Recent Updates
April 28, 2010
State Must Prove Defendant's Knowledge of Driver's License Suspension
April 13, 2010
Sentencing Commission Votes to Eliminate Recent Criminal History Points
October 15, 2009
Consent to search inside of vehicle does not extend to locked containers
October 14, 2009
Making phone calls to get drugs for personal use not a felony
October 07, 2009
Duval County schools agree to reduce number of students getting arrested
Supreme Court to Examine School Strip Searches
April 20, 2009
Topic: Criminal
The Supreme Court decided to take up the case of a 13 year old girl who was strip searched on suspicion that she had an over the counter pain medicine in violation of school policy. Remarkably, the school did not believe she had illegal narcotics, but rather pain medicine given to her by her parents. This will be an important opinion by the Supreme Court because children in school generally don't have the same rights as the do off school campus. It is more difficult to suppress searches conducted on school grounds and cases we could successfully get suppressed on the streets are upheld in court when the search was done at the child's school. We will track the results of this decision because is may open more protections for children in Jacksonville and Northeast Florida schools for drug searches. Duval, Clay, and Nassau schools' drug searches and enforcements are aggressive and hopefully the Supreme Court's decision can put some reasonable guidelines to the current policy.
A CNN article on the Court's decision can be found here
