‘God-fearing and very fair’
Wide racial disparities show up in prosecutor’s sentencing numbers. But in tiny Madison County, the sheriff runs the show.
MADISON COUNTY — Dean Morphonios was the sole prosecutor in this tiny Panhandle county for nearly a decade.
He’s the son of a flamboyant Miami judge — Ellen Morphonios — but could not be more different in character and temperament.
Where his mother was bold and bawdy and bragged about her sexual conquests, he is humble, deeply religious and devoted to his wife.
Where she earned the nicknames “Maximum Morphonios” and “The Time Machine” for doling out long sentences to criminal defendants, he has a reputation for leniency and favoring probation over prison.
Where she co-wrote an autobiography and hosted a radio show for years, he prefers anonymity and declined to be interviewed.
Morphonios’ mother, who died in 2002, was no racist. Morphonios isn’t one, either.
But a decade of crime data from
the state’s massive Offender Based Transaction System shows that black defendants he prosecuted for felony drug crimes spent four times longer behind bars than whites on average.
That places Morphonios, who was reassigned to Lafayette County earlier this summer, among the prosecutors with the widest sentence disparities in the state.
This glaring difference in outcomes for blacks and whites prompted the Herald-Tribune to investigate Morphonios as part of its three-year examination of racial bias in Florida’s criminal justice system.
After the newspaper published its “Bias on the Bench” series in December 2016, some judges absolved themselves of blame.
They said if anyone is responsible for racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, it’s the prosecutors. That’s because they control plea bargaining, in which more than 95 percent of cases are settled.
Since almost all of Morphonios’ cases ended with plea deals, it makes sense to point a finger at him for the disparities in Madison County, according to the judges’ theory.
Talk to anyone at the local courthouse — defendants, clerical staff or defense attorneys — and they’ll tell you they admire and respect the 62-year-old assistant state attorney and doubt race influences his decision-making in any way.
“He’s probably one of the best prosecutors I’ve worked with,” said Mutaqee Akbar, an African-American criminal defense attorney based in Tallahassee. “He’s God-fearing and very fair.”
But when conversation turns to Sheriff Ben Stewart and his countywide drug task force, sentiment shifts.
“The drug task force is racist. You can quote me on that,” Akbar said. “Madison is famous for racial profiling on I-10.”
Akbar added that sheriff ’s deputies are known for seizing cash, cars and other assets from those found breaking the law.
“They get a lot of forfeiture money,” Akbar said. “That’s all they care about.”
Stewart declined to be interviewed. He did not reply to an Aug. 6 email outlining the newspaper’s findings.
His chief deputy, Epp Richardson, was initially helpful. But he, too, stopped returning calls and emails in early August.
During a conversation earlier this summer, Richardson said forfeitures had nothing to do with the number of his office’s drug arrests.
“It’s really not a business,” he said. “It’s an enforcement action.”
To explore these issues further, the Herald-Tribune asked the 3rd Circuit Court, which includes Madison County, for all of Morphonios’ felony drug cases from 2014 through 2016.
Reporters built a database with the names of defendants, defense attorneys and arresting officers, as well as the reasons behind the arrests, the points scored by defendants under state sentencing guidelines, and the sentences they ultimately received.
After analyzing this information and interviewing more than 20 lawyers, court officials, county residents, criminal defendants and legal experts, the newspaper found:
■ Stewart grew his task force into one of the most productive drug-busting machines in Florida — moving it from 50th in the state in per capita arrests in 2009 to third by 2015.
■ The task force runs like a business. Money flows in from fines, fees, forfeitures and grants — at least $2.2 million over the past decade. It is used to buy patrol cars, radios and other equipment.
■ Deputies arrest more blacks than whites — not only along the 30-mile stretch of Interstate 10 that cuts through the county but within Madison and away from the highway as well. While blacks represent less than 40 percent of the county’s population, they accounted for 60 percent of the sheriff ’s felony drug busts from 2014 through 2016.
