Author Archives: Jay Butchko
How Many Degrees of Separation Are You From a Life Sentence for Drug Conspiracy?
Florida law makes a lot of threats, and Floridians happily ignore them. Lawmakers threaten to impose life sentences for drug trafficking, while Floridians go on injecting, ingesting, and inhaling with little regard for which drugs are on which schedule of controlled substances, and which drugs are even present in the powders and pills they… Read More »
Who’s Afraid of Tuci?
The gossip about the legal problems surrounding Sean Combs, the recording artist and entrepreneur who has variously been known by the stage names Puff Daddy and Diddy, just keeps getting more complicated. This spring, an associate of Combs, Brendan Paul, was arrested at an airport in Miami and accused of transporting drugs at Combs’s… Read More »
Broward Men Face Criminal Charges After Throwing Backpack Full of Drugs Out the Window on Alligator Alley
If you want to ditch a backpack full of stuff you aren’t supposed to have, there are worse places to do it than Alligator Alley at night. An isolated stretch of road, surrounded by alligator-infested marshes connecting Florida’s Gold Coast to the Paradise Coast, is one of the few places in Florida you can… Read More »
Take a Deep Breath and Turn Yourself In
Florida has a lot of scary things. The ordinary afternoon thunderstorms are so terrifying that any reasonable person would head for the hills long before Florida appears in the cone projecting the path of a tropical storm or hurricane. Nutria and iguanas are everywhere, and even the ducks that hang around Florida’s numerous man… Read More »
Online Purchase of Synthetic Opioids From China Leads to Arrest of South Florida Man
When you were a child and you curiously started to open a brightly colored envelope from the mailbox, even though it was addressed to one of your parents, they probably sternly warned you that it is against the law to open other people’s mail. Your parents were correct; the Fourth Amendment protection against illegal… Read More »
Is It Just a Bag of Weed or Evidence of a Drug Conspiracy?
Journalists never get tired of knitting their brows about how housing Florida is unaffordable. Their think pieces often go on to outline scenarios of how Florida’s unaffordable housing could cause the economy of the entire United States, or even the entire world, to collapse. All of this macroeconomic hype is missing one of the… Read More »
Embalming Fluid Isn’t Just for Exquisite Corpses Anymore
Dry climates, such as one finds in Egypt and the Sahara, are ideal for preserving documents written on plant-based materials such as papyrus and paper. Manuscripts that are hundreds of years old have survived in the libraries of Timbuktu, and some papyri have survived for thousands of years in Egypt. The Florida swamp is… Read More »
A Question of Law or a Question of Fact?
The idea of letting 12 strangers decide whether or not you will go to jail is scary. It is especially scary when you consider that those 12 people are either so ignorant that they have never heard of the drug that you are being charged with possessing, so idle that they have nothing better… Read More »
Jury Instructions in Florida Drug Cases
The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution enshrines the right to a fair trial, and a trial is not fair unless all of the participants perform their duties according to the dictates of the law. This includes the police who obtained the warrants and made the arrest, the prosecutors who made a case… Read More »
Opening Statements in Florida Drug Crime Trials
Most defendants in drug crime cases do not go to trial, but the ones that do go in with a plan. By the time the trial begins, your lawyer will have already thought about every witness you will summon and every question your lawyer will ask when examining your witnesses and cross-examining the prosecution’s… Read More »
