A circuit judge dismissed the last three criminal charges in the St. Johns County voter guide prosecution on Oct. 16. The felony among the three was dismissed with prejudice, which is the single form of dismissal that does not leave the charge available again. The St. Johns Citizen reported the ruling on Tuesday morning, and its account is the only published description of the order this newsroom has read.
Circuit Judge William E. Davis entered the ruling two weeks after he dismissed misdemeanor counts against four other defendants in the same matter on Oct. 2. The defendant in the Oct. 16 order is a campaign manager, and she was the fifth of the five people this prosecution charged in July. Her count of evidence tampering was the only felony charged against any of the five defendants, and the order disposed of it permanently.
The two misdemeanor counts against her, a conspiracy count and an unauthorized voter guide count, were dismissed without prejudice instead. Prosecutors may file those again if they choose to, and the order places them in county court rather than in the one that has just released them.
Why the felony went
The tampering allegation rested on a claim that some of the pamphlets had been burned by this defendant. The order found that destroying some copies did not amount to destroying the evidence, for two reasons that it sets out. Many of the guides had already been distributed by then, the Citizen reports the order saying, and investigators were already holding copies of their own. The order draws a comparison to an earlier Florida case in which electronic material was deleted after it had already been shared with other people, and that comparison is the reasoning the Citizen reports it applying to the pamphlets here.
That finding is what carried the rest of the ruling, because the felony was the only count of its kind against her. Once it was gone, the circuit court no longer held jurisdiction over what was left, which was two first degree misdemeanors. The order says those two charges belong in county court, which is the court the state had already asked on Oct. 7 to move the other four sets into. It is the same jurisdictional reasoning that took the other four sets of counts out of circuit court on Oct. 2.
The order did not accept the whole of the defense argument, and the part it refused belongs in the record beside the part it allowed. Davis rejected the challenge to the constitutionality of Florida’s voter guide statute, and he rejected the claims of selective enforcement and selective prosecution with it. He found no evidence that this defendant had been singled out, and no evidence that prosecutors had purposefully taken an irregular path in charging her.
What is left of the case
Nothing in this prosecution is now pending in the circuit court, which is where all five sets of counts were filed in July. The four sets dismissed on Oct. 2 were against County Commissioners Christian Whitehurst and Sarah Arnold, St. Augustine Beach City Commissioner Dylan Rumrell, a former mayor of that city, and a political consultant. All four of those were dismissed without prejudice, and the order made no finding on whether the allegations against them were true. The fifth set went two weeks later, and one of its three counts went in the form the state cannot undo.
Whether any of these misdemeanors can be brought again is a question about the calendar rather than about the evidence in them. Section 775.15(2)(c) of the Florida Statutes gives the state two years to commence a prosecution for a first degree misdemeanor. Subsection (3) of the same section starts that two year period running on the day after the conduct is committed. On conduct alleged for Aug. 1, 2024, the ordinary deadline fell in August of this year, and that date has now passed.
Subsection (4)(c) extends that period by three months from a dismissal, but only in the one circumstance the paragraph sets out. The document has to have been filed inside the period and then set aside because of a defect in its content or form. Whether counts filed in the wrong court are a defect of that kind has not been settled by any order in this matter that the public can read.
The state’s own reconsideration motion of Oct. 7 identified Oct. 19 as its deadline to appeal the Oct. 2 dismissal. The Citizen reports that no notice of appeal had appeared in the clerk’s online docket as of Tuesday morning, the day after that deadline. Appeals from the circuit court in this county go to the Fifth District Court of Appeal, under section 35.043 of the Florida Statutes. This paper read all 74 cases filed in that court in the seven days ending Oct. 20, and none of the 74 is this matter.
Section 924.07(1)(a) is the provision that would carry an appeal of either dismissal, because it allows the state to appeal an order dismissing an information or any count of one. Nothing in this matter has appeared on that court’s docket, and the Oct. 16 order is five days old as this is written.
The Tattler has tracked these five cases since July and will publish anything further that happens in them. That includes a refiling in county court, an appeal of either order, and the point at which the time to take one has run out.
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