Florida’s Unbreakable Attachment to Sundown Laws

On Sunday, January 24th, 2021, I drove to Gulfport, Florida. I went there to post my fliers on what I call “county-specific justice” at Stetson University College of Law. I chose Stetson for a simple reason: It was the closest law school to me, and the only one I thought my car could make it to. I wanted to educate law students on how their local authorities, and authorities around Florida – police, prosecutors, judges – evade state law and the Constitution, to instead enforce what they wish the law was, and how they prefer to enforce it.

The next morning, I was arrested based on this exact concept, for what was basically an old-fashioned sundown law violation, for entering Gulfport.

“County-specific justice” is the idea that, within a county, the law and the facts are whatever the local sheriff says they are. They can convict anyone of anything, and no outside authority can do anything about it. Think Boss Hogg in “The Dukes of Hazzard”. It is really no different from every other nation in history, before and without a Bill of Rights, because it is what the people – human nature, the vicious mob, the 51% majority faction – demands. It is what James Madison sought to prevent, when he wrote Federalist 51.

Florida sundown laws are a subset of this concept. Read what Gulfport town councilman Bruno Beckhard said about Sundown Laws in Pinellas County, Florida, in 1937:

“Gulfport has never receded from the position it took when most of the men were fishing and women and children were left alone, that no negroes would be allowed within the town limits after sundown. This is not a matter of statute, it is merely a condition that no St. Petersburg negro questions.”

So on January 25th, 2021, the morning after I drove to Gulfport, the police came to my house and arrested me. I asked what the charge was, and they could not tell me. I waived my rights to be interviewed, and again asked on tape to see the arrest affidavit. Again they refused to show it to me. It wasn’t until 10 days later, when my sister who is a Constitutional law expert called and demanded to see it, that they finally showed me the arrest affidavit.

The arrest affidavit stated:

“your Affiant knows of no legitimate purpose for Stephen Murray to be traveling to Pinellas County.”

Sound familiar? They even used UTC times to make it sound like I went there after sundown, despite the fact I actually left a little after 3 PM:

“entered Pinellas County via the Sunshine Skyway Bridge at 7:17 UTC time and left the county again via the Skyway Bridge at 8:51 UTC”

Then police contacted a close associate in the local media, to promulgate the time-worn narrative, that my mere presence in the county posed a threat to the wife and children of an important local white man, who is often out of town:

“Okeechobee man arrested for stalking [Florida House Speaker] Chris Sprowls’ wife… The Sprowls live in Clearwater with their two young sons.”

Of course after being technically in custody for five months, I was never charged with any crime. Because there is not actually a law against driving to Gulfport.

“The State Attorney hereby files a No Information on the above styled case. Dated: June 22, 2021.”

So what is going on here? You may be surprised to find out, the law in Florida is actually set up to preserve the ability of white people to keep black people out of their towns at whim, through and despite changes in state and federal law, and the Constitution.

My first exposure to this, was when my friend Mandi May Jackson was arrested in 2016, in Seminole County, Florida. They had already published a false newspaper story in Georgia, that she was arrested with GHB. When she was arrested in Seminole County, the local paper published a story that was not based in any police document, that Mandi May Jackson tied up, robbed, and shot a man. And what I found out, is Florida (and other states), actually have a designed mechanism to turn these fake local news stories – planted by local police – into witnesses in court.

They call them jailhouse informants. They are basically the most dangerous, devious felons in the prison system. And the State of Florida actually lets these dangerous felons out of prison, as a reward for reading what a suspect is accused of in the paper, and then swearing the suspect confessed to it. And you are not allowed to tell the jury that is what is going on. The judge, the lawyers, nobody is allowed to do or say a thing about it.

Some Florida judge even wrote a case law, that enables cops to publish any lie they want in a newspaper, for witnesses and even jurors, to read and recite. This case law was written at the height of the “tough-on-crime” Republican political resurgence, when they needed fake witnesses to do broad sweeping incarceration of bystanders under new “felony murder” laws. And the person so defamed has no legal recourse.

“The press has no duty to go behind statements made at official proceedings and determine their accuracy before releasing them.”

Ortega v. Post-Newsweek Stations, Florida, Inc. 510 So. 2d 972 (Fla. 3d DCA 1987)

A while back, a bunch of naive people like me came along, and said “Oh my god, Florida is railroading innocent black people with the complicity of local newspapers. Who knew? Who would have guessed?”

“According to the Innocence Project, an in-custody informant (“jailhouse informant”) testified in over 15% of wrongful conviction cases later overturned through DNA testing. Of the exonerees released from death row, 45.9% were convicted, in part, due to false informant testimony. This makes fabricated testimony a leading cause of wrongful convictions in capital cases. Further studies have shown that informant perjury was a factor in nearly 50% of wrongful murder convictions.”

So the Supreme Court of Florida was under some political pressure to do something about it, and convened something called “The Florida Innocence Commission”. And the basic end result, was they did nothing. In fact, less than nothing, they made it worse. Because they put a line in the instructions given to jurors, that made it seem to jurors like they were the first people to ever wonder if the felons in court might be lying. As if everyone else in the courtroom – judge, prosecution and defense lawyers – assumed to that point that the felons were telling the truth. When in fact everyone in the courtroom but the jurors, knows the felons are lying. That is what I sought to educate the law students about, when I made my trip to Gulfport.

