by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
Criminal defense attorney Greg Messore remembered with some revulsion working the weekend shift for the Public Defender’s Office on the days immediately following New Year’s Eve.
He walked into a courtroom packed with the previous evening’s arrests, most of them alcohol-related. Those revel-rousers made for a sobering sight, but what Messore really recalled was the smell. In those circumstances, justice was still blind, but its scent was quite pungent.
“The smell is something you can’t forget,” said Messore. “Everybody in there was detoxing at the same time.”
Such is the fate of the public defenders, state attorneys and judges that draw first appearance duty following Jacksonville’s biggest celebrations. Events like Fourth of July fireworks, the Super Bowl, last week’s Florida-Georgia game and even this week’s Greater Jacksonville Agricultural Fair, draw thousands of people downtown, many of them with beer in hand.
It’s a recipe for rowdy behavior that sometimes pushes the City’s legal limits. And when arrests surge so does the workload for the state’s attorneys, criminal defense attorneys and downtown bail bondsmen.
Public Defender Bill White said his office expects an increase in alcohol-related offenses in the wake of those events. High-profile athletic events also bump the number of arrests for scalping. But he called the increase “just a blip on the radar.”
“Our attorneys have full workloads 365 days a year,” said White. “We do see a slight increase in drunk and disorderly arrests and public intoxication, but it’s not anything unmanageable. Like last week, most of the arrests were college students with no record. In those cases they usually are allowed to go home with a fine and time served.”
The students from the Florida-Georgia game who do require representation often have the financial means to hire a private criminal defense lawyer. Casey Stripling of downtown defense firm Armstrong and Stripling said his office received several calls from out-of-towners arrested last weekend looking for local representation. Not surprisingly, most of them were calling from Gainesville or Athens, Ga. area codes.
“If they’re not from Jacksonville, it makes sense that they would want to retain local counsel,” said Stripling. “If a lawyer comes in from out of town, they don’t know the prosecutors, they don’t know their way around. It’s kind of a fish-out-of-water syndrome.”
Jacksonville’s slate of high-profile football games bring in a particularly appealing demographic for attorneys like Stripling and Messore: well-heeled travelers in the mood to celebrate on the downtown streets.
“The type of people who come to these events obviously have enough money that they can travel,” said Stripling. “They’re more likely to be willing to pay for representation.”
Events like the Florida-Georgia game seem heaven-sent for the bail bondsmen clustered around the downtown jail. But the relatively minor arrests that those events typically produce don’t necessarily require a bondsman’s services, said Rick Borenstein, manager of Liberty Bail Bonds on the corner of Liberty and Monroe streets.
Echoing Frost’s comments, Borenstein said “9 out of 10” of the arrests don’t result in jail time beyond the offenders’ first appearance. He said the Fair actually generates the most business for Liberty.
This year, the Florida-Georgia game actually cost Borenstein one of his clients. One of the men arrested in the Saturday beating death of a University of Florida student was out at the time of the crime on a $20,000 bond posted by Liberty.
With that offender in police custody, Borenstein said Liberty was forced to surrender the bond. Borenstein couldn’t disclose the man’s name.
Fortunately severe charges are rare in the wake of downtown events. But, with Jacksonville continuing to add high-profile athletic events like this year’s ACC football championship game and next year’s first-round NCAA basketball tournament, Messore predicts local defense attorneys will continue to benefit.
“You get people in the wrong place at the wrong time, words are exchanged and they find themselves in need of aggressive, effective legal representation,” he said.