crime

The Miami-Dade County commission voted Tuesday to allow civil penalties for certain misdemeanors, including possession of drug paraphernalia and up to 20 grams of marijuana.

Doug Hanks of the Miami Herald reports: 

Miami-Dade commissioners voted Tuesday to let police treat marijuana possession the same way they do littering and loitering — issuing a civil citation with a $100 fine that keeps the offense out of the criminal system.

Between the two, the Village of Bal Harbour and Glades County don't even have 16,000 residents. And yet, from 2009 to 2012, the Bal Harbour Police Department and the Glades County Sheriff's Office were behind an international, undercover money laundering sting operation that handled more than $55 million for drug cartels and other criminal organizations.

The state of Florida hadn't seen an operation of this magnitude in years.

A 23-year-old Miami man faces three felony counts and a misdemeanor charge after Monroe County Sheriff's Office detectives say he offered to sell "medicinal high grade top shelf" marijuana on Craigslist.

Keys detectives saw the listing on the online classifieds website. The post also included "a picture of a green leafy substance that appeared to be cannabis," according to Deputy Becky Herrin, spokeswoman for the Monroe Sheriff's Office.

According to an FBI report released this week, almost all of the FBI’s experts who conducted microscopic hair analysis gave flawed testimony in criminal trials.

The error-filled testimony went on for more than two decades since 2000, according to the report, which is the largest post-conviction review in the history of the FBI.

The hair analysis was scientifically flawed, and in most cases bolstered prosecutors' cases against defendants, the report found. 

The Florida Supreme Court has reached a groundbreaking decision about inmates who were sentenced to mandatory life in prison without parole for crimes they committed while they were still kids.

The decision makes 2012's Miller v. Alabama apply retroactively. It was a U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled mandatory life sentences without the opportunity for release were cruel and unusual.

For the past three years, 201 Florida inmates have been in a kind of limbo. They're inmates who were sentenced to life in prison without parole as juveniles before the Miller ruling.

  Prosecutors will not charge the police officers who killed a motorist on South Beach in a hail of bullets after a chaotic chase during Memorial Day weekend four years ago.

In a long-awaited ruling on the controversial incident, the Miami-Dade state attorney’s office officially ruled Tuesday that the 12 officers were “legally justified” in killing Raymond Herisse after he plowed into several cars and nearly ran over several bicycle cops. Police bullets — over 100 were fired in all — also wounded four bystanders.

The City of Miami voted today to pay nearly $1 million to the estate of an unarmed man who was shot and killed by a Miami police officer.

Miami Officer Reynaldo Goyos killed Travis McNeil, 28, during a traffic stop in Little Haiti four years ago.

During an internal affairs interview about the shooting, Goyos said that during the traffic stop McNeil reached toward his waistband area.

“At that time I said 'don’t do it,' gave him a loud verbal command: 'Don’t do it.' And at that time I saw a black object coming up,” he said in the interview.