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McGroarty sued the Florida Department of Law Enforcement claiming a violation of his substantive due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. McGroarty’s federal lawsuit alleged that the FDLE violated his rights by continuing to publish his personal identifiable information on FDLE’s sex offender registry website even after he had completed a ten year probation for a sex crime and was no longer subject of Florida’s registration laws.

When McGroarty lived in Florida his Florida conviction as a sex offender required him to register there. He then moved out of Florida to California where he lived while he completed his Florida probation. Eventually he moved to North Carolina, and eventually Florida notified him after he completed his probation that he had to continue registering in Florida as a sex offender. Thereafter, Florida maintained information about McGroarty on its online database, including his photograph, pursuant to Florida’s sex offender registry law, Fla. Stat. section 943.0435. In his lawsuit, McGroarty claimed that Florida lost jurisdiction to enforce compliance with its sex offender registry statute after he moved to California in 2004 because he was no longer a resident of Florida. The district court dismissed his lawsuit as time barred under the statute of limitations.

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Stryker filed a federal lawsuit against three officers of the Homewood Alabama Police Department for excessive force in violation of the Constitution and for state law claims for assault and battery. The incident resulted from his arrest for disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and failing to comply with a lawful order of a city officer. Stryker was a commercial truck driver. After he who arrived at Walmart Store at 2:00 a.m. with his delivery, he was approached by a Homewood Police Officer who told Stryker a woman called the police accusing Stryker of hitting her car on the highway.

Stryker’s version of what happened next was drastically different from the police officer’s version. Under Stryker’s version, he took out a camera to take photographs of the woman’s car, something his company required him to do in the event of an accident. The defendant officer told him not to take photos and to put away the camera. As went to return to his truck, without warning the officer tased him and kicked him when he fell to the ground. As he tried to get away the officer struck him multiple times in the face breaking his jaw. Stryker managed to get into the cab of his truck but the officer broke into the cab, and with other officers that had arrived, they removed him and continued to beat and kick him.

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Grow formed a company and teamed up with a compounding pharmacy called Patient Care America to market three of its compounded medications: a pain cream, a scare cream, and a metabolic vitamin. He recruited two sales representatives and paid them using a tiered multilevel pyramid structure which meant that commissions for the sales representatives were based on their own referrals and referrals made by representatives brought in by the representatives they brought in. He also recruited patients instead of doctors and used telemedicine companies to prescribe the creams and vitamins to patients. Some recruited patients were paid commissions for just ordering their own creams and vitamins and set up a phony survey program where Grow’s recruited patients were paid $1,000 per month to try the creams and vitamins and write about their experiences.   The only purpose of the survey was to refer more beneficiaries and get paid commissions. Nothing was done with the results of the survey. Grow was charged and convicted of conspiracy to commit healthcare and wire fraud, committing healthcare fraud, conspiracy to receive and pay kickbacks.

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Gayden’s career as a doctor ended after law enforcement began investigating his medical practice following tips that he was prescribing excessive amounts of Oxycodone. Drug Enforcement Agents reviewed his prescription records through the Florida Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) and discovered that Gayden had a history of irregular prescribing practices including issuing scripts for opioids in higher quantities or greater potency and in greater frequency than the norm. The DEA issued a search warrant for his patient records. Through recordings made by undercover patient who visited his office they discovered long lines of patients waiting to get into Gayden’s office. Investigators also learned that Gayden insisted on cash only for his services.

Just before the five-year statute of limitations ran, a federal grand jury indicted Gayden on seven counts of unlawful distribution of a controlled substance in violation of 21 U.S.C. section 841(a)(1). Gayden was convicted following a jury trial and sentenced to 235 months in prison.

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Toddrey Bruce appealed his conviction for unlawful possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. Bruce was arrested when he was found in the possession of a firearm which was illegal under federal law for him to possess. In this appeal he claimed the trial court erred by not granting his motion to suppress the evidence of his gun possession because the seizure was a violation of the Fourth Amendment violation. Here are the facts leading to his seizure and arrest.

A 911 call came to the police at 3:00 a.m. by an anonymous person about a disturbance in the front yard of a “drug house” and that one of the men involved had a gun. He told the 911 operator that while he was speaking to the operator, they we were arguing and the person holding the gun he described as a black man standing next to a white car in front of the house. The tipster warned that the police should use caution because there might me shooting any minute. The dispatcher quickly related key parts of the call to the police and several officers who were nearby arrived on the scene with flashing police lights. The approaching officers saw two men in the white car at the address given by the tipster and for officer safety they drew their guns as they approached the car. The police approached Bruce while he was sitting in parked in front of a house. When the police approached the car, they told the men to exit the car, and Bruce tried to make a break for it. When one of the officers grabbed him, a semi-automatic pistol dropped from his waistband.

