Polk Law Blog

A Polk County Sheriff’s Deputy’s comments at a trial resulted in the Second District Court of Appeals ordering a new trial in a Polk County arson case. The comments were voluntarily brought to the trial court’s attention by the prosecution.

According to the opinion, defendant Ascour Natan was convicted of aggravated stalking and arson in a jury trial before Judge Dale Durrance. Apparently, during the trial, an item of evidence was mislabeled. This did not appear to be of any consequence in the court’s opinion. Read the rest of this entry »

The Complaint filed by Polk businessman Sam Killebrew has been released by the Clerk of Court.

The Document

• Complaint, Killebrew v. Edwards

The Basics

There is only one plaintiff, Sam Killbrew, who is filing suit in his individual capacity as a voter. He seeks to have the term limit and salary cap provisions for county commissioners in the county charter declared to be in violation of the Florida Constitution.  Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: Much of what appears below is incorrect because it was based on erroneous information indexed by the Clerk of Court before the Complaint was made available. See my next post for more details.  Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month, I wrote about my thoughts concerning the arrest of EllenBeth Wachs, the legal affairs coordinator for the Atheists of Florida, Inc. She has been charged with holding herself out as qualified to practice law. Yesterday, my post was quoted in an op-ed by Glenn Marston in The Ledger, who was critical of the charges. A lively discussion followed on the Ledger’s Facebook-linked comment system.

I had intended to post some of the documents filed in the case with my last post, but never got around to doing so. Here they are:

Read the rest of this entry »

A lot has happened in a very short amount of time on the legal issues involving the Polk County charter provisions that limit commissioners to two terms and that reduce their salary to about half what state law requires.

In my initial post, which was quoted in a Ledger editorial, I disagreed with the conclusion of the County Attorney, who opined that both the term limit and salary provision were unconstitutional. After additional consideration, I stand behind that conclusion, subject to the complexities noted below. I think that the term limit provision would be held unconstitutional under clear Florida Supreme Court precedent, and that the pay provision of the charter would be upheld as Constitutional, although with less certainty.

I will depart slightly from my earlier analysis and state that the matter is not one that is clearly resolved. It is quite possible that a court may see this a little differently than I do.

Read the rest of this entry »