A.C. v. State
| Citation | 23 So.3d 826 |
| Decision Date | 04 December 2009 |
| Docket Number | No. 5D09-2421.,5D09-2421. |
| Parties | A.C., C.M., T.M., D.O., and P.W., Children, Petitioner, v. STATE of Florida, Respondent. |
| Court | Court of Appeal of Florida (US) |
Robert Wesley, Public Defender, and Rosemarie Farrell, Assistant Public Defender, Orlando, for Petitioner.
Bill McCollum, Attorney General, and Pamela J. Koller, Assistant Attorney General, Daytona Beach, for Respondent.
A.C., C.M., T.M., D.O., and P.W. [collectively "Petitioners"] seek a writ of certiorari directed to similar custody orders issued after each failed to appear at their adjudicatory hearing, the date of which was advanced by the court and of which they were unaware.
All of the children had trial dates scheduled for either July 20, July 23, or July 28, 2009. All were represented by the public defender and all were given notice of these dates at their arraignments, which occurred in May. According to the Petition, sometime after the arraignments, thousands of cases were reassigned from one of the four juvenile divisions in the Ninth Judicial Circuit in Orange County which had been eliminated at the beginning of 2009. Because a backlog of juvenile cases continued to build, a senior judge was scheduled to run an additional docket during the week ending June 26, 2009, and the clerk was charged with scheduling hearings on that docket for that week. Petitioners assert that the clerk failed to assign cases and when it was belatedly discovered that no cases had been assigned to the extra docket as they should have been, the administrative judge decided to reassign to that docket cases that had already been set for trial at a later time. Petitioners' cases were among those reassigned cases. Petitioners contend that their attorneys had insufficient time to notify them of the earlier trial dates, or to prepare for them.
According to Petitioners, a stack of orders, dated June 12, 2009, resetting juvenile trials for the week ending June 26, 2009, was received by the Office of the Juvenile Public Defender at the end of the day on Tuesday, June 16, 2009. P.W.'s trial was reset to June 24. A.C., C.M., T.M., and D.O. were all ordered to appear for trial on June 26. All of them failed to appear on these dates and, despite counsel's objection, the trial court issued custody orders for all of them for their failure to appear.1
Petitioners argue that they were arrested and jailed upon unlawful orders and that the harm to them will be compounded as the failure to appear is memorialized in their juvenile record and assessed as a risk factor, which adds points toward a threshold that will determine whether they are jailed in future proceedings. See § 985.255(1)(g)(1) Fla. Stat. (2009).
The transcript in all of Petitioners' cases revealed that they lasted no more than two to three minutes, that counsel requested that a custody order not be issued, objected to the case being reset with such short notice, informed the court that he or she had not been able to contact Petitioners and asked that the original trial date be restored. In each case, the court concluded that notice was reasonable and that if Petitioners did not receive notice, it was due to his or her own failure to keep in touch with his or her counsel.
There is no rule of juvenile procedure that speaks specifically to service of orders resetting trials or the amount of notice required when a trial is reset. Petitioners assert that notice given only to their counsel was not "reasonable notice" as is required by rule 8.100(f). The State contends that service upon counsel is all that is required and that twelve days is a reasonable amount of time under rule 8.100(f). We agree that service on counsel for the juveniles2 is sufficient, but we disagree that the time allowed for notice of the advancement of the trial dates was sufficient. Subsection (c) of rule 8.085 provides that notices of hearings shall be served a "reasonable time" before the time specified for the hearing. "While there are no hard and fast rules about how many days constitute a `reasonable time,' the party served with notice must have actual notice and time to prepare." Crepage v. City of Lauderhill, 774 So.2d 61, 64 (Fla. 4th DCA 2000) (quoting Harreld v. Harreld, 682 So.2d 635, 636 (Fla. 2d DCA 1996)); State Dep't of Transp. v. Plunske, 267 So.2d 337, 339 (Fla. 4th DCA 1972). Although general time parameters are usually recognized, what constitutes "reasonable notice" will necessarily depend on the interests at stake. See, e.g., J.B. v. Dep't of Children & Family Servs., 734 So.2d 498 (Fla. 1st DCA), rev. granted, 749 So.2d 503 (Fla.1999), decision quashed on other grounds, J.B. v. Florida Dep't of Children & Family Services, 768 So.2d 1060 (Fla.2000); Harreld, 682 So.2d at 636; Anderson v. Sun Trust Bank/North, 679 So.2d 307 (Fla. 5th DCA 1996); Montgomery v. Cribb, 484 So.2d 73, 74 (Fla. 2d DCA 1986); Henzel v. Golstein, 349 So.2d 824 (Fla. 3d DCA 1977). See also Reynolds v. Reynolds, 187 So.2d 372, 373 (Fla. 2d...
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...when defendant had an opportunity to file the motion before trial. C.M. v. State, 51 So. 3d 540 (Fla. 5th DCA 2010) (See A.C. v. State , 23 So. 3d 826 (Fla. 5th DCA 2009) for discussion of error that occurs when the court moves up trial dates for several juveniles, and the PDs are unable to......