Florida Criminal Attorney Blog

A plastic container stuffed with body parts was found in Miami, Florida late yesterday afternoon. The container was discovered by two fishermen fishing in a canal. This is the third such discovery in the South Florida metro area since late October.

Does South Florida have a new serial killer on its hands?

As a criminal defense lawyer, I think this is a very real question that police need to start considering. Not to make corny references to Showtime's hit series "Dexter," which I love by the way, but it seems like a new body is washing up every few weeks around here!

The first discovery was made in Deerfield Beach, Florida on October 26 when the decomposing remains of Doris Lopez, 48, were found stuffed in a container left in her car.

The second discovery was made in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on November 6 when a concrete laden container was found floating in a canal behind a residential area. When a homeowner secured the container for removal, a look inside revealed the existence of mutilated, decapitated white male.

The third discovery was made a few weeks later, on November 15, when a human skull was found in a container lodged on the banks of a Dania Beach, Florida canal. Subsequent DNA analysis has shown that this head belonged to the decapitated body found on November 6.

Now we have a third gruesome discovery.

Continue reading "Body Parts Found in Container in Miami, Florida, Yet Again!" »

A human skull was found yesterday morning in Dania Beach, Florida. Incredibly, this is the third time body parts have been found in South Florida in the past three weeks. More and more, our community is starting to look like scenes from Showtime's crime series Dexter!

The first gruesome discovery was made in Delray Beach on October 26 when Doris Lopez's remains were found in a cardboard container left inside her vehicle.

The second discovery was made on November 6 when a container was found floating in a canal behind a waterfront home in Fort Lauderdale . A forensic inspection of the container by the Broward County Medical Examiner's Office revealed the presence of mutilated body parts, a show, a pair of eyeglasses and concrete. The Broward Medical Examiner's Office claims that the time of death may have been as early as Halloween (October 31).

Now a third discovery has been made. This time it is a human skull. So far, no arrests have been made.

This skull was found late Sunday morning in Dania Beach by Willie Hernandez who is an employee at an auto parts store called Millions of Parts. Hernandez made the discovery near an area of the company's junkyard where he and co-workers eat lunch.

"I had seen a bunch of plastic and a white bucket at the edge of the rocks, lying flat down," he said. "I saw blood coming out and I thought maybe it was bait, from people who fish there. The head was inside the bucket. The hair was surrounded by concrete."

The presence of concrete makes this discovery sound eerily similar to the container found on November 6.

Who does this skull belong to? Is it linked in any way to the prior cases?

Does Broward County have a new serial killer on its hands? Are these cases linked in some way to drug trafficking or domestic violence?

Continue reading "Human Skull Found in Dania Beach, Florida" »

Yesterday, approximately 230,000 students and thousands of teachers and other school personnel were placed on a county-wide lockdown of every public school located in Broward County, Florida. This lockdown was initiated after an unidentified woman called a local radio station to say her husband was going to a school in Pembroke Pines, Florida where he would start shooting. After the caller's statements were reported to police, the radio station sifted through its emails and found an email received yesterday that stated "something big was going to happen" involving Broward government buildings.

Living in a post-Columbine/post-911 environment, the Broward School Board went on red alert and locked-down every public school in the county as of 11:00 am yesterday morning. This was no minor feat, given the fact that the Broward County School Board oversees the sixth largest school district in the country (if I am not mistaken, Miami has the fourth largest school district).

This blog entry will be a multi-part series that addresses a number of issues relating to electronic evidence.

However, before I go any further, I want to commend the School Board for assessing this threat and initiating a proactive response in a relatively timely manner. With over 230,000 students to protect, the School Board handled the matter professionally. Panic did not ensue, parents did not make a mass-Exdous from work to schools, and it was obvious that the School Board worked cohesively with local law enforcement and the media.

While I wonder why it took two hours and ten minutes to issue a county-wide lockdown following the woman's 8:50 a.m. call to the radio station, I still think Superintendent Notter and his staff should get credit for handling the situation well.

Continue reading "Pt. 1: Electronic Evidece and the Lockdown of Broward County Schools" »

According to the Sun-Sentinel, the Fort Lauderdale Police Department is investigating a new homicide after a homeowner discovered a container filled with cement and body parts floating in the canal behind his home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. So far no suspects have been publicly named and no arrests have been made.

(Photo Credit: Sun-Sentinel, Michael Francis McElroy, Sun Sentinel / November 9, 2010)

The man who made the gruesome discovery says he found the container floating behind his home last Friday. When he first discovered it, the homeowner tied the container to his dock with the intention of removing it from the water and discarding it later on.

