Show Your Work: Florida Caselaw, Week of September 18, 2026

It’s ten twenty-five at night in June twenty twenty-four, at a rooming house in Sarasota. Two probation officers pull up. There’s a car in the carport and a scooter in the yard. One officer knocks on the front door and the window next to it, calls out his name, and calls his cell phone several times. Nobody comes to the door.

At the violation hearing, the judge found that he wasn’t home, revoked his probation, and sent him to prison for forty-five months.

But neither officer testified how long or how loudly the officer knocked. Neither had ever been inside that house, and neither could say where his bedroom was in relation to the front door. Nobody answered. How did they know he wasn’t home?

I’m Rory Safir, and this is Reasonably Safir.

This one is the caselaw edition: the decisions Florida’s appellate courts handed down this week, case by case, for the lawyers who’d rather hear them than read them.

Here’s the thing about this week. The same question keeps coming up: how do you know? A man didn’t answer his door, so the State said he wasn’t home. The State said it had tried to find another defendant for years, but put on no evidence of a search. A life care planner priced future treatment that the patient might never undergo. In each, the court had to look at what supported the conclusion. Then there’s a DUI stop the court upheld, where the officer’s specific observations explain why the defense precedent didn’t fit. That’s the theme. Show your work. Let’s get into it.

The first case is the one I opened with. Smith against the State, Second District, out of Sarasota County, Judge Krug below. Judge Rothstein-Youakim wrote it, Judge Khouzam concurred, and Chief Judge Lucas dissented. The dissent questions the line of cases the majority relied on, so we’ll cover both opinions.

Smith pled in 2022 to fraudulently using someone’s personal identification information and to possessing forged notes. He got community control, then two years of probation. Condition nine confined him to his approved residence between ten at night and six in the morning. On June twenty-sixth, twenty twenty-four, two officers came out to check, and what they did is what I described a minute ago. One detail before we move on: the violation affidavit said they arrived at eleven twenty-four. The officer testified it was ten twenty-five. The court treated that as an inadvertent misstatement, and it probably was. Notice it anyway. If the affidavit and the testimony don’t agree on the time, ask what else on that affidavit came out of memory.

Smith testified. It’s a rooming house with three other people living in it. His room is toward the back. There’s a window air conditioning unit that drowns out noise from outside. His phone was off because he couldn’t pay the bill. His investigator went out the following January and had to knock three or four times before a man named Wayne opened the door. The judge didn’t believe him, revoked, and imposed forty-five months in prison.

Reversed, with instructions to vacate the revocation and put him back on probation.

The rule is old and it’s two words long. The violation has to be willful and substantial, and the State proves it by the greater weight of the evidence. What the Second District held is that failing to answer a knock is not legally sufficient evidence that you weren’t home. This is not a new holding. The court walks its own line of cases. Brown in two thousand two, a flashlight knock at two in the morning with the television on inside. Brown again in twenty nineteen, several very hard knocks at six fifty in the morning plus a phone call. Edwards in twenty twenty, knocking and calling out from the front door only. Kegler in twenty twenty-one, a doorbell and three knocks at five thirty-seven in the morning plus a cell phone. Every one of those was reversed. The court’s own sentence in this case: there is no basis to infer that Smith even would have heard the officers.

Now the cases on the other side, because you need both halves of this. Dietz, nineteen eighty-eight: the officer knocked on the front door, then on windows on all sides of the house, then on a side door, at four twenty in the afternoon. Sufficient. Hurst, two thousand six, out of the First District: the officer knocked on the door and then on the side of the trailer where she knew the bedroom was, hard enough to wake the neighbors. Sufficient.

Those comparisons matter. The court looked at where the officers knocked, what they knew about the building, and whether the testimony supported an inference that the person inside would have heard them. A statement that the officer knocked several times doesn’t answer all of that.

