Florida Attorney General Aims to Vacate Convictions of Defendants Convicted in Illegal Reverse Drug Sting

It isn’t easy to get others to admit that they were wrong. You especially face an uphill battle when someone else’s wrongdoing has undermined your credibility. If you plead guilty to a crime, or if a jury convicts you on trial, you have a criminal conviction on your record, which prospective employers and landlords. It is hard to say, “I didn’t do it,” or, “They were in the wrong,” because official documents say otherwise. Restoring your voting rights after a criminal conviction is a long process, making it hard for you to vote for the people who enacted the unfair law under which you were convicted or sentenced out of office. As depressing as it is to think about, plenty of wrongfully convicted people are locked in prisons as we speak, working on their appeals or resigned to their fate and counting the days until their release, when they can put this ordeal behind them. It is rare that the state will realize its mistake on its own, and when it does, it is even rarer that it will correct its mistake on its own initiative. Here, our Miami drug crimes defense lawyer explains a low point from Florida’s War on Drugs and its long aftermath, which could lead to the state vacating the convictions of hundreds of wrongfully convicted defendants.

This Is Your Brain on the War on Drugs

People who grew up in the 1980s were taught to fear drugs, and drugs are indeed scary; they are probably even scarier, with so many counterfeit pills that may or may not contain lethal doses of fentanyl. The law enforcement operations against drug crimes were just as scary, even though many of the unnerving details did not receive media coverage until years later.

Entrapment, where law enforcement induces a defendant to commit a crime and then arrests him or her for it, is against the law. You can successfully fight your charges if you convincingly argue that your arrest was the result of entrapment. In the late 1980s, the Broward Sheriff’s Office engaged in an entrapment operation that is beyond the imagination even of the most inspired authors of action movie screenplays.

Drug Sting Operations and Reverse Drug Stings

Drug stings do not usually count as entrapment. In fact, they are a common practice in drug crime investigations. In a drug sting, an undercover officer or confidential informant initiates a drug purchase, and once the transaction gets far enough to yield sufficient evidence, police arrest the seller. Then the state has ample evidence that the seller possessed illegal drugs and intended to sell them.

A reverse drug sting, however, is more insidious. In this case, undercover officers attempt to sell drugs to prospective buyers. In the late 1980s, the Broward Sheriff’s Office conducted a large-scale reverse drug sting. BSO deputies manufactured crack cocaine and sold it on the street in Broward County’s most impoverished neighborhoods. The operation resulted in convictions for more than 1,600 defendants. Some of the defendants received enhanced sentences because the drug sales took place in drug-free zones, such as near schools. The sentencing guidelines in place in the 1980s and 1990s provided for longer prison terms for nonviolent drug offenses than today’s sentencing guidelines do. This happened before the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 took effect.

Ways to Make a Criminal Conviction Go Away

At the end of last year, Florida Attorney General Harold Pryor announced his intention to vacate the convictions of more than 1,600 defendants sentenced during the reverse sting operation of the late 1980s and early 1990s. When the court vacates a conviction, it withdraws the defendant’s guilty plea, reverting the case to where the defendant had not yet entered a plea. Then the state drops the charges against the defendant. If the state vacates your conviction, you cannot be charged again with the same crime, even if new evidence against you emerges; this is the “no double jeopardy” rule.

Vacating a conviction is just one of several ways to make a conviction go away. You can appeal a conviction, and if your appeal is successful, the court can overturn it. Another possibility is to get a conviction expunged. Both of these processes take years of work, and they require the assistance of a criminal defense lawyer.

Contact Our Criminal Defense Attorneys

A South Florida criminal defense lawyer can help you seek justice if the court wrongfully convicted you of a crime, or if prosecutors pressured you to plead guilty.  Contact Ratzan & Faccidomo in Miami, Florida for a confidential consultation about your case.

Sources:

theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/10/florida-crack-cocaine-convictions-vacated

npr.org/2024/12/10/g-s1-37578/florida-prosecutor-overturn-convictions-cocaine-sting