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Gerti Muho’s scheme led to his conviction of bank fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity, money laundering, and a 264-month sentence in federal prison. In this appeal he claimed that the district court should have reinstated his court appointed counsel despite his having invoked his right to self-representation. He also claims the trial court should have granted his request for court issued subpoenas, and the trial court erred by enhancing his sentence.

Muho worked for an investment firm “FAM” which gave him a position allowing him access to the personal information of the firm’s employees. After he left the firm, he created and used fraudulent documents purporting to reestablish his authority with the firm and then take control of one of FAM’s entities using a shell company he created. He was able to convince a bank, HSBC-Monaco, that he had legal authority to execute financial transactions on behalf of one of the subsidies and incuduced the bank to wire transfer over $2 million from the firm’s subsidy account to an account Muho controlled in another bank.

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Plaintiff James Tracy held a tenured position at the School of Communication as Florida Atlantic University (F.A.U.) when he ran a personal online blog called the “Memory Hole Blog” which began attracting news media attention for publicly questioning whether the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newton, Connecticut had in fact occurred. The University did not ask Tracy to stop blogging but did request that he post an adequate disclaimer on his blog and that he report his blog as an outside activity. Both were required under the faculty’s collective bargaining agreement. Tracy did post a disclaimer by he refused to report his blog arguing that the blog did not qualify as a reportable outside activity under the definition of a “conflict of interest/outside activity. After he ignored two years of repeated requests to submit outside activity reports, F.A.U. fired him for insubordination.

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Nikola Cruz shot and killed 17 people at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018. Fifteen students who were bystanders suffered traumatic harm and psychological injuries from the shooting. In their lawsuit against Broward County, Robert Runcie, Scot Peterson, the students allege that the Parkland tragedy was exacerbated by government blunders before and after the shooting because Broward County Sheriff’s Office failed to act on the many dozens of calls it received that warned of Cruz’s dangerous propensities. Sheriff Scott Israel and Superintendent Runcie knew that Cruz might be dangerous, and Runcie was warned that the school had inadequate security, but neither official attempted to improve it. After Cruz started shooting, Scot Peterson, the police officer in charge of school security, stood outside the school with three other officers and did not enter or attempt to stop the shooting.

They claimed that the failure of Broward County and the officials to protect the students violated their rights to substantive due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. The district court dismissed the claims, and the students took this appeal.

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Graham’s IRS problems started because he only paid a small portion of the money he made running bingo games from 2006 through 2009. When Graham’s payments to the IRS were too small to satisfy his debt, they became more aggressive and after sending lien and levy notices they began to confiscate and selling several pieces of his real estate. Those sales still fell short of is debt which by June of 2014 reached $3.6 million. Graham met a Thomas Walker who claimed to specialize in credit repair. Walker introduced Graham to two individuals Ben and James that he knew who claimed they could help him pay off his taxes with the help of a bill of exchange that would only cost Graham $10,000. After paying the fee, Ben and James sent Graham and Walker a packet of documents which Graham and Walker took to the IRS building in Montgomery, Alabama. Theses documents included a $3.6 million check entitled an “international bill of exchange. The bill of exchanged was not processed because it looked suspicious and determined to be fraudulent. Graham was indicted on one count of passing a fictitious financial instrument in violation of USC 514(a)(2) and one count of corruptly endeavoring to obstruct the administration of the internal revenue laws in violation of 26 USC 7212(a).

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Latecia Watkins was a supervisor at the Boca Raton, Florida, Post Office when she was arrested on for importing more than five kilograms of cocaine into the United States. Here is how it unfolded.

Two packages from Trinidad and Tobago addressed to the Boca Raton Post Office were intercepted at the international mail facility and found to contain cocaine. Law enforcement agents removed the drugs and placed a GPS tracking device with sham cocaine into the packages and put both packages into the mail stream headed to the original destinations.

The agents monitored the GPS and the Post Office’s internal tracking system. They set up surveillance of the Boca Raton Post Office the morning of August 11, 2017 when they expected the packages to be delivered. The GPS device stopped working but they were able to track the packages by the Post Office tracking system. They began to realize some strange occurrences because one of the packages addressed to a Boca Raton post office which did not have a P.O. box number was accepted without the number. Normally a package could not be received unless the addressee had a rented a post office box. The agents then suspected an inside job and the suspect was most likely a supervisor and not just an employee because a postal employee would not have access to certain aspects of the scanning system to manipulate the tracking history of the package.

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