Law for victims shields police
In January 2019, a Dollar Tree employee in Masaryktown, Florida, called 911 after a homeless man stole $70 of beer, wine, candy and cookies. A sheriff’s deputy had little trouble finding him – the man had passed out drunk in a nearby ditch.
The deputy took the man to the hospital, where he became irate. With his left wrist handcuffed to the bed, he started swinging his right arm wildly. To get the suspect “under control,” the deputy pepper-sprayed him.
The Hernando County Sheriff’s Office provided a copy of the use-of-force report to USA TODAY and ProPublica in response to a public records request. Blacked out was one crucial detail: the deputy’s name.
Under a law passed to protect crime victims, the deputy was entitled to privacy, officials said. He’d suffered a battery: The flailing suspect had been attached to a pulse monitor, and the wire hit near the deputy’s shoulder.
Introduced in memory of a woman murdered by her ex-boyfriend, Marsy’s Law was created to offer crime victims a slate of rights, including protecting them and their families from harassment by their attackers.
Now, as police across the U.S. face cries for accountability amid mounting evidence of brutality and systemic racism, law enforcement agencies in Florida are using the law to shield officers after they use force, sometimes under questionable circumstances.
Florida agencies have used it to hide the names of officers who sent a 15year-old boy to the hospital, officers who fired bullets into moving cars and officers who released their K-9 dogs on drunk and mentally ill people.
Marsy’s Law passed first in California in 2008 and is now law in 11 other states. It happened each time by ballot initiative, allowing voters to adopt all of its implications with a single yes.
Now, it is on the ballot in Kentucky, a state still reeling from the raid that killed Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker in Louisville. Had it been in place this March, the public may not have learned the identities of the three white officers who opened fire.
“This constitutional amendment is so ambiguous and has lent itself to so much misinterpretation, misapplication, inconsistency,” said Amye Bensenhaver, director of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition and a former assistant state attorney general. “We will have those problems emerge, just as they have emerged in Florida.”
The law increasingly has been coopted by police. It got on Florida’s ballot in 2018 after being introduced by a sheriff and revised with the help of two statewide law enforcement associations. Officers say it allows them to claim victim status in use-of-force cases where they say the suspect was the aggressor.
At least half of Florida’s 30 largest police agencies said they apply it to shield the names of on-duty officers, a USA TODAY and ProPublica investigation found.
Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco introduced Marsy’s Law in Florida. Now, he is a vocal advocate for using it to shield deputies’ names.
“The provision exists for victims across the spectrum, regardless of their profession,” said Nocco’s spokesman, Chase Daniels. “We believe there is the capability to both protect the victim and provide transparency under Marsy’s Law, which we have done.”
Nocco and three other county sheriffs who routinely use Marsy’s Law declined to comment. In an emailed statement, Hernando County Sheriff Al Nienhuis said that Florida voters, “intentionally or unintentionally, did not provide exceptions based on the victim’s positions or actions.”