Chief Judge Lucas dissents, and he gives the doctrine a name. He calls it L-E-L-E, short for loud enough, long enough. I’ll call it LELE. His complaint is that nobody can tell you where the line is. His line: no one really knows, and we’re still not telling them, because apparently LELE is something to be felt, not described. His argument is that this whole line of cases is a leftover from the special standard Florida used to apply in circumstantial evidence cases, the one the Florida Supreme Court abolished in Bush against State in twenty twenty. Under the ordinary sufficiency standard, he says, a trial judge is allowed to draw the reasonable inference that a man who doesn’t answer his door during curfew isn’t behind it. He takes a shot at the rule against pyramiding inferences on the way out: inferences, he writes, are not Lego blocks or Jenga sticks.

The majority doesn’t dodge him. Footnote six admits the question is open, and answers that the prohibition on stacking inference on inference is a separate rule that survived Bush, citing a Second District case from this July called Young. So the majority is resting this result on inference-stacking rather than on the old circumstantial standard.

If you defend these, compare your record with the five cases the majority follows and with Dietz and Hurst. The dissent gives a prosecutor an argument you should be ready to answer. The majority’s response in footnote six belongs in that preparation too.

The next case is Kafus against the State, Sixth District, out of Lee County, Judge Kyle below, Judge Mize writing. This is another curfew revocation reversed, this time because the evidence didn’t establish willfulness.

Kafus was found in violation on five separate curfew violations after an evidentiary hearing, and sentenced to eighty-nine and a half months in prison. Five of them. The Sixth District reversed all five and ordered probation reinstated, and it never reached the question the Second District was arguing about. It held there was no competent, substantial evidence that any of the five was willful. The rule it used comes from a twenty twenty-four case called Bean, quoting the Second District’s Rousey: a violation is willful only where the defendant fails to make reasonable efforts to comply. Negligence isn’t enough. Ineptitude isn’t enough.

These are separate arguments. In Smith, the evidence didn’t establish that he was away from home. In Kafus, the evidence didn’t establish a willful violation. Kafus doesn’t describe the circumstances of the five incidents, so don’t assume it involved the same unanswered-door facts. The useful point is to address willfulness separately, even if the State proves an absence.

The next case is Cantrell, Sixth District, out of Orange County, Judge Wozniak writing. It’s a statute of limitations case to check when a misdemeanor capias has been outstanding for years.

A battery on April thirtieth, twenty nineteen. The information was filed on August ninth, twenty nineteen, comfortably inside the window. And then nothing, until the capias was executed on November twenty-sixth, twenty twenty-five. Six years and seven months later.

Here’s the statute. Section 775.15(2)(c) gives the State two years on a first-degree misdemeanor. And under 775.15(4)(b), the prosecution counts as commenced only if the capias is executed without unreasonable delay. Filing the paper doesn’t stop the clock. Serving it stops the clock, and only if the State was reasonably diligent about serving it.

At the hearing the State said it had made five attempts over six years. It called no witnesses. It introduced no evidence. Cantrell, in the meantime, spent at least two hundred and two days in the Orange County Jail during that same window, and while he was sitting in there, that same county served him with two other arrest warrants.

The Sixth District granted the petition, and it did it the polite way: it withheld issuance of the writ, confident that the trial court will dismiss the action. The holding is one sentence. The State presented no evidence that it had conducted a diligent search. Not thin evidence. None. Argument from the podium is not evidence of a search.

One footnote, because Cantrell nearly fumbled the framing. He argued the State’s burden in the trial court was to prove by competent, substantial evidence that the case wasn’t time barred, and the court said that conflates a burden of proof with an appellate standard of review. What the State has to show, under the First District’s Mackey, is that it investigated leads and checked the obvious sources. Don’t write the appellate standard into your motion and call it a burden.

If you have an old case where the capias sat for years, pull your client’s jail history before you do anything else. Two hundred and two days in the county jail is not a man in hiding.

The next case is Miller against the State, Second District, out of Manatee County, Judge Mercurio below, Judge Silberman writing. It’s a habeas petition about a bond.

Miller was arrested in June on six counts of promoting content depicting sexual conduct of a child and two related counts. The court set ten thousand dollars per count, so eighty thousand dollars total. He moved to reduce it. Here’s the hearing record: no prior criminal history, twenty-nine years in Manatee County, lives with his mother, works fifty-eight hours a week at sixteen dollars an hour, pays four hundred a week toward the family’s mortgage, no savings. He testified he could manage a bond around twenty-eight hundred dollars.

