By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
Every day, state prisoners flood Florida’s courts with appeals and pleadings about their cases that they’ve written themselves. Those pro se filings – Latin for “on his own behalf” – rarely get far.
This spring, however, an inmate sex offender serving a life sentence convinced the Fourth District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach that a Broward judge erred when she failed to order prosecutors to explain potentially serious discrepancies about his Miranda rights warning form.
The state introduced the Miranda form as evidence at Charles D. Williams’ 1998 trial, but Williams contends the document was a fraud and that police forged his signature. For years, Williams and his family filed public records requests seeking to obtain a copy.
“After serving multiple requests to the Broward County Clerk and the State Attorney’s Office over a course of years, his brother finally obtained a copy of a Miranda waiver form,” says the unanimous order by a three-judge appeal panel. “The date on the form produced differed from the date on the form introduced at trial, and the signature on the form produced varied from the petitioner’s signature.”
The panel ordered Broward Circuit Judge Lisa Porter to require prosecutors and the clerk’s office to respond to the “factual issue of whether the form produced is the same as the form introduced at trial.” If the response doesn’t resolve the matter, Porter was instructed to “hold an evidentiary hearing.”
The court issued its mandate to Judge Porter on June 12 after denying a request for reconsideration by Florida Assistant Attorney General Richard Valtunas, who in previous court papers called Williams’ assertions “outlandish allegations of fraud and skullduggery.” The judge had not taken action as of Monday.
Williams, who next week turns 76, was a longtime Pompano Beach resident when Broward Sheriff’s detectives arrested him in 1996 on multiple counts of sexually battering or molesting his teenage stepdaughter. He was convicted after a three-day trial in March 1998. His conviction was upheld on appeal.
Starting in 2006, Williams and his family began filing public records requests for a copy of the Miranda waiver form presented by the state as evidence at his trial. After repeated visits and phone calls, Clerk Howard Forman’s office advised that it didn’t have the form in their file. Meanwhile, the State Attorney’s Office provided a copy, but Williams claims it wasn’t the same form the state used at trial and that the signature on it isn’t his signature.
Williams, housed at the Department of Correction’s South Florida Reception Center in Doral, petitioned Broward Circuit civil Judge John Bowman in 2011 to compel the state to produce a “true” copy of his Miranda waiver form. He based his claim on the signature discrepancy and “trial testimony from a police officer in which the officer referred to the document as an ‘Affidavit of Conform’ and described the rights on the form differently than as written on the ‘Waiver of Counsel’ form provided by the State Attorney’s Office to his brother,” according to the appellate decision.
Bowman found Williams’ petition legally sufficient and transferred the matter to Porter in the criminal division, where it sat for three years until Porter denied it and entered an order prohibiting Williams from further pro se filings.
“Because the petition established a legally sufficient basis for relief, as determined by the civil court judge, the criminal court judge erred in denying the petition,” the appeal court’s decision says.
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