Too bad the media isnt aware of this
That is absurd. Why wouldn’t you just toss it in a pond, bury it, dumpster it, etc? You actually hired a lawyer for this?
I must be misunderstanding you because under this scheme, the police could never convict someone of possession of drugs. A cop pulls me over and there is a bag of weed in the passenger seat. At trial the prosecution will describe how the cop found the drugs.
I take the stand and say that it wasn’t mine, I stopped a mile back down the road to use the restroom and came back and starting driving. My attention was diverted because I was having a bad day, so I never looked at the passenger seat. Someone must have placed it in my unlocked car while I was in the restroom, your honor.
Now, if I understand you correctly, the state now has to “rebut my claim sufficiently for the jury to disregard it.” How would they do that exactly?
I can’t answer for RNATB but I think Bricker answered this in post #94.
As I showed earlier, despite what I would guess is a common protestation of, “That ain’t mine!”, our court system has had no trouble tossing people into jail by the truck load for drug possession.
You’ll have to ask Bricker about how stuff works in practice, but I imagine it depends on the case. Rather hard to argue that a baggie isn’t yours if there are your fingerprints all over it, for example.
So is this the new standard for legal discussions? Posters make statements and when questioned, the questioner is told to wait for Bricker to respond? Let’s just turn legal threads into **Bricker **manifestos.
I may disagree with Bricker but he knows the minutiae of how the court works because he has expertise in that area and I linked just above to an answer of his that I think addresses your question.
If that did not address what you are asking you can say so and ask for further clarification.
Yes, let’s.
But don’t worry – threads will still operate the way they do today: people whose opinions are supported by the factual content of my posts will praise me; people whose opinions are hurt by the factual content of my posts will disagree, without citation to fact, and loudly insist that the law is a matter of opinion, and besides there’s The Spirit to consider, to which they alone are privy, and the five or six posters on this board able to consistently separate their desires from the truth of factual information will continue to do so quietly.
The jury is entitled to believe, or disbelieve, anything you say.
Note that merely because they disbelieve your story does not produce a record that supports the opposite conclusion. By this I mean if you testified that you saw the rapist attacking the girl, and was not Steve, they can disregard your testimony, but they cannot convict Steve just because they don’t believe you. They have to have some evidence that says it WAS Steve.
In this hypothetical, the jury is entitled to infer that a person sitting next to a transparent baggie, openly visible on the seat, would see it. And assuming the bag itself is in evidence, they are entitled to to look at it and decide that its character and status as contraband was immediately obvious to anyone.
They don’t HAVE to decide that, but those are permissible inferences.
Florida: Don’t get caught with dope, 'cause you’ll presumed guilty unless you prove yourself innocent*.
But want to kill your 4yr old baby, hide the body in the woods and go clubbing for a month? Want to play rent-a-cop and shoot an unarmed 17yr old kid? Florida’s your kind of state!
*yes I know I’m misrepresenting the law. It’s called poetic license; bite me.
In fairness, we have an overabundance of kids and weed, so the state’s public policy of reducing the numbers of both kind of makes sense.
Gotta be another Modest Proposal in there somewhere.
Remember when they had the problem with all the land mines in Thailand etc? And the UK was struggling of what to do with the potentially gadzillions of BSE-infected cattle? And the thought was, just ship all the cows to Thailand and let 'em wander around, randomly finding the land mines as they graze. Problem solved.
Something along those lines.
Says the person who has provided no citations in this thread and likened this to statutory rape in post #8 to insinuate this is now a strict liability crime when it isn’t.
Keep up the good work counselor! :rolleyes:
The distinction between strict liability and general intent aside, he was exactly right (both this law and statutory rape laws create general intent crimes). The key is that either way mens rea is not required.
The only iffy part is that SCOTUS has yet to rule on the constitutionality of such statutory rape laws. He did not say they had, though; he just impled that if you support those it’s hard to see why you’d have a problem with this.
If you are accused of statutory rape and they prove you had sex with an underage person then there is no “but” or other circumstances which changes the outcome.
In Florida you may be proved to have possessed an illegal drug but in theory you can still be found innocent if you can prove it wasn’t yours and had no knowledge of it.
