Can you believe that prosecutors in Duval County charge, prosecute, and try cases where the accused was arrested for trafficking in hydrocodone, a first degree felony (up to 30 years in prison) based on her actual possession of a pill bottle, labeled as belonging to her husband who had a valid prescription for the Lorcet tablets the bottle contained?
The accused, who should never have been arrested, charged, and much less persecuted, had to proceed on the sole defense theory that she was holding the pills for her husband. She was prosecuted for what? I discussed this case with Cheetah, my 2 year old chimpanzee. Even she, looked at me with a perplexed face and asked me if these morons were at all in touch with reality. I did not know what to tell her.
How can any educated fellow agree that it is a crime for a wife to carry her husband’s lawfully prescribed and obtained medication? It appears that in Duval County, Florida, this simplistic logic escapes a bunch of legal scholars and others. It first escaped the copper who started this fine piece of criminal masterpiece investigation and arrested the accused. It then escaped the intake prosecutor who you’d think should have wondered if he or she should move forward with such evidence. It finally escaped the trial prosecutor who was ready, willing, and able to expose the accused to 30 years in prison, waste days of jurors, judges, witnesses, clerks and deputies’ time to prosecute such garbage.
One hundred thousand dollars is likely a very conservative estimate of the cost of this futile and worthless exercise, if we consider the trial judge, the appellate judges, the law enforcement officers and the FDLE experts involved in the investigation and the trial testimony, the prosecutors, the deputy bailiffs, the clerks, without forgetting the time wasted by the jurors.
Unthinkable, yet the unable felony prosecutor wrongly spewed the following: “They want you to say, so what, they're her husband's pills, of course she can have them, but you know what you won't hear, when the Judge reads you the law, you won't hear that she had a right to have them because, after all, Hydrocodone is a controlled substance. You will not hear from the judge that it is a defense for this defendant to have the pills because her husband has a prescription. You will not hear that. If you do not hear that, then there is no defense in the law for this defendant to have the pills.” … and the final straw; the jury found her guilty of trafficking in hydrocodone.
Luckily, the appellate court overturned the case and told this fine bunch to try again…
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