Attorney General Ashley Moody wants the Florida Supreme Court to take up a dispute about whether a former Jackson County sheriff’s deputy should have been convicted on a racketeering charge related to planting drugs in vehicles during traffic stops.
Lawyers in Moody’s office last week filed a notice that is a first step in asking the Supreme Court to take up the case, which a panel of the 1st District Court of Appeal said last month involves a “complex legal issue, and its answer has far-reaching impact.”
The appeals-court panel upheld former Deputy Zachary Wester’s convictions on other charges related to planting drugs. But, in a 2-1 decision, it ruled Wester should not have been convicted of racketeering because he acted alone. It said he should be resentenced.
The notice filed last week, as is common, did not provide detailed arguments that Moody’s office will make at the Supreme Court. But it pointed to part of the appeals court opinion that took a step known as certifying a question of “great public importance.”
That question asked whether, under a state racketeering law, the state “must prove that the enterprise in which the defendant is alleged to have participated or been employed was being used by at least two persons with the understood purpose of accomplishing some illegal objective or end.”
The majority of the appeals court concluded that Wester did not violate the law known as the Florida RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization) Act.
“Here, there is no question that Wester was employed by or associated with the JCSO (Jackson County Sheriff’s Office),” Judge M. Kemmerly Thomas wrote in the majority opinion joined fully by Judge Joseph Lewis.
“Further, it is undisputed that he used the office of sheriff to carry out his crimes. That is to say, his acts were ‘inextricably intertwined’ with his law enforcement duties and facilitated the prohibited acts. However, the evidence establishes that he acted alone and not in concert with any other individuals in the commission of the crimes ‘through’ a pattern of racketeering activity.”
But Chief Judge Timothy Osterhaus dissented on the racketeering issue, saying that the RICO Act and other cases show that “racketeering encompasses crimes like Wester’s, where an individual employed by an entity activates the weight of that entities’ authority and tools — the entire law enforcement system in Jackson County in this case — in a criminal scheme.”
“(It) is undisputed that the sheriff’s office employed Wester and vested him with the full authority of a deputy sheriff to enforce the criminal and traffic laws in Jackson County on its behalf,” Osterhaus wrote.
“Wester leveraged this authority as well as the tools of the sheriff’s office — patrol car, lights, uniform, badge, arrest authority, handcuffs, jail, official paperwork, etc. — to commit a series of crimes that were only successful because of Wester’s employment and association with the office. It vested governmental authority in Wester to do what he did — to make traffic stops, conduct vehicle searches, and make arrests that activated the entire criminal justice system in Jackson County against his victims — the sheriff’s office jailed Wester’s victims as lawbreakers, the state attorney’s office prosecuted them, and courts administered their cases.”
Describing the facts of the case as “disturbing,” Thomas wrote that Wester began working for the sheriff’s office in 2016 and planted drugs in certain vehicles during traffic stops.
“After Wester set up the unsuspecting and innocent individuals, they were arrested and charged with drug-related crimes, drastically impacting their lives,” Thomas wrote. “The crime spree came to an end only when an internal affairs investigation was initiated into Wester’s unauthorized disconnection of his body camera during the traffic stops.”
Wester was found guilty on one count of racketeering, along with charges of official misconduct, perjury, fabricating evidence, false imprisonment and possession of a controlled substance and drug paraphernalia, Thomas wrote. He was sentenced to slightly more than 12 years and six months in prison.
Thomas wrote that the RICO law was written to address organized crime, and she said applying it to criminals acting alone “would create unintended results.”