The judge denied it, and here is the entire stated reason: the nature of the charges, and, quoting the transcript, the fact that I know that you’re going to score to prison.

The Second District granted the writ. Section 903.046(2) lists the factors, and rule 3.131(c)(3) requires the court to consider them. A court is allowed to weigh the nature of the offense heavily. What it can’t do is resolve the whole question on the nature of the offense, and a forecast about the eventual scoresheet isn’t one of the factors at all. Remanded for a new hearing on the actual criteria.

If you cover first appearances, that’s your case. Don’t argue the amount. Argue that the record contains one factor and a prediction and nothing else.

The next case is Gil Pino against the State, Third District, out of Miami-Dade County Court, Judge Alvarez-Zane below, Judge Logue writing. The court affirmed the DUI conviction and the suppression denial. It’s useful to see why the defense precedent didn’t carry the argument here.

After three in the morning, a Doral officer watches a car change lanes twice without signaling and weave in and out of its lane. She lights him up. He keeps driving for four or five blocks, through the lights, the horn, the yelp and the sirens, before he pulls over.

On the lane change, the defense had real law. Section 316.155 only requires a signal if another vehicle may be affected by the movement, and the Florida Supreme Court said so in Riley back in ninety-four. In Hurd, from two thousand seven, the Fourth District found no basis for the stop where the record didn’t establish an unsafe lane movement or reasonable suspicion of impairment.

Here’s why Hurd didn’t save him. In Hurd, the officer admitted there were no other cars on the road. In this case, the officer testified that there were other vehicles out there and that the driving pattern presented a safety concern. That’s the whole difference. The Third District distinguished Hurd on the testimony, and then held, independently, that those facts plus the failure to stop for four or five blocks gave a founded suspicion of impairment, citing DeShong, Roberts, Carrillo and a Fifth District case from twenty twenty-four called Sheldon.

For hearing preparation, put Gil Pino next to Smith. Different legal standards, but the same question helps you read both records: how do you know? In Smith, the officers couldn’t say where the bedroom was or how long and how loudly they knocked. In Gil Pino, the officer described other traffic, the driving, and the delay in stopping. Those details supported the court’s decision. On direct, a prepared prosecutor can develop that testimony. On cross, you can test whether the officer actually observed it and whether the video supports the account.

The next case is Hernandez against the State, Second District, out of Hillsborough County, Judge Sisco below. I was a public defender in Hillsborough before I opened my own firm, so I know that building and I know that division. This is a postconviction reversal in a DUI manslaughter case.

Hernandez entered an open plea to DUI manslaughter and vehicular homicide. He filed a 3.850 motion saying his lawyer misadvised him into the plea and then failed him at sentencing. The postconviction court denied it, principally on the answers he’d given under oath at the plea colloquy.

Reversed. Under Grosvenor, the court needed to determine, considering the totality of the circumstances, whether there was a reasonable probability that Hernandez would have rejected the plea and insisted on proceeding to trial. His colloquy answers were part of that record, but relying on them didn’t substitute for that analysis. The sentencing claim also required a separate prejudice analysis under Strickland. The court remanded for reconsideration under those standards. It left the merits open: the trial court can again summarily deny a claim conclusively refuted by the record; otherwise, it must hold an evidentiary hearing.

Two more in one breath. They are the same defect twice. Misner, Fifth District out of Seminole County: a rule 3.801 jail credit motion summarily denied without attaching the records that would refute it. Reversed, and that’s an automatic in every district in this state. And Arreguin, Fourth District, decided on the State’s own confession of error: a 3.800(a) motion denied as successive when it raised a different issue than the first one, which the rule doesn’t bar. On the merits, section 775.082(3)(a)4.a. lets a court impose a life sentence, or a split sentence with a twenty-five-year minimum. Not both. Under Prentice, the remedy is to strike the minimum mandatory and leave the life sentence in place, with no resentencing hearing.