■ Few felony drug defendants in Madison County, black or white, spend any time in jail or prison after their initial offense. A review of defendants prosecuted by Morphonios shows that 70 percent spent no time in lockup. Only 22 received more than 30 days and all but four were black.
■ For most felony drug offenders, the harshest punishment is monetary. Convicted black defendants leave court owing an average of about $1,700, while whites owe about $1,300. If they don’t pay on time, the sheriff issues a warrant for their arrest, leading to more fines and fees.
In Madison County, it’s all about the money, legal experts say.
“Everyone is happy as long as these guys are paying fines,” said Kenneth Nunn, a University of Florida law school professor. “They’re not that concerned that they serve time. If they served time, they won’t pay the fines.”
‘A war on these drugs’
Madison County was settled in the 1820s by planters who farmed the land with slave labor.
For years, the county was among the most populous and prosperous in Florida — first harvesting cotton, then expanding into tobacco, timber and meat packing.
Today, Madison County is a placid backwater.
Most of its thriving businesses are hotels and gas stations that cater to motorists traveling along I-10.
Many of its downtown storefronts are empty.
“The county had a big meat-packing plant, but that shut down in the early 2000s and a lot of people lost jobs,” said Andrea Oliver, a Tallahassee Community College professor who grew up in Madison.
“There’s definitely been a brain drain going on. The population is graying, getting older. The common denominator is economic depression,” Oliver said.
Madison County has the highest percentage of people living in poverty in the state.
It has the state’s second-highest percentage of African-Americans.
It has the lowest median household income, and is one of only two counties in Florida to have lost population since 2000.
“There are no jobs,” said Darnell Davis, who was born in Madison and runs an accounting office and a small convenience store in a black neighborhood south of the courthouse. “That’s the biggest problem.”
There is also an uneasy relationship between blacks and whites that dates back generations.
“We love each other on Friday nights for football,” Davis said. “But other than that we live in different worlds.”
Born and raised in Madison, Benjamin J. Stewart, 59, graduated from the only high school in town and earned a degree in law enforcement from North Florida Community College.
His personnel file shows he joined the Marine Corps Reserve in 1977 and worked as a dispatcher for a local electric company before landing a job as a corrections officer at the Madison County Jail.
When conducting a background check at the time, Joe Peavy, the Madison County sheriff in the 1970s and 1980s, said he got nothing but glowing recommendations.
“As a matter of fact, I’m not sure he can live up to all the compliments he received,” Peavy, who died in 2016, said in a letter contained in Stewart’s personnel file. “All were positive regarding his life in Madison County, his work in the area and his commitment to the Lord.”
Stewart spent almost all his career with the sheriff ’s office.
When his predecessor retired in 2008, he ran for sheriff on the pledge that he would stamp out drugs.
“When I ran, I didn’t make a lot of promises,” Stewart told the Tallahassee Democrat in June 2010. “But I did say I’d start a war on these drugs.”
After taking office, Stewart immediately established a four-person drug task force and stepped up traffic stops and searches along the interstate.
At a time when drug arrests were declining across Florida, Madison saw its drug busts triple from just over 100 in 2008 to nearly 300 seven years later. The business proved lucrative. Stewart raised more than $800,000 in federal and state grants aimed at thwarting drug trafficking over the past decade, statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice and the Madison County Sheriff ’s Office show. At the same time, his deputies seized at least $1.4 million in cash, cars, guns and electronic equipment, practically all of it from traffic stops along the interstate.
After one bust in November 2015, for example, deputies took nearly $14,000 in cash and a Glock semi-automatic handgun from an Orlando driver and his Tallahassee companionwhohad been pulled over for a window-tint violation. Deputies didn’t find much in the way of drugs — just three attention-deficit disorder pills and marijuana residue on a digital scale. But they found plenty of cash stuffed in two Crown Royal bags.
