A Florida prosecutor announced plans to vacate as many as 2,600 convictions of people who were arrested for buying crack cocaine produced by the Broward County Sheriff’s Office over thirty years ago.
This practice, which took place from 1988 to 1990, was declared “outrageous” by the Florida state Supreme Court in a 1993 ruling, stating that it violated individuals’ rights to due process. Shockingly, a recent audit uncovered hundreds of those arrests and convictions still on people’s criminal records more than three decades later.
State Attorney Harold Pryor announced his office’s plan to rectify this gross injustice, declaring, “It’s never too late to do the right thing.” He emphasized the lasting damage these convictions have caused to countless lives, from employment opportunities to housing and beyond. Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, many of these cases were never vacated, leaving them to linger and unfairly affect individuals’ futures.
“These matters were well before our tenures. However, I am of the opinion that the State has an ethical duty and obligation to correct this injustice before destruction [of old records] is initiated,” Pryor wrote in a letter to Sheriff Gregory Tony on Thursday.
Tony supports the State Attorney’s efforts to vacate these outdated judgments and sentences, acknowledging the ethical duty to address this historical wrongdoing. The disturbing discovery reveals that these records, some now slated for possible destruction, were never meant to be kept this long under the law.
Defense lawyer Ed Hoeg says the people who were jailed in this sting were battling addiction. Hoeg was a public defender who played a role in the Supreme Court outlawing the practice.
“They were arresting people not for selling, but for purchasing,” Hoeg told the Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale. “They had detention deputies posing as dealers. They would sell it, and these poor people who were addicts were buying it. And they were selling it within 1,000 feet of schools, so the penalties would be greater.”
