I would go much further than that. I propose that we declare war on them.
(Really asking a question here)
What makes a crime a strict liability crime?
I can see it in a statutory rape case. Did you have sex with that person and was that person underage? If yes then the state does not give a hoot about any other circumstances except (maybe) during sentencing.
But is possession in the same boat? I toss the baggie at you, you catch it and the state deems you guilty for possession?
Are there any protections for this in the law that says certain crimes can be deemed strict liability but others cannot or do we just hope the state will be reasonable about these things?
For instance if you kill someone the law cares about the circumstances. We have different degrees of murder and they account for killing someone being accidental or whether it was in self defense and so on.
If killing someone was like drug possession now is in Florida it would seem that state would need to prove you killed the person and any other circumstances YOU need to prove. Killing anyone would be a default first degree murder unless you can prove mitigating circumstances rather than the state having to make a case under reasonable doubt.
“Strict Liability” means that, if you committed the criminal act, you are guilty of the crime. Statutory rape, and some traffic offences, are the most common laws of this type.
Under strict liability, there are no mitigating circumstances allowed - although a jury can still nullify. It looks like this drug possession law isn’t actually strict liability, however, but that ignorance of the possession, or nature of the substance, can be an affirmative defense. All the links are to Wikipedia, if you want more background information on the concepts.
It doesn’t reflect particularly well on Florida that it’s harder to claim that someone planted drugs on you than that you shot someone in self defence…
Edit - If I’m wrong about anything here, hopefully Bricker, or someone who’s actually either American or a lawyer can correct me.
It is strict liability in effect. It removes mens rea as an element of the crime. The article is correct to the extent that Florida is the only state which does not require intent for a drug conviction of this type (though Washington does not require mens rea for drug trafficking offenses). The article is wrong - hugely wrong - that the law “does away with the presumption of innocence.”
The Supreme Court has held that mens rea need not be proven in “public welfare offenses” (Morrissette v. US, 342 U.S. 246) Those tend to be regulatory infractions, with relatively small penalties. SCOTUS has never considered the constitutionality of strict liability statutory rape offenses - but both those and this involve severe criminal penalties and are unlikely to be deemed public welfare offenses.
ETA: I am an American. And a Floridian. And a law student. I hope that’s close enough.
EETA: Here is the government’s reply brief in the Florida Supreme Court case, which explains the whole thing relatively well.
It’s not strict liability in effect. It’s general intent in effect. If it were strict liability, the affirmative defense about intent wouldn’t be available, but it is.
Why?
As mentioned the law cares about circumstances of a crime when dealing with most crimes (as you noted statutory rape is a hold out and the rest such as traffic violations are minor crimes).
Again consider a charge of murder. The state has all sorts of different levels of murder to charge you under and each goes beyond the mere fact that someone is dead and you killed them. They are deeply linked to the facts surrounding the case and not merely that someone is dead.
In a murder trial the state needs to prove all the components beyond a reasonable doubt. Correct me if I am wrong but they never tell the defendant that he/she is responsible for proving the circumstances in the case.
To put the onus on the defendant in a criminal trial seems distinctly a removal of presumption of innocence. As I mentioned above proving you were is possession of drugs when you were arrested is trivial. If that is the sole bar the state needs to cross to throw you in jail for a drug offense that is very scary.
Not always, in the case where the defendant is using an affirmative defense. It is, as has been rather exhaustively demonstrated in the Zimmerman/Martin threads, the case in Florida, but not everywhere. The wiki page on affirmative defense I linked to earlier has some more information on this.
It’s not trivial, and it’s not a removal of the presumption of innocence. That would only happen if they didn’t have to prove you had the drugs. In the cases you are talking about, the defendant did possess the drugs.
Now, I don’t agree that it should require an affirmative defense situation here, as I don’t think it’s valid to infer knowledge from the simple act of possession in the absence of proof to the contrary, but no matter how many times you assert it, you’re still wrong about this having anything to do with presumption of innocence.
Because the presumption of innocence has to do with the crime and its elements. So long as the state has to prove each element of the crime, you are presumed innocent. Yes, if the cop testifies that he found a " white powdery substance" in your bag and vouchered it using voucher #123 and someone from the lab testifies that they performed an analysis on the powder contained in the bag attached to voucher #123 and the substance proved to be cocaine , and the judge or jury believes both the cop and the lab person you will likely be found guilty. If the judge or jury doesn’t believe one of them , or if one of them doesn’t show up to court , you will be acquitted.
Eliminating the presumption of innocence and placing a burden on you to prove that you are innocent would mean that there was *no need for the cop or lab technician to even show up to court to begin with.* You got arrested, and are presumed guilty unless you prove otherwise.
Even with an affirmative defense, the state first has to prove that you committed all the elements of the crime. Only once that has happened does the burden shift to the defendent.
Well, if the law was written such that the only element of the crime of “murder” was the killing of a human being , there wouldn’t be any degrees of murder, or any such crimes as manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide . They prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you killed someone, you’re guilty unless you raise specific defenses, some of which (like insanity) are affirmative offenses which you must prove beyond a reasonable doubt and others which are not affirmative (like self-defense) and which the prosecutor must disprove beyond a reasonable doubt.
And again, all of this is a completely separate issue from whether it’s a good or bad law.
Perhaps I am wrong.
It seems to me if there are multiple components to prove a case then shifting the onus to the defendant is removing this presumption.