Two months later, deputies stopped a pair of Miami residents for driving about 10 mph under the speed limit and for swaying inand out of their lane. A search of the car revealed just over an ounce of pot, a Bersa Thunder .40-caliber pistol and more than $25,000.
Then, in March 2016, deputies hit the jackpot when they pulled over a car for an expired tag. There were no drugs. But the two California residents had $188,000 — cash used “to facilitate money laundering ... or to hide proceeds from criminal enterprises,” according to the arresting officer.
There is no indication that Stewart has used his office to enrich himself.
His net worth actually declined from $400,000 in 2012 to $175,000 last year, according to his state disclosure form, and his annual salary has only slowly crawled past $100,000.
But the sheriff ’s office has benefited from Stewart’s policies.
It now employs 81 people. That includes 36 deputies, four of whom are black, making it the 11th-largest sheriff ’s office per capita in Florida and one of the biggest businesses in Madison County.
Since 2009, its annual spending has increased 22 percent to nearly $6 million.
It collects at least $33,000 a year from fines charged to felony drug offenders and tens of thousands more from defendants convicted of other crimes.
Its ability to apply for grantsand seize assets after drug busts only adds to its disposable income.
“It’s a strain to have a drug unit, period, but it’s a necessity,” deputy David Harper, the head of Madison’s drug task force, told the Tallahassee Democrat in August 2010. “If it wasn’t for the seized drug money, we’d have no equipment to work with.”
‘You ain’t got no rights’
Janetta Edwards was driving along I-10 in Madison County in February 2015 when sheriff ’s deputies stopped a friend she was following.
The 24-year-old black woman pulled onto the shoulder a few hundred yards up the highway and waited.
A dashcam video shows deputy Doug Haskell trudging up to her car, leaning his head through thepassenger window and asking Edwards for her driver’s license above the racket of her yapping Yorkie.
Edwards refused and demanded a reason.
Haskell said she was traveling with another car that had been reported stolen and asked her to step outside.
Edwards, who had no arrest record, declined, saying Haskell had no right to make that request.
Haskell countered that he would put her in jail for obstructing justice and “light her up” if she didn’t obey.
The standoff lasted more than 13 minutes.
Haskell then gave Edwards a final warning and turned his Taser on her, while fellow deputy Bobby Boatwright pulled her from the driver’s seat and hurled her down a grassy field along the shoulder.
Another video of the arrest from Haskell’s body camera shows Edwards lurching off balance down the hill and falling to the ground against a metal sign post, where deputies cuff her hands behind her back.
All the while, Edwards keeps screaming, “You violated my rights. You violated my rights.”
“You ain’t got no rights,” Haskell responded. “Stupid ass.”
In his police report, Haskell noted four unspecified traffic violations and that a handgun had been found in the back seat of her car.
For Akbar, the Tallahassee attorney who represented Edwards, the incident sums up the attitude of the Madison Sheriff ’s Office toward African-Americans.
But he was impressed by the way Morphonios promptly declined to prosecute.
In an October 2015 interview with WTXL-TV in Tallahassee, Stewart defended his deputies’ use of force, saying that a search of the car revealed stolen credit cards and other contraband.
“In my opinion, that’s why she didn’t want to get out of the vehicle,” Stewart told the TV station. “But sadly this officer took way too much time with her, spent too much time trying to beg her to get out of her car, just to avoid situations like this. He went above and beyond, and he’s being portrayed as the bad guy.”
Epp Richardson, the sheriff ’s chief deputy, said the case is being investigated by federal law enforcement officials. But more than two years have passed and no charges have been filed.
The incident is nothing out of the ordinary for black residents of Madison County.
“They stereotype our asses,” said Kenneth Barfield, a 57-yearold black man who lives in a neighborhood off Martin Luther King Boulevard.
“Me and you ride around for an hour or two and we’ll have so many police behind us it won’t even be funny,” he said.