I have participated in hundreds of threads, and written thousands of posts that were carefully cited, and the response from you and the rest of your brain-dead lummock companions has been to peer at them briefly and then continue to bray loudly your own opinion. You, and your compatriots, have heads impervious to cited facts. Why would I possibly expect this thread to be any different?
I mentioned statutory rape to illustrate two things. One was that the new drug law is a general-intent crime, with no specific scienter requirement. Your OP blathers like Chicken Little about the claim that this somehow changes the burden or proof; confronted with a law that is already more draconian than the drug law in this regard, and has existed for years, someone with the mental acuity of a mealworm would have realized that if this change truly represented a removal of the presumption of innocence, then the statutory rape laws had already done that and worse. You would have then cogitated a bit and realized that perhaps you were being a trifle hasty – that, indeed, the accused is still presumed innocent, and the change only amounts to the elements of the crime being changed.
But, of course, you didn’t do that.
I see no reason to waste my valuable time looking up caselaw and posting it for the benefit of slack-jawed primates barely able to master potty training.
I would have thought this was obvious, but the issue with statutory rape is that the perpetrator may not have known the victim was underage. Do you really not get the parallel?
Bricker’s wrong. I feel it in my gut.
I have to go now, and kill all the hostages.
Then you should stop posting here if you think mere assertion is enough because people do not appreciate your cites and ignore them.
They are not the same.
It is my understanding that in a statutory rape case there are no mitigating circumstances when it comes to whether the defendant is guilty or not. You could produce ten witnesses and security video and testimony from the underage person admitting they got into a bar on a fake ID, that they seduced the older person and told that person they were 22 years old and willingly engaged in sex and all of it could be absolutely believed and not matter one whit.
If you had sex with an underage person that is all the state cares about. You are guilty if you did it. You cannot produce any defense beyond trying to prove that the sexual intercourse did not occur.
In the case of Florida and their new take on possession the circumstances can still matter. Possession is one element of the crime but not the only one. As has already been noted (and cited) knowledge that you were possessing an illegal substance is part of the crime and still bears on the question of guilt in Florida.
Except Florida has shifted the burden of proof from the state to the accused.
Yes, the state still has to prove possession so you are technically correct you have a presumption of innocence when you step into the courtroom.
Except think about it. What does the state have to do to prove you were in possession of an illegal substance?
Prosecutor: Officer, when you searched the defendant what did you find?
Officer: I found a comb, a wallet, house keys, $22 in cash and a bag of what looked like marijuana.
Prosecutor: Was the substance in the bag marijuana?
Officer: Yes, we tested it and it was marijuana.
That’s it. State just proved you were in possession of a controlled substance. Took them all of what? Thirty seconds and the state’s case is done under Florida law. It is an absurdly simple hurdle for the prosecution to get over. What defense do you propose as a rebuttal to this? “No you didn’t!”?
I produced videos earlier of police planting drugs on people. You cannot assume the police are always telling the truth and honest keepers of the public trust.
It is now incumbent upon you to deny your guilt and prove your innocence. Look at the order of those words…guilty till you prove your innocence. Previously and in other states the state still needs to make their case beyond mere possession. Not so in Florida. The accused now needs to prove the elements in the case to show they are innocent. Hence guilty until you prove your innocence. As a practical matter that is the state of affairs in Florida now for a drug possession case.
In typical Bricker fashion though you sidle in, toss some snark, make no effort to understand what is being discussed and make some assertion on how the law is what it is and all us cretins should not argue with you.
This is a message board and not law school. We complain about a given law being unjust or in error for some reason or other. Even among lawyers there is a lot of debate about how a law should be applied or if a law goes too far. If there weren’t there’d be no Supreme Court cases. Saying the law is what it is is beside the point.
Coming here and demeaning people because they have the temerity to not accede to the proclamations of the Great Lord Bricker Whose Every Word Drips With Absolute Truth is bullshit and you well know it (or should).
If you think the Florida take on possession is peachy say so rather than ranting that it is the LAW and all us peons should just suck it up and accept it.