Ideological Split Continues at Supreme Court of Florida
The ideological split among the current justices at the Supreme Court of Florida continued to show in three cases decided on 7/10/2008. In Florida Dept. of Environmental Protection v. Contractpoint Florida Parks, LLC, the court held 4-3 that §11.066(3), Fla. Stat., does not require a specific legislative appropriation before a state agency can be required to pay a valid judgment entered into for breach of contract with a private entity. In the majority were Justice Pariente, along with Chief Justice Quince, Justice Anstead, and Justice Lewis. Dissenting were Justices Wells, Cantero, and Bell.
In Wyche v. State, the court held 4-3 that a criminal defendant's saliva sample was not given involuntarily, and therefore not in violation of the Fourth Amendment, even though the police obtained the defendant's consent to giving the sample by telling him that he was a suspect in burglary A, when in fact there was no burglary A. The State later tried to use the sample to prosecute the defendant in burglary B. This time, Chief Justice Quince "switched sides" and voted with her three more conservative colleagues, Justices Wells, Cantero, and Bell.
And in Salazar v. State, Justices Bell, Cantero, and Wells, though concurring in the court's affirmance of the defendant's first degree murder conviction and death sentence, took issue with the standard of appellate review which should be afforded to a trial court's ruling on a motion for mistrial.
It'll be interesting to see whether and how this split plays out in Murray v. Mariners Health. That's assuming, of course, that the court decides the case before the departures from the court of Justices Cantero, Bell, Wells, and Anstead over the next several months, as I noted here.