When he took a look inside the container the next day, the homeowner saw a sneaker protruding from concrete and decided to call police.

At first, the presence of body parts in the container and concrete was not obvious, but in an abundance of caution, police investigators had the container inspected by the Broward Medical Examiner's Office.

During this inspection, medical examiners chipped away at the concrete and discovered the presence of chopped up body parts. To preserve their ability to question potential suspects, police are not revealing which body parts were found, how they were cut, or the description of the container.

Continue reading "Dismembered Body Found in Container Floating Behind Fort Lauderdale Home" »

Unidentified skeletal remains were found today off of U.S. 27 in northwestern Broward County, Florida. According to police, a tourist had stopped on the side of the road to urinate when he noticed discovered the remains next to an area of flattened grassland that caught his attention.

While no identification has been made, detectives from the Hallandale Beach Police Department immediately suspected that the remains may belong to Lynda Robin Meier who has been missing from their jurisdiction since June 4th.

However, given the condition of the remains, police suspect that the they may be too old to belong to Ms. Meier because she has only been missing for a few weeks.

To be sure, the Broward County Medical Examiner's Office will be working with a forensic anthropologist to first determine the sex of the remains and then possibly make an identification using personally identifying features, such as dental records.

Continue reading "Have Lynda Robin Meier's Remains Been Found in Broward County?" »

According to a recent article by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Broward County Sheriff's Office plans to test guns that were found or seized by police, but which aren't necessarily evidence of a crime.

While many people are not aware of this, police departments across the country routinely take possession of firearms that are not used as evidence. Some guns are found discarded, others are seized during domestic violence or drug arrest, and sometimes guns are recovered during community "buy back" programs. Once recovered, a firearm is stored by the police for a period of time and then later destroyed - unless of course it is being preserved as evidence in a criminal prosecution.

By randomly testing its "non-evidentiary" guns, Broward crime scene technicians hope to discover clues that may help solve some open cases. By recovering a projectile from a gun test fired in their laboratory, crime scene technicians are able to compare the markings imprinted on the projectile by the gun's barrel to the markings on other bullets retrieved from crime scenes. When the imprints on the bullets seem to match, technicians presume that the bullets were fired from the same gun. In a sense, crime scene technicians compare the unique markings of a gun barrel to a person's fingerprints.

This type of forensic evidence is called "pattern evidence" and is very different from "analytical evidence" which concerns DNA analysis, blood toxicology, and the like.

While the concept of comparing barrel imprints on projectiles seems very compelling, the truth is that pattern evidence is unreliable. Unlike DNA or blood analysis, pattern evidence calls for interpretation by someone who visually inspects two samples and opines that they look similar enough to be considered matches.

This methodology becomes especially problematic because the two samples a technician may look at are rarely, if ever, identical. Unlike what is seen on TV, a bullet recovered from a crime scene looks nothing like the perfect specimen recovered in a laboratory. Bullets often fragment, chip, flatten, and partially disintegrate upon impact. This is especially problematic when dealing with hollow point ammunition (which mushrooms inside its target) or jacketed ammunition which separates on impact. Not to mention the fact that surviving portions almost always receive additional imprints, scratches, and dings from the targets they travel through and ultimately land in.

In 2005, the United States Congress ordered the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a study on forensic science to address problems like these. For those who have never heard of the National Academy of Sciences, they are kind of a big deal and have been advising the Federal government on scientific and technical matters since Congress created the Academy in 1863.

In its 350 page report to Congress, the National Academy of Sciences stated that "[W]ith the exception of nuclear DNA analysis, however, no forensic method has been rigorously shown to have the capacity to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source." See: Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward, Page 7, The National Academy Press, 2009.

This is a huge problem!

While investigators should analyze each and every clue they recover from a crime scene, police have a tendency to overstate the value of their evidence when trying to close a case - especially when they try to build a case around a particular suspect. This problem is exacerbated when a shortcoming in evidence can be ignored by labeling the evidence "scientific" or "forensic."

Science plays a very important role in law enforcement and in our court system. However, the public, especially those who serve on juries, should always question what they are being told. This scrutiny should be applied to both prosecutors and defense lawyers alike. Each piece of evidence in a case, whether it is evidence that supports guilt or negates guilt, should only be given its proper weight, if any at all.

Ultimately, jurors should remember that the burden of proof rests on the prosecutors and the prosecutors alone. As the accuser, it is the prosecutor's job to prove each and every element of a crime to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt. If a juror has reasonable doubt about the true scientific validity of a piece of evidence, then that evidence should be disregarded.

When it comes to scientific evidence, I for one put my faith in the National Academy of Sciences and you should too.