Cutting Through The Crap

Remember the two folks who were arrested while they were handing out Gideon Bibles near a school in Monroe County? The Gideon folks believed they had a right under the First Amendment to pass out bibles on the bike path where they apparently were. Well, they had a court hearing recently, and the judge threw out the case.

The State Attorney said the defendants were trespassing. "This was never a free speech case," . . . he said. "It was a trespass case."

Yeah, right! No one believed that for a Key West minute; including the judge. Of course this was a First Amendment case. Who was the prosecutor trying to kid?

This was also a case of an over zealous prosecutor who apparently didn't have a case or forgot to bring it to the Courthouse. The case never should have been brought in the first place. Once it was, however, the prosecutor should have accepted the plea deal offered by the defense attorney. It's likely that emotion and ego got in the way. And then there was face-saving to be done.

So Judge Payne cleverly cut through the crap and did the right thing.

Must Have Been The Kilt

Is it true what they say about kilts? Maybe so.

In this strange incident in Fargo, North Dakota, a man wearing a kilt and a T-shirt reading, "For Sale," was arrested after he and a woman were they were observed having sex behind a house. The arrest occurred when the couple refused to stop upon police command to do so.

Only the man was charged, proving, we guess that it's not a crime in Fargo to get under a kilt.

Stop Fish Swaps

"Florida's fishermen have built a reputation for harvesting quality seafood. We do not want unscrupulous merchants to tarnish that hard-earned image." That from Charles H. Bronson, Florida's Agriculture Commissioner. Mislabeling or misrepresenting fish is a national problem and a fraud on consumers. Under Florida law the practice is also unlawful.

Among the abuses is the substitution of other fish (often catfish) for grouper. Restaurants that substitute one kind of fish for another and don't inform consumers will now face increased fines of from $250 to $500 from the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, which is required to inspect Florida restaurants twice each year. This seems like just a drop in the bucket to us, but for good restaurants, their reputation is their business, and being charged with a violation, even without a fine, would likely be a deterrent enough. What concerns us is the restaurant owner who just doesn't care. For that kind of owner a $250 to $500 fine will be thought of as just the cost of doing business.

Now Florida has created a website to help consumers combat -- and report -- mislabeled seafood. The website also contains information about the seafood industry, seafood festivals, seafood recipes, seafood cooking tips arranged by species, and interesting links to other seafood related sites. We've added a link, called "Florida Seafood," so you can check it out. Let us know what you think.

Don't Look In The Freezer

If you're a dinner guest, don't look in your host's freezer. You never know what you may find. On Tuesday, July 3rd in Verviers, Belgium, a city 78 miles east of Brussels, a dinner guest did just that.

After dinner, she volunteered to help with the dishes. When she was done she decided to put the leftovers in the freezer in the basement. She went down, opened the freezer door and found two bodies: one of the hosts wife and the other of his 12 year old stepson.

The other guests notified police who identified the bodies. The host admitted that he and his wife, who had been stabbed and placed on ice for several weeks, had had a bit of a quarrel, but he could not explain the death of the child.

Sounds like a plot line for a budding KW novelist, doesn't it? They say truth is stranger than fiction.

What Is Plan B ?

The Monroe County School Board has announced that it is looking for money to replace the four school resource officers the Sheriff has told them he may have to cut from his budget. The School Board and the superintendent have met with a representative of the Sheriff's Office.

But just what is the School Board's plan? To say we are looking for more money, we are lobbying Islamorada or Marathon officials, or we'll have to talk to the municipalities are not plans. What is it besides look for more money and talk to the municipalities that the Board is going to do? Will it cut other services to meet the shortfall in funds? Will it cut administrators? Will it do without the officers? Will it seek private funds? Will it ask businesses to help? What, exactly, is the School Board going to do? A plan would be good and now would be a good time to tell the public what it is.

The way the School Board is proceeding makes us (and perhaps others in the public) think there may be no Plan B.

Cutting The School Resource Officers

What we don't understand about the announced potential cuts of four school resource officers by Sheriff Rick Roth's office is where the School District Administration was when all of this was happening. We don't believe for a Conch minute that the School District was unaware of the potential for cuts. The School District has a liaison with the Sheriff's Office. It is reasonable to assume the School Superintendent knew what was going on. If school officials were co concerned about the potential cuts why weren't they revving up the parents before now?

We wonder whether this situation is not another one of those forget-about-it-until-it-happens situations that has continued to plague this school district's operation. Maybe the School Superintendent is confident that the positions will in fact not be cut or will be restored in the end. We don't know.

What we do know is that the Sheriff's Office doesn't just willy-nilly make cuts. Position cuts are a matter of the tough choices that have to be made among scarce resources. Does one increase this response team or that response team? Does one devote more resources to the schools or to the road? Does one put more resources into crime prevention or to apprehension? Ideally, the Sheriff's Office would like to have the resources to put more of them toward every one of these activities. But the resources just aren't there. So the Office has to make some hard choices about where to put the resources it does have. At the end of the day, it all comes down to money.

The County Commission or the School District (or both) could allocate more money for the school resource officers. Of course, it is still the Sheriff's call whether to assign the officers to that duty, but there is no reason to believe the Sheriff would not do so. Alternatively, the Sheriff could "find" additional money or back away from the potential cuts. However, that seems unlikely at this point in time.

Now if the Sheriff is about to fight with the County Commission over his budget, it is a well known budgetary strategy to cut cows that seem sacred to politicians to increase the likelihood that money for those cows will be added to the budget without reductions being made to other priority items. Do school resource officers fall within this category of sacred cows? Probably not, but the announced potential for cuts may generate enough calls to Commissioners and School District politicians to save some of the resource officer positions or give the sheriff some budgetary wiggle room.

The potential cuts may have one salutary effect. They may force the School District to focus more closely on its own goals and priorities and develop back up plans for situations like the potential loss of the four resource officers. If the School District has a Plan B the District has not announced it. That is not surprising since to do so might lessen the chances of insuring the survival of the resource officer positions. What worries us is that there may be no Plan B on the drawing board.

Should Felons Be Allowed To Vote?

Governor Crist thinks so. He said yesterday that he is hoping to restore felon voting rights by acting through the Florida Clemency Board to do so. “I believe in my heart that everybody deserves a second chance,” the Governor was quoted as saying. “And I’m hopeful that maybe later this week we’ll have an opportunity to restore civil rights for Floridians and give them that right to vote.”

The Florida constitution bars voting for all convicted felons. Florida has the nation’s largest number of disenfranchised former offenders.

Florida felons who have served their time and are no longer on probation can apply to have their voting rights restored, but the route to do so is time consuming and complex. Only a few hundred succeed each year. The ACLU says there are 950,000 felons in Florida who are disenfranchised.

If You Go To Eat At The Outback . . .

Leave the drugs at home is the message from the incident described by two hungry cops in their police report here.