T.S., A CHILD, APPELLANT,
v.
STATE OF FLORIDA, APPELLEE
AI-generated. These summaries, headnotes, and key points are machine-generated and may contain errors or omissions. Always verify against the full opinion text below. Not legal advice.
The court held that an appellant cannot raise the issue of a repealed statute for the first time on appeal if the error could have been cured in the trial court without prejudice.
A minor was found guilty of assaulting a school board employee under a statute that had been repealed prior to the incident. The new statute had diffe…
The full statement of facts, procedural history, and disposition for this case are member content.
Join FLexlaw to unlock all legal intelligence© FLexlaw, Inc. — AI-generated enrichments are proprietary. All rights reserved.
Explore caselaw by topic → Browse Statutory Repeal cases and more on FLexlaw
KLEIN, J.
T.S., a minor, was found guilty of assaulting a school board employee and adjudication was withheld. T.S. now appeals on the ground that the statute he was charged with violating had been repealed prior to the time of the incident. We affirm because the error, which is being raised for the first time on appeal, could have been cured if it had been raised in the trial court. There was, accordingly, no prejudice.
Appellant was charged under section 231.06, Florida Statutes (1995), a statute which was repealed on October 1, 1996, and replaced with section 784.081, Florida Statutes (2000). Both statutes address assaults on school board employees. The new statute requires that in order to be convicted the person charged with the violation must know that the victim was a school board employee. The petition did not refer to the new statute and did not allege that appellant knew the victim was a school board employee.
Appellant was not, as he argues, found guilty of a non-existent crime. The petition alleged facts constituting a crime and, if appellant had raised the issue in the trial court about the wrong statute, it could have been cured with no prejudice to appellant. Morales v. State, 785 So. 2d 612 (Fla. 3d DCA), rev. granted, 800 So. 2d 615 (Fla.2001).
The state does concede that the petition does not allege that appellant knew the victim was a school board employee, an element of the new statute. We therefore remand for the offense to be reclassified as simple assault.
WARNER and FARMER, JJ., concur.
Cases With Similar Vibessemantic neighbors from the corpus
Citator
Cited By
-
Polite v. State, 933 So. 2d 587 (Fla. 3d DCA 2006)…95 S.Ct. 1255 (emphasis added).7 It is significant also that when the legislature determines that knowledge of an officer’s status is an element of an offense, it has expressly included such a condition. The point is clearly made in T.S. v. State, 808 So. 2d 1276, 1277 (Fla. 4th DCA 2002). In considering the similar offense of assaulting a school board employee, the court stated: Appellant was charged under section 231.06, Florida Statutes (1995), a statute which was repealed on October 1, 1996, and replace…
Authorities Cited
- Morales v. State, 785 So. 2d 612 (Fla. 3d DCA 2001)