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Flagler, Florida and Beyond
Pierre Tristam | December 9, 2016
It’s a widely accepted but dangerous myth: that cops are under siege, handcuffed by “new restrictions.” The reality is the opposite, with more unbridled and brutal policing than we care to admit.
FlaglerLive | May 31, 2016
Sept. 1 arguments before the Florida court on the question may be made moot by a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, expected in June, on the same issue. U.S. Justices were skeptical of breath tests.
FlaglerLive | May 26, 2016
Courtrooms are using computer programs to predict who will be a future criminal, informing decisions from bail to sentencing. Meant to be fairer than human biases, one such program in Florida is particularly likely to falsely flag black defendants as future criminals, wrongly labeling them this way at almost twice the rate as white defendants.
FlaglerLive | May 13, 2016
Florida Justices, in a 5-2 decision, rejected an appeal from a driver stopped by Orlando police because a tag light and wires were hanging over the license plate on a vehicle he was driving.
FlaglerLive | March 17, 2016
“Civil asset forfeiture” is a controversial practice that gives police authority to seize cash, cars, homes or pother property suspected of use in a crime even absent an arrest. Florida just reformed the law to make forfeiture more difficult and accountable.
FlaglerLive | October 29, 2015
Dustin Singleton, 35, was accused of inciting a riot at the Flagler County Jail Tuesday, a 2nd degree felony, after he refused orders to go to his bunk. He was serving 30 days on a misdemeanor probation violation over a minor pot possession.
FlaglerLive | October 28, 2015
Flagler NAACP members were mostly reassured by use-of-force evidence that, according to the Sheriff’s Office, has declined in Palm Coast, thanks in large part to police body cameras.
FlaglerLive | August 27, 2015
The checkpoints typically result in far fewer arrests for drunk driving than for other reasons: drivers may charged with a host of issues that have nothing to do with drunk driving, including for drug possession or for non-moving violations such as non-functioning headlights or tail lights or irregular registration.
FlaglerLive | June 29, 2015
The U.S. argues that the country will be less safe if the proper authorities have no “backdoor” – a piece of code that lets them in. Software engineers call backdoors “vulnerabilities,” deliberate efforts to weaken security.
FlaglerLive | June 19, 2015
The $1.5 million in legal fees, including nearly $1 million to civil-rights lawyers, are because of Gov. Scott’s failed push to force welfare applicants and tens of thousands of state workers to submit to suspicionless drug tests.
FlaglerLive | June 5, 2015
The conviction for pot smoking of a Palm Coast resident who’d never had so much as a traffic ticket illustrates the sickness of a police and judicial system’s wrongheaded marijuana fixation.
FlaglerLive | December 18, 2014
The checkpoints, which must follow strict guidelines, will be located at Palm Coast Pkwy NW and Frontage Road as well as State Road 100, East of Old Kings Road.
FlaglerLive | December 7, 2014
Resisting arrest is a cop’s license to kill: In retrospect there was little doubt that grand juries in Missouri and New York would let off the cops responsible for the killing of two unarmed black men.
FlaglerLive | December 3, 2014
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a Florida law pushed by Gov. Rick Scott requiring welfare applicants to submit to drug tests before they can receive benefits.
FlaglerLive | July 9, 2014
The governor has not conceded that forcing state employees to undergo urinalysis is unconstitutional despite lower court rulings that spurred the concessions. The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year refused to take up the case, but it is believed Scott will again ask the high court to rule on the case if he ultimately loses in lower court proceedings.
FlaglerLive | June 8, 2014
The ACLU of Florida has been seeking public records for several months now from about 30 police departments and sheriffs’ offices all over Florida in an effort to access whether or not police are not trampling on privacy rights.
FlaglerLive | June 3, 2014
Susan Jones, for more than seven years a home owner on Palm Coast’s Ferdinand Lane, was arrested when she attempted to refuse entry to deputies who wanted to serve an arrest warrant on another woman staying in Jones’s house.
FlaglerLive | April 21, 2014
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision not to take up the case means that the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling stands: Drug tests can’t be justified constitutionally for many of the 85,000 workers who would have been subject to Scott’s policy. The two sides continue to carry out a painstaking process of looking at different categories of workers to determine whether some could be subject to drug testing — a process stemming from the appeals court ruling.
FlaglerLive | April 16, 2014
Florida voters in 2004 approved a constitutional amendment that requires parents to be notified before their minor daughters can have abortions. But an appeals court ruling released Friday shows how far teens can go to challenge the law–and preserve their privacy when seeking an abortion.
FlaglerLive | March 13, 2014
Linda Thomas, a retired attorney in Palm Coast, filed the lawsuit in federal district court, charging the city’s code enforcement division with violations of the 4th and 14th amendments. Flagler County circuit court in two rulings already found the code enforcement division had improperly and arbitrarily cited Thomas, but the court did not address constitutional issues.
FlaglerLive | February 5, 2014
Sophia Zhudro is the 30-year-old resident of Palm Coast’s B-Section who was arrested on Jan. 24 for marijuana possession as she was parked with her 15-month-old on the side of a residential street in her neighborhood. She tells her side of the story, taking issue with the way the incident was related by police.
FlaglerLive | January 15, 2014
Lawyers for Scott filed a petition this week asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, after the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year ruled against across-the-board drug testing, but various groups blasted the Scott administration for continuing to pursue the drug tests. They pointed to repeated past rulings against such drug testing.
FlaglerLive | January 2, 2014
In a harshly worded, 30-page opinion, the judge concluded that “there is no set of circumstances under which the warrantless, suspicionless drug testing at issue in this case could be constitutionally applied.”
FlaglerLive | December 27, 2013
A high school student who took a loaded gun to school argued that the search of his back-pack, based on an anonymous tip, was illegal. A 2-1 ruling of the Third District Court of Appeal disagreed.
FlaglerLive | October 14, 2013
Anticipating the day when FDLE’s crime labs will not be as readily accessible, the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office is investing in a crime scene investigator of its own, a mobile CSI unit, and a $75,000 annual contract with DNA Labs International, a private company, to more aggressively use DNA testing in property crimes.
FlaglerLive | October 7, 2013
Grappling with privacy rights amid fast-changing technology, the Florida Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments in a challenge to police using “real-time” cell-phone information to track a suspect in a drug case.
FlaglerLive | September 26, 2013
Two young children and a middle-aged woman were detained while, for the second time in four days, the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday deployed its SWAT team to serve a warrant on a suspect later charged with possession of marijuana, cocaine, and prescription pills without a prescription.
FlaglerLive | August 12, 2013
Attorney general Eric Holder on Monday delivered a seminal speech outlining a plan to revamp federal drug policy and incarceration rates of non-violent and elderly offenders, and urging Congress to review mandatory sentencing in light of a “war on drugs” that has not worked. The full speech.
FlaglerLive | July 18, 2013
We already teach our sons to be “agreeable” and “non-challenging” with police. Must we now teach our sons to conform to some modern form of “Jim Crow etiquette” and defer to all potential bigots who come their way? Terrance Heath writes that the answer is as heartbreaking to give as it is to receive.
FlaglerLive | July 18, 2013
Sixty-three companies are asking the federal government to allow companies that receive foreign-intelligence surveillance requests to publicly discuss those requests in basic terms, while gun rights advocates have joined the Unitarian Church and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a lawsuit against NSA spying on First Amendment grounds.
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