PLEA DEALS

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Jul/Aug 2004 by Grotto, Jason, Garcia, Manny

Criminals avoid felony records even after pleading guilty

When Lori Pittman was sexually assaulted in 1998, she did everything she could to see justice done.

She cooperated with prosecutors and police, relived the traumatic event time and again during depositions and sat by as her assailant's defense attorney probed her private life.

"It felt like an eternity, but I walked away from all this feeling that everyone had done a really good job," she said. "I was surprised and impressed with the judicial system."

Then The Herald contacted her about her assailant's plea deal, which allowed him to avoid a felony conviction - even though he pleaded guilty to the crime.

"I'm blown away," she said. "I thought he had lost his right to vote and that he would have to disclose his conviction to future employers. That's why I went through the whole process, to protect other people."

The plea deal her attacker landed is called a "withhold of adjudication," a cumbersome legal phrase that is foreign to most Floridians - even those who have been victims of crimes. But judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and criminals know it all too well.

Created by the state's legislature in 1941, withhold of adjudication allows felony offenders who plead guilty or no contest to skirt a conviction. It was intended to be a one-time break for first-time felony offenders, a second chance for those who made a terrible mistake. It was a way for them to escape the stigma of what some call the "scarlet F."

Being a convicted felon is especially harsh in Florida, where felons permanently lose their civil rights - even after completing their sentences. That means they cannot vote, serve on a jury, own a fire-arm, hold public office or obtain many state licenses and student loans.

A computer analysis of nearly 800,000 cases between 1993 and 2002 showed that the well-intentioned law had morphed into a handy tool to move cases through a court system bursting at the seams. Rapists, child molesters, child abusers, cocaine traffickers, repeat offenders and even corrupt public officials were landing the break.

In all, The Herald found that one of every three felony offenders who entered Florida's courts left without a conviction - though they pleaded guilty or no contest to the charges brought against them.

There were other unintended consequences:

* White criminal offenders were 47 percent more likely to get withholds than blacks charged with the same crime and who had similar prior records. That meant blacks were branded convicts and lost their civil rights more often than their white counterparts.

* Florida courts had nearly decriminalized some felonies for first-time offenders. Nearly three out of four thieves got the break. Those charged with battery landed it more than half the time, while public officials who took bribes had a 50-50 shot as did embezzlers and criminals who forged checks or stole people's identities.

* Though the break was intended for first-time offenders, the Herald found more than 17,000 offenders who received two, three, four - and in a handful of cases - even five withholds.

* In thousands of cases, the courts gave the break to child molesters, child pornographers, and men who impregnated adolescent girls. Even in cases where the evidence was overwhelming, child sex offenders landed the plea deal.

"The only evidence they had against me was DNA," said one man who got a withhold after impregnating a 15-year-old.

During the past decade, Florida legislators passed a bevy of laws aimed at getting tough on crime.

They devised minimum mandatory sentences, enhanced punishments for habitual offenders, required criminals to serve at least 85 percent of their prison time and increased the number of crimes considered felonies.

All are measures that sound good on the campaign trail.

Our findings suggested that while politicians were getting tough on the front end, criminals were getting away clean on the back end. Within a week of the series, a group of legislators gathered in Tallahassee to announce legislation aimed at tightening the use of withholds.

Building the house

When studying something as complex and messy as a statewide criminal justice system, it helps to have a simple way to think about it, a way to break it into little pieces.

The withhold project was sort of like building a house, with the law governing the use of withholds as our foundation, the data analysis as the frame and the details we gleaned from court records and interviews as the drywall, flooring, electrical and plumbing.

We knew that withholds are intended to be a one-time break for first-time felony offenders. judges and prosecutors should use them sparingly and only for less-serious crimes. And, like all aspects of the justice system, the use of withholds should be blind to race, ethnicity, etc.

Using these facts as our foundation, we built the frame of our house with a database obtained from Florida's Department of Corrections. The database tracks all felony offenders sentenced to state prison or supervision. It contains basic demographic information about offenders, such as race, gender and date of birth, as well as details about their crimes and sentences, including whether they received a withhold.