The deadline the state identified for itself to appeal the dismissal of four sets of voter guide misdemeanor counts was Oct. 19, which was Monday. Nothing in the matter has appeared on the docket of the court that would have to hear such an appeal. That date came out of the state’s own reconsideration motion of Oct. 7, and it is the only firm one this record carries.
Appeals from the circuit court in this county go to the Fifth District Court of Appeal, under section 35.043 of the Florida Statutes. That section composes the Fifth Appellate District of the Fourth, Fifth, Seventh and Eighteenth Judicial Circuits, and St. Johns County sits in the Seventh. Section 924.07(1)(a) is the provision that would carry an appeal of this kind, because it allows the state to appeal from an order dismissing an information or any count of one.
Seventy-four cases were filed in that court in the seven days ending Tuesday, which is the window its own docket search offers. All seventy-four were read, that window contains the deadline, and not one of the seventy-four is this matter. The only two cases in it styled as the state against a defendant are a prohibition proceeding and an appeal in an unrelated circuit criminal case.
A title search of the same docket was run for every defendant in this prosecution whose name appears in the public record, which is three of the five. The newest result for the first is a foreclosure appeal filed Aug. 31, and the newest for the second was filed in 2023. For the third the court returns no records at all, and the fourth misdemeanor defendant is described in the record only as a political consultant. No name for that person is on the public record, which is why the whole seven-day list was read rather than only the cases a name would find.
What that does and does not establish
A docket entry is a court’s record of a case it has opened, so its absence Tuesday morning is not proof that nothing was filed Monday. What can be said is that nothing has appeared in the court that would hear it, and that no outlet has reported a filing anywhere. The St. Johns Citizen, which has broken every filing in this matter, has published nothing in it since its story of Oct. 9. Nothing in these cases appears anywhere in the current headline feeds of six regional outlets, 265 headlines between them.
The Office of the State Attorney for the Eighth Judicial Circuit received six written questions about these cases from this newsroom on Oct. 7. It acknowledged the request that day under reference 01PR-2026-16441-A, it has answered none of the six, and no answer from that office had arrived by Tuesday morning.
The calendar underneath it
The dismissal of Oct. 2 was entered without prejudice, which means the counts may be brought again and that nothing was decided about whether the allegations are true. So the live question is no longer whether the state wants to bring them again, but whether the time limit in the statute still allows anybody to do it.
Section 775.15(2)(c) gives two years from the offense for a first degree misdemeanor, and subsection (3) starts that clock running on the day after. On conduct the state alleges for Aug. 1, 2024, the ordinary two years ran out in August of this year, which is before these counts were dismissed. Subsection (4)(c) extends the period by three months from a dismissal, but only where a document filed in time was set aside for a defect in its content or form.
Whether counts filed in the wrong court amount to a defect of that kind is the question nobody has yet had to answer on this record. Three months from Oct. 2 is Jan. 2, 2027, and that is the outside date if the subsection turns out to reach this situation at all.
The fifth defendant’s case was not part of the transfer the state asked for, and it remains in circuit court, where a felony count is charged alongside the misdemeanors. The Tattler is tracking all five of these cases and will publish the outcome of each one, including an outcome that consists of nothing further being filed.
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