Data compiled by the Herald-Tribune shows that sheriff ’s deputies arrest more blacks than whites in Madison.
From 2014 through 2016, deputies busted 78 motorists for felony drug crimes aftertraffic stops along the interstate — 55 percent were black.
By comparison, the Florida Highway Patrol arrested 48 motorists on the same 30-mile stretch of road during the same threeyear period. Only 27 percent were black.
Why the disparity?
The sheriff and his chief deputy would not answer that question.
Similar discrepancies appear when analyzing the sheriff office’s drug sting operations, where undercover officers or confidential informants buy drugs from suspected dealers.
While 26 percent of all blacks arrested for felony drug crimes from 2014 through 2016 were caught in sheriff’s office drug stings, that number dropped to just 5 percent among whites.
Deputies also charge more blacks with selling drugs near churches, schools and other drugfree zones, which can lead to much longer sentences.
And even though national studies show blacks and whites smoke pot at about the same rate, deputies arrested more blacks for the possession and sale of marijuana.
Richard Sutphen, a professor emeritus in social work at the University of Kentucky, said police arrest greater numbers of blacks across the country because more
of their illegal activities take place in the streets and outside their homes.
“They don’t want minorities all over the place,” Sutphen said. “They want to keep them contained and controlled in their communities.”
There are several ways to do that, he continued. One is to criminalize them. Another is to burden them with debt.
“The idea is to keep people down.”
‘Look at these gams, pal’
Madison is about far as you can get from South Florida and still be in Florida — maybe not in terms of miles, but certainly in terms of ambiance.
There’s no traffic, no congestion, no skyscrapers, beaches or cruise ships. No hum, no buzz, no pulse of a rapidly growing metropolis.
Trucks loaded with tall pine logs rumble down country roads past undulating pastures, bearded oaks, ramshackle shacks and trailers, feed stores and junkyards.
Only 33 building permits were pulled in Madison County in 2017, according to the U.S. Census.
But this is where Dean Morphonios chose to practice law after growing up in the state’s largest city, the son of a local celebrity.
Ellen Morphonios, a farm girl from North Carolina and former beauty queen, moved to Miami in 1946 with her family, eventually becoming one of Florida’s first female prosecutors and one of its earliest female felony judges.
An opening tale in her autobiography, “Maximum Morphonios,” has her lifting her robes and revealing her ankles to a sex offender that she just sentenced.
“Get a good look at these gams, pal,” she is rumored to have said, “because they’re the last ones you’ll be seeing for a long, long time.”
Though Judge Morphonios insisted the incident did not happen like that, she couldn’t resist repeating it. And it certainly captures her bodacious character.
Married three times, Ellen Morphonios was the first to admit she had a weakness for men.
“There were times when I had a husband and a couple of boyfriends all wondering if I was being faithful,” she wrote in her book.
Ellen Morphonios was a Republican, a vocal backer of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But unlike other Southern conservatives at the time, she was an ardent supporter of civil rights.
She regularly championed the cause during her radio broadcasts, which prompted a tongue-lashing from her first husband and Dean’s father, Alex Morphonios.
“My radio program drove Alex crazy,” Ellen Morphonios wrote in her book. “I was broadcasting at a time when blacks were rioting in the streets in many cities. I have never approved of violence, but I expressed my support on my show for the blacks’ fight for freedom and equality. Alex, no friend of Martin Luther King Jr., hated that.
“‘If you like blacks so much,’ he said one time, ‘why don’t you go marry one?’”
Dean Morphonios, who once called his mother his greatest gift, made every attempt to replicate her career.
He served as a prosecutor in Tallahassee, ran two unsuccessful campaigns for judge in the 1990s and spent nearly 15 years in private practice.
He even defended his mother against a career-ending accusation that she accepted a bribe from a fellow judge. She denied the charges and was never convicted.
‘Advocate for civil rights’
Morphonios took a job as prosecutor in Madison County in 2009.
