reports call into question the Constitutionality of using drug field test kit results against any defendant charged with a drug crime in a criminal case.

All residents of Florida, and the United States as a whole, are protected by the Fourth Amendment which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by police. One aspect of the law on searches and seizures generally requires police to obtain a search warrant before entering someone’s home to look for evidence. A search warrant must be based on specific evidence that gives the police probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime can be located in a particular place. Normally, when a Jacksonville, Florida police officer asks a judge to issue a search warrant, that police officer swears to knowledge of evidence providing probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime, such as marijuana or cocaine possession or trafficking, is currently located in a specific place, such as a suspect’s house.

What if a Jacksonville police officer suspects that illegal drugs, like a shipment of marijuana or cocaine, will be delivered to a particular location in the future? Can the police officer obtain a search warrant now for evidence of illegal drugs that may materialize later? This is referred to as an anticipatory search warrant- where the police allege that there is evidence indicating that drugs or other evidence will be at a specific place at a specific time in the future. Anticipatory search warrants are not automatically illegal, but they require an additional element.

As stated, in order for a regular search warrant for existing drugs or evidence to be valid, there must be probable cause to believe that the drugs or evidence are present at the specific place to be searched. For an anticipatory search warrant, where the drugs or evidence are not present when the search warrant is requested but expected to be present in the near future, the police officer must establish that some triggering event will occur that will cause the drugs or evidence to appear. For instance, in a drug trafficking investigation, a confidential informant may inform the police that a suspected drug dealer will be getting a shipment of marijuana, cocaine or some other drug delivered to his/her house or apartment. The triggering event would be the delivery of the drugs by some specified person. The police officer may request a search warrant now to search that location at some specified time in the future. In order for the search warrant to be valid, there must be probable cause not only to believe that the drugs will be at that particular location but also that the triggering event will occur. In other words, the police officer must show some specific evidence indicating that the triggering event, i.e. the delivery by the person, will take place in the relevant time frame. The police officer may not just generally assert that a delivery will be made at some point and obtain a search warrant.

Eleven people were arrested and approximately $24 million worth of cocaine and marijuana were seized as a result of a recent drug investigation in Palatka, Putnam County, Florida (which is about an hour south of Jacksonville, Florida), according to an article on Firstcoastnews.com. The cocaine and marijuana drug investigation involved local Putnam County police as well as officials from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). According to the article, the cocaine and marijuana as well as cash, vehicles and electronic equipment were stored in two houses on San Jose Avenue in East Palatka, Florida.

It is unclear from the article how they arrived at the $24 million dollar value for the drugs, but clearly this case involves a significant amount of drugs. In a case of this size with multiple law enforcement agencies and many defendants, there are likely to be several issues regarding to whom the police can actually attribute the illegal drugs. Widespread arrests such as these often involve people who may have little or no direct connection to the drugs in the hopes that the police can get incriminating statements from them, flip them as witnesses or somehow tie them to drugs found at a particular location.

It is not uncommon for police to use shaky evidence from unreliable co-defendants to try and incriminate others on whom the police have little to no evidence. This occurred in a recent ecstasy trafficking case involving a Lasnetski Gihon Law client. Once we uncovered the true nature of the alleged evidence and the unreliability of the state’s witnesses in that case, it was clear that the state could not prove their drug trafficking case against our client and the charges were dropped.

Fourteen suspected cocaine dealers in Fernandina Beach (Nassau County), Florida were arrested this week, according to an article at www.Jacksonville.com. According to the article, the arrests and charges were the result of a six month investigation into drug dealing in the Fernandina Beach and Amelia Island areas. Apparently the investigation involved the Jacksonville, Florida office of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the local Fernandina Beach police department. The police officers allegedly used undercover police officers to make drug purchases from Side Hustle Fashions, which is a clothing and shoe store in Fernandina Beach, Florida. Police also executed search and seizure warrants and seized significant quantities of drugs and cash (Police often seize cash and other property that they believe are proceeds of, or related to, illegal drug activity. However, there is a procedure criminal defense lawyers can follow to return that money and property for people when they are improperly seized.)

The article indicates that some of the the fourteen people arrested and charged with drug crimes as a result of the Fernandina Beach drug investigation will end up in federal court while others may face state charges. While there are significant differences between charges, sentences and procedures in the federal system as opposed to the state system, most of the charges will involve the sale and delivery of crack cocaine.

If you have any questions about your rights in a drug case, or any other criminal case, whether it is in the federal criminal system or the state system, contact a law firm whose attorneys have the experience and knowledge to understand all of the legal issues in a complex criminal case and will protect your rights if you have been arrested and charged.

Two individuals were arrested this week for allegedly trying to buy $100,000 worth of cocaine from federal undercover agents, according to an article on News4Jax.com. Apparently, federal law enforcement authorities and local St. Johns County, Florida police were working together on the case over the last few months. Both men were arrested and charged with trafficking in cocaine.

The majority of undercover illegal drug investigations target sellers and suppliers of illegal drugs such as cocaine, crack, methamphetamine and ecstasy. However, when the amount of the drugs is big enough, local and federal law enforcement officials will set up an undercover operation to try and arrest buyers as well. In this case, the potential buyers reportedly were looking to buy 5 kilograms of cocaine. The idea is that buyers of such quantities of drugs will turn around and sell the drugs to other drug suppliers or users.

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