Florida Prosecutor Wants To Clear Convictions Of People Who Bought Police-Made Crack

You read that right!

In a world of WTF stories, this one may be the WTF-iest of all time!

It begins in 1988, when the panic over crack cocaine was all the rage. Ronald Reagan was president, and the tabloids were full of stories of crack babies, and crack-crazed squirrels attacking people and decimating their gardens in search of their next fix.

The pressure was on police departments to do something, and the men of the sheriff’s office of Broward county Florida got a bright idea. The crime lab supervisor John Pennie, police chemist Randy Hilliard and the Sheriff Nick Navarro decided they would freebase their own crack cocaine, on the seventh floor of the Broward County Courthouse.

And that is what they did. They picked up some baking soda and cooked up that Florida snow into ready rock, heat-sealed it into baggies, and sent undercover deputies off to sell it. By the high school! And selling within 1,000 feet of a high school made buying it a felony with a three-year mandatory minimum sentence.

Ballsily, they argued in court that they did it for everybody’s own good: the state making its own crack was better than using seized crack, because the seized crack might be full of all kinds of impurities, and what the police was making was the good shit.

Plus there wasn’t enough crack seized from the community to do the level of busting they wanted to do. And making their own was more convenient for the police, because they did not have to have the chemist testing the quality of the crack. They already knew the quality, because they’d made it themselves.

After their crackery cookshop was uncovered, Jim Leljedal, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, dismissed the haters as simply jealous of this genius plan: “I think there’s all this excitement just because it's a practice that's never occurred to any other police department before.”

With their newly made bounty, the Broward County police sold a lot, $20,000 worth, to thousands of people, for two entire years. And oops, whoops, butterfingers, they misplaced a lot of it too.

In 1993 the Florida Supreme Court ruled that this was all some crazy bullshit — while they said it is fine to use seized drugs to ensnare people, the police making their own is outrageous.

And now, 33 years after the press first got wind of what the sheriff’s department was cooking up, and 31 years after the Florida Supreme Court threw out the first police-crack-factory guy’s conviction, can you believe 2,600 people still have convictions on their records? (Yes, you can.)

We also must interject that crack enforcement was racist as hell. To cite just one study from the Florida Herald Tribune, “when Black and white people were convicted of similar drug crimes, Black people received a sentence that was, on average, two-thirds longer.” We don’t know the makeup of these 2,600 people, but probably it was not white girls and boys whose parents had lawyers on speed dial when they got busted.

So now, finally, the state attorney for Broward County Harold Pryor is moving to vacate the convictions of those 2,600 people, who still have them on their records, should they happen to still be alive. “It is never too late to do the right thing,” he said. And that is true. Not much help to the people who already spent years in prison thanks to those guys, though.

[State v. Williams / UPI / New York Times archive link / Florida Politics]

Follow me on Bluesky!