The rest of the week, quickly. A Sixth District stalking injunction out of Lee County got reversed, and it’s worth a minute because these walk into every general practice. Condominium neighbors. Daily insults about weight and disability. A false rumor. Photographs of his covered patio sent to the condo association. And she had started walking around the neighborhood at night with a flashlight. The Sixth District wrote, and I’m quoting, though we disapprove of this behavior, and then it reversed anyway. The statute requires conduct that would cause substantial emotional distress to a reasonable person in the petitioner’s position. That test is objective. And it did not help that this petitioner described the whole situation on the stand as, quote, really becoming comical. The court’s line: there was no evidence he suffered emotional distress at all. Rude isn’t stalking.

Crews, Sixth District, affirmed citing Maye. That’s the third week running I’ve read that case on this show: rule 3.800(a) is not the vehicle for an Apprendi claim. And the Florida Supreme Court decided Smiley, a capital postconviction appeal out of Polk County, affirming the denial of his initial 3.851 motion and denying his habeas petition. Justice Grosshans wrote it.

Now the injury side. Reinberger addresses both the proof needed for future medical expenses and the closing argument supporting future pain and suffering.

Progressive Select against Reinberger, Second District, out of Pasco County, Judge Sharpe Byrd below. Judge Morris wrote it, Judge Labrit concurred, and Judge Atkinson concurred in part and dissented in part. An uninsured motorist trial out of a Christmas Eve crash in twenty nineteen. The jury came back with one million one hundred ninety thousand dollars in future noneconomic damages and two hundred thirty thousand dollars in future medical expenses.

Almost all of the future medicals are gone. The pain and suffering stands. Here’s why, and it’s a lesson in how a life care plan gets built.

The planner was a physician, board certified in occupational and preventative medicine. He priced the plan at about two hundred thirty-three thousand dollars. It included physical therapy, twelve visits a year against a thirty-year life expectancy, even though she had refused physical therapy, on the theory that her situation may change. It also included three radiofrequency ablations because providers had described them as possibilities, even though she declined the one that was actually recommended and the treating physician’s assistant testified he did not anticipate she would ever have one. He included a TENS unit without knowing she already owned one, and neurologist visits because her neck may become relevant and could be the source of the pain.

He never spoke to a surgeon. He never examined her. And he didn’t know whether he had the majority of her records from the previous ten years.

The Second District rejected nearly the whole future-medical award. Progressive conceded that seventeen thousand eight hundred fifty dollars for medication had support. The court directed that the unsupported portion be struck from the judgment. That’s a little over two hundred and twelve thousand dollars of the jury’s future-medical award, before accounting for comparative fault. Future medical expenses have to be reasonably certain to be incurred, and the court’s description of this testimony was that it was replete with the words may, could, and if. Something based on a possibility cannot be reasonably certain to occur. The planner agreed on the stand that everything in his plan was included to a reasonable degree of medical certainty. That didn’t resolve the problem. The court said the magic phrase is not dispositive.

Progressive also sought a new trial on pain and suffering, arguing that the plaintiff had invited the jury to use the economic number as a multiplier. The court read the closing argument and found that the primary argument concerned the twenty-four-hours-a-day loss of time. It upheld the noneconomic award. When you draft that closing, explain the evidence supporting pain and suffering independently. Tying the request to the medical expenses can give the defense another argument if that award is later reduced.

And read Judge Atkinson’s partial dissent, because it’s the defense roadmap. He would have excluded the life care planner altogether, citing a First District case called Anderson-Moody for the proposition that a planner’s opinions lack a factual basis when the treatments weren’t recommended by a treating physician or another disclosed medical expert. He also would have admitted the defense biomechanics testimony, the equivalent forces comparison, where the crash forces get compared to plopping in a chair or doing a jumping jack. That comparison is coming to a courtroom near you.

One more on the injury side. City of Boynton Beach against Pierre, Fourth District: noneconomic damages are not available under Florida’s Public Whistleblower Act, because section 112.3187 doesn’t clearly and unequivocally waive sovereign immunity for them. The Fourth now lines up with the First in Toal and the Third in Garavan. Three districts, same answer. Treat it as settled when you value a public sector retaliation claim.