And the reason the Innocence Commission did nothing, was because another local king sheriff up the road from Pinellas County, “Doughnut” Bill Cameron of Charlotte, was on the Innocence Commission. And he made sure they did nothing about it. Because using lies to railroad black people, is much too important a tool for Florida sheriffs to ever let go:

“Sheriff Cameron opposed the motion. He took exception to the terms ‘must’ and ‘should’ in the current instruction of the Eleventh Circuit, which reads in part: ‘You must consider some witnesses’ testimony with more caution than others”

Though they did put up a bunch of brazenly fake arguments about the supremacy of jurors – who just happen to be local white people – to give the appearance they did something. And the Innocence Commission was disbanded by Florida West Coast Republican legislators, as a wasteful expense.

Another example, is how local police in Florida are regulated and discliplined – or not disciplined – locally. So if a cop lies in a report, or in court, he is expected to be investigated by the local sheriff or mayor. That local sheriff or mayor answers to the same 51% majority that demanded the cop lie in the first place, to railroad black people out of their communities. So the local 51% majority in Florida will elect a mayor or sheriff, specifically for letting cops lie.

And the circuit court judge is also elected by that same 51% majority, and will never dare say a thing about a cop who lies in court, to railroad a black person. And by the time the lies get to the appeals court, 10 years later, they are undetectable. There is no sign of what people in that local county knew 10 years earlier was a lie, and what wasn’t. The records will even often be lost, as a result of some unfortunate human error.

When police lied in my friend’s case Mandi May Jackson, I was like you. I thought it was against the law, and there was some institution to do something about it. So I contacted every institution in the State of Florida. And here is an example of their response:

“Your correspondence was received by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), Office of Executive Investigations (OEI). In your correspondence, you appeared to allege misconduct by members of the Altamonte Springs Police Department (ASPD) and several Florida attorneys. Upon review, it was determined that your complaint does not warrant an investigation by FDLE.

If you have a complaint against a law enforcement officer, Florida law states that the employing agency is responsible for investigating complaints against officers within their agency. Therefore, any complaints regarding alleged misconduct by members of the ASPD should be directed to the ASPD’s Internal Affairs / Professional Standards Unit for their review and any action deemed appropriate. In an effort to further assist you, OEI is forwarding a copy of your complaint to the ASPD.”

That law is presumably Florida Statute 112.533. No institution in Florida is given statutory jurisdiction to investigate local cops. By law, nobody can investigate them.

112.533 Receipt and processing of complaints.—
(1)(a) Every law enforcement agency and correctional agency shall establish and put into operation a system for the receipt, investigation, and determination of complaints received by such agency from any person, which shall be the procedure for investigating a complaint against a law enforcement and correctional officer and for determining whether to proceed with disciplinary action or to file disciplinary charges

What this essentially means is that the State of Florida can pass a law against sundown laws. And the local police department can keep enforcing sundown laws, by rounding up black people, planting drugs on them, lying in a report that they punched a public safety officer, whatever. And if a cop lies, and it is a blatant provable lie designed to round up black people – and if his local community supports what he is doing – there is nothing anyone in Florida can legally do about it. And it is designed to be that way.

Like you, I was naive when I first found out this was going on. I went onto the web, and started telling people “Oh my God, Florida cops are using lies to lock up the innocent.” And the response I got, often in the anonymity of the web, was “Yes, of course this is what is going on. This is what we want. This is how we get them off the streets, and make the world a better place.” They say things like:

“Thug life has its price, as it should. If you hang out with dopers, or live around dirtbags, we are going to lock you up, too… And the only person who cares if they are innocent is their own fucked-up families, so fuck them.”

So suppose they use lies, to give a life sentence to someone with a past drug arrest, who was merely near the scene of a crime, or accidentally turned down the wrong road, near an important white person. That is not a false conviction, that is a fair conviction in the minds of the majority of white Floridians.

So now we have this thing in Florida and elsewhere, called “The Constitutional Sheriff”. This is really just a sheriff who declares the supreme right of his deputies, and any member of the white majority faction, to shoot anyone they want at any time. They pass an anti-riot law, or prattle on about the Second Amendment, it is all about the sacred right of their constituents to shoot black people. Of course if a black person has a gun in his car, that goes against the Zeroth Commandment that Moses lost, and you have to sentence that black person to death for owning a gun. It is the opposite of Constitutional, it is exactly what Federalist 51 was written in fear of.

The pattern of locally electing sheriffs and prosecutors and judges, and disciplining them in their own department, is all designed to preserve eugenics by incarceration, and protect the power of white people, living near smaller pockets of black people, in Florida. And rather than being conservative or Constitutional or freedom-oriented, it is the exact values our nation was founded to avoid. Our nation was founded for white factions, based on class or religion, to avoid persecution by aristocrats, and the mob.

And now Florida is basically British. And the Constitutional sheriffs go around saying to black people “Get out of the car. Got any weapons in your car?” And then they plant a bag of dope in the car, and Florida law says nobody outside the local white community who elected the sheriff can say or do a thing about it. And so the sundown laws go on, and Florida will never let them go.