It is far easier for the defendant to get over the beyond a reasonable doubt hurdle. It is decidedly more difficult to make an affirmative defense.
And as for “proving” possession I would think most times it is the cop saying, “I found drugs when searching the defendant.” I doubt a, “No he didn’t” from the defendant gets them very far in asserting their innocence. As noted above the system is not exactly struggling to get drug convictions and by far most of those are possession cases.
The hurdle for “proving” possession is a decidedly easy one for the state to cross. Making any defense beyond that the defendant’s responsibility seems onerous and unnecessary. In Florida it seems the system is now such that a cop merely saying they found drugs on the defendant is about all that is needed to send them to prison. Looks like a presumption of innocence thing lost to me.
AFAIK Kansas is also a strict liability state. When my father died one of the boxes of items I recovered from his house contained a pot pipe and other paraphernalia. I asked a lawyer on this board privately if it was legal to own, and he looked it up and told me I needed legal help, because even my accidental possession could get me in trouble. I sought help from a lawyer in my town, who told me the single best thing I could do was throw it in the trash. Apparently, turning it in to the police was a Bad Idea, as he knew of cases where people walked up to a police station, said “I found this in the park”, and were promptly arrested and charged with misdemeanor possession. And in one case, went to jail. Because they could not prove that they were not in “possession” of the item as they were turning it into the police. :rolleyes:
Naturally I destroyed everything, and the statute of limitations has run out anyhow.
I don’t know why I ever thought that Bricker was a good person.
I heard that you gave that stuff to Marley and shortly thereafter he banned everyone 
The US needs not just stricter drug laws, but more incarcerations too.
I’m with billfish678 on this one. I don’t see a practical difference on how this would play out for anyone suspected of possession. Courts have always ruled that intent can be inferred by someone’s actions.
If the police catch me standing over my wife’s corpse with a smoking gun, they will likely charge me with murder. To prove the “intent” element, they don’t need a notarized statement from me stating that I want to kill her, a witness stating that I said that, or a mind reading device. The jury can infer that by pointing a gun at someone and pulling the trigger, that I intended to kill her. Now, I can rebut that inference by claiming it was an accident or self-defense, and the jury may or may not believe me, but the initial inference is there.
Likewise, in 49 states, a jury will infer that if you are in possession of a drug, that you knew you had it. It makes sense, if I have a valuable product in my possession, I probably know about it.
The only thing the Florida law does is actually codifies this inference which everyone believes anyways. In Florida, or any other state, if you are caught with drugs, you will be forced to come up with a rationale that the jury will accept in order to beat possession charges.
In 49 states, the jury will be explicitly instructed not to make that inference. The jury will be told that the state must have proved beyond a reasonable doubt that under the circumstances, the defendant did not possess the drugs because of mistake, inadvertence or accident.
You’ve stated my points much better than I did Jtgain. But yeah that was my point.
Now, the fact that this is how things currently WORK when it comes to drug possession and charges is not something I am terribly happy about but that’s another debate.
And this thread is one of the reason I don’t associate with people who do drugs, seem a bit shady in general, or go to places where there seem’s to be a higher than normal chance some drug dealing/use is going one. The whole drugs and the war on it is one gawd awful mess I most certainly DO NOT want to accidentally get sucked into.
Oh, and Jimmy, thanks for your replies to my other posts as well.
I have to admit I’m not seeing the problem here that you are. What you are saying, in effect, is that the defense has to present positive evidence of an alibi, right? And that’s supposed to be bad?
Well, gosh, who would have a problem with that? Surely you don’t think the state should have the burden of proving any alibi the defendant can pop out beyond a reasonable doubt? In the case of drug possession, doesn’t every defendant claim they didn’t know the drugs were there? That’s what I’d say.
I mean, suppose that in the State of Florida, they were to force the state to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, some other type of alibi. I dunno… let’s say, self defense in the case of a murder. So suppose one night the cops come along to find a man with a smoking gun in his hand and there’s a dead man on the ground with a bullet hole in his chest. They are in a public place, one that both men had a right to be, and the victim is not carrying a weapon. Now, should the law force the prospective defendant, let’s call him “Mr. Z,” with a burden to provide some affirmative evidence that he acted in self defense? Or should we just take Mr. Z’s word for it, and not make him provide any evidence his alibi is believable?
It seems to me quite logical that “Mr. Z” should have to provide some evidence he acted in self defense. I wonder if anything like that has ever happened in the State of Florida.
If only it was pitifully easy for them to get a state-issued ID …
Eventually most people who engage him catch on. Some faster than others, of course.
In fairness to Whack-a-Mole’s point of view, RickJay, although I do think he is being a little obstinate in the way he’s articulating it, there’s a significant difference between possession as a criminal act and how knowledge relates to it, and shooting a dude as a criminal act and how self defense relates to that. We’re taking a bit of license by even calling possession an act in the first place, since most possession is done on an ongoing passive basis.
Knowledge does seem intrinsic to the act of possessing, whereas the question of whether it’s self defense or not is separate from the actual criminal act of killing a dude with a bullet fired from a gun you were holding.
As has been said, you have to prove you didn’t have the drugs to be acquitted. If you had them, and the state can prove it, you are guilty. Merely being in possession of the illegal drugs is enough. Is this a good law? Arguably not. But undoubtedly the article is poorly written. It throws the word “innocence” around too loosely.