One more thing before I let you go. Let’s turn those curfew decisions into hearing preparation. We’ve covered the cases. What should you actually ask, and what evidence should you bring?

Start with the condition and the allegation. Read the order alongside the affidavit. In Smith, the alleged violation was being away from the approved residence during curfew. Keep that allegation in view when the testimony turns to unanswered calls and knocks. Ask what evidence supports the claimed absence.

First, cross the officer on five points: the arrival time, the length of the visit, the number of knocks, how loud they were, and where the officer knocked. Compare the time with the affidavit. If the witness says they knocked loudly or waited a while, ask what they mean. Did anyone else respond? Could they hear a television or an air conditioner? These are questions about the evidence in your case, not a requirement that an officer supply a stopwatch reading or a decibel measurement.

Second, make the officer describe the building. Have you ever been inside? Where is the bedroom in relation to the front door? Is there a back door? How many people live there? In Smith, neither officer had been inside, and neither knew where his room was. In Hurst, the officer knew where the bedroom was and knocked there. That difference gives you something specific to examine.

Third, consider photographs, a diagram, and testimony establishing the layout. They can help the judge evaluate whether someone in that bedroom would hear a knock at the front door. A photograph won’t establish that an air conditioner was running that night or that your client was home. Identify what each exhibit actually proves, and supply the testimony needed to connect it to the alleged violation.

Fourth, keep later observations separate from conditions on the night in question. Smith’s investigator visited months afterward. Someone answering the door on that later visit didn’t establish what Smith could hear during the curfew check. If you use an investigator, establish when they visited, what they observed, and whether the relevant conditions have changed.

Fifth, address willfulness separately. If the State establishes an absence, what evidence explains it, and what efforts did your client make to comply? Kafus applies the reasonable-efforts rule and says negligence or ineptitude doesn’t establish a willful and substantial violation. The opinion gives us little detail about the five incidents, so use its stated rule without inventing a factual match.

When you argue the motion, identify the missing proof and ask the court to address it. Did the evidence establish an absence? Did it establish a willful and substantial violation? Make each argument separately and ask for a ruling. That gives the trial judge a specific issue to decide and makes your position clear in the record.

And prepare for the dissent. Lucas questions whether this line of cases improperly carries forward the old circumstantial-evidence standard. The majority answers that inference-stacking remains a separate problem. You don’t have to predict which argument a future court will accept. Explain why the evidence in your case does or doesn’t support the inference that your client was away from home.

For a prosecutor preparing the hearing, those same questions help identify what the officer can actually establish. A later visit may clarify the layout, but it can’t supply observations missing from the original check. Neither opinion sets a required number of knocks or minutes at the door. The testimony has to support the alleged violation on the facts of that case.

So that’s the week. A man sent to prison for forty-five months because nobody answered a door, with no record of how hard anyone knocked. Five curfew violations and eighty-nine and a half months reversed in a different district the same day, on willfulness. A six-and-a-half-year-old misdemeanor dismissed because the State argued diligence instead of proving it. An eighty thousand dollar bond sent back because the judge gave one factor and a prediction. A DUI manslaughter plea claim sent back for the right test. A stalking injunction reversed because obnoxious is not the same as stalking. And two hundred and twelve thousand dollars in future medicals struck because the doctor who priced them kept saying may.

The pattern, if you want one: saying someone was absent, that a search was diligent, or that treatment was reasonably certain doesn’t tell the judge how you got there. The testimony has to explain it. That’s the question to bring to the next hearing: how do you know?

One caveat, colleague to colleague. These are summaries, most of these decisions aren’t final until the rehearing window runs, and nothing in this episode is legal advice. Pull the opinion before you rely on a word of it.

If you want any of this week’s opinions, or the curfew hearing cross-examination checklist I just walked through, email me at Rory at the Safir lawyer dot com and I’ll send them over.

Take care of yourself, and take care of your clients.