Florida Illegal Prison Sentence
While I was in law school, I interned in the Staff Attorney's Office of the Sixth Judicial Circuit. At the time (pre budget cuts) there were about six attorneys and two interns whose sole job was to read and answer motions for post conviction relief. These are motions filed, usually pro se, by a person who has been sentenced to prison who thinks the sentence is illegal in some way.
Most of the motions had to do with jail credit. When a person is sitting in the county jail, all the days they serve there should count toward their prison sentence. For example, if a person sits in jail 90 days before serving a 5 year prison term, he should be credited for that time in jail.
The 5th DCA (Daytona Beach) just ruled on the case of McLeod v. State It seems McLeod pled to a 3rd degree felony and was given proabation with a suspended sentence of 5 years in the Florida Department of Corrections. The maximum sentence on a 3rd degree felony is 5 years. So if McLeod violated his probation, he would have gotten the full 5 years, minus any time served in the county jail. Unfortunatly for McLeod, he did violate and the court sentenced him to the five years minus 92 days he'd spent in jail.
But he'd actually spent 318 days in jail and argued that he deserved credit for all of them. The State and the judge argued that McLeod waived his right credit for time served as part of a plea agreement. (Who in their right mind would believe that this was a "plea agreement" to the maximum amount of time possible for the crime?)
The 5th DCA agreed with McLeod and better yet - said that because he was entitled to credit for all of his time served, he was actually sentenced to more than the maximum of 5 years which made his sentence illegal.
If you think you have agreed to an illegal sentence - call Pawuk & Pawuk.
