Florida Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Law Ruled Unconstitutional

Guilty knowledge, as Kameel Stanley characterizes it in the St. Petersburg Times, is a pretty important concept in criminal law. In Latin, it's called mens rea, and it means that the prosecution must prove that the person charged with a crime actually intended on committing the crime. Mens rea literally means "guilty mind."

Prosecutors ordinarily have a higher burden of proof in the criminal justice system - hence the "innocent till proven guilty" thing.

At least it was that way until the Florida legislature got rid of the duty of a prosecutor to prove guilty knowledge in alleged drug offenses with its Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Law of 2002.

Wayward Burden of Proof

According to federal judge Mary Scriven, the law violates due process.

"Not surprisingly," she wrote, as Stanley reports, "Florida stands alone in its express elimination of mens rea as an element of a drug offense. Other states have rejected such a draconian and unreasonable construction of the law that would criminalize the 'unknowing' possession of a controlled substance."

Scriven then ruled the law unconstitutional, causing "one of the largest potential effects on criminal law in the past decade," says one defense lawyer.

The Case That Started it All

33-year-old Mackle Shelton was busted for drugs (delivering cocaine) and convicted in 2005, serving out his 18-year sentence in Florida prison, because the jury in his case was instructed to find him guilty if he delivered cocaine - not if he intended to deliver cocaine.

As Harvey Silverglate writes for Forbes, the issue is "far from a technicality." Silverglate writes, "It is a staple of our civilized criminal justice system that you cannot be convicted of committing a crime unless you knew what you were doing and realized that it was against the law."

Shelton's attorney said, "It takes the presumption of innocence and throws it in the garbage can," referring to the 2002 Florida law. And Silverglate seems to back that statement up in his Forbes piece, where he highlights the rise of strict liability crimes that do not require the age-old burden of proof in which the accused is innocent till proven guilty.

With Scriven's ruling, hopefully we can take the presumption of innocence back out of the garbage can.

Sources: Forbes, "How a Floridian busted for cocaine possession may save future white collar defendants," by Harvey Silverglate, 08/05/11

St. Petersburg Times, "Federal judge rules Florida drug law unconstitutional," by Kameel Stanley, 07/29/11