Here, he has handled more than 500 felony drug cases, including 321 from 2014 through 2016. Those cases were evenly divided between black and white defendants. But blacks received sentences averaging 147 days behind bars — nearly four times as long as whites.
While that represents a wide disparity, the sentence lengths are short compared to other parts of Florida.
In Jacksonville, for example, both blacks and whites convicted of felony drug offenses receive sentences that are three times more punitive on average.
“Dean is one of the most godly, religious and compassionate people I’ve ever met,” said Jeff Siegmeister, the state attorney for the 3rd Circuit and Morphonios’ boss. “I’d be shocked if there was any bias in his heart toward anything.”
The problem, Siegmeister said, is that the sheriff and his task force see Morphonios as being too lenient.
“They want prison,” Siegmeister said. “He doesn’t.”
So Morphonios compromises. He recommends more suspended sentences than any other prosecutor in the circuit, according to Siegmeister, a total of 47 from 2014 through 2016.
Morphonios also gave breaks to other felony drug offenders.
Of the more than 300 felony drug defendants he prosecuted from 2014 through 2016, half got lenient sentences and only five defendants received harsh sentences, according to the Herald-Tribune’s leniency and severity indexes.
Even defendants arrested with quantities of drugs, indicating they were dealing or trafficking, got off easy when Morphonios was the prosecutor.
Derream Auguste and Dimitri Thompson, black men from South Florida, were found with more than 4 pounds of pot and a handgun in their car in 2015. They got pretrial diversion.
Greyson Davis and Haley Willard, white women from Panama City Beach, got caught with 11 pounds of pot the same year. They only spent one night in jail.
Then there was Tallahassee resident Quaneshia Rivers and Orlando resident Travoris Bunion. The black couple got busted with 24 pounds of marijuana in 2015. They spent no time in lockup.
All told, only three of the 54 defendants arrested with quantities of drugs in their cars received more than 30 days behind bars. All three were black.
Because of his lenience, not one felony drug offender prosecuted by Morphonios went to trial from 2014 through 2016, a significant savings for the court system.
Instead of jail or prison, defendants were sentenced to long periods of probation, averaging three-and-a-half years for blacks and just over two years for whites.
These lenient outcomes did not make sheriff ’s deputies happy and they often appeared in court to glare at Morphonios, Siegmeister and other attorneys say.
“There’s a ton of pressure put on him,” Siegmeister said. “But he’s a man of ultimate faith. He tries to keep them happy.”
Akbar, the Tallahassee attorney, said Morphonios is free to work out plea deals with defense attorneys and their clients for most crimes. But when it comes to drug offenses, he can’t make a decision on his own. He has to check with members of the task force.
“These are the people he relies on for outcomes,” Akbar said. “They’re part of the negotiation.”
Even though blacks prosecuted by Morphonios are found guilty more often and are less likely than whites to get pretrial diversion or have their adjudication withheld, Akbar said that doesn’t mean Morphonios is biased.
“I see Dean as an advocate for civil rights,” Akbar said. “He gives people a first opportunity to go on probation. When they violate, he lays the hammer down.”
Drop in forfeitures
For the past 18 months, controlling jailhouse expenses has become something of an obsession for Stewart.
The focus comes at a time of declining arrests and shrinking revenues from forfeitures.
In 2016, the Florida Legislature passed a bill making it harder to seize cash and other assets from criminals.
“Since the act, we haven’t had an asset forfeiture in two years,” said Chief Deputy Richardson. “Our fund is down to $50,000.”
In the meantime, the sheriff ’s office has slowed its drug interdiction efforts and shuttered its interstate criminal enforcement unit that consisted of two officers. Drug busts dropped 24 percent in 2017.
“We’re not out there like we used to be,” Richardson said.
Madison ranked No. 23 on the list of Florida counties with the most drug busts per capita in 2017. That’s down from No. 3 the year before.
But while County Commission minutes show the sheriff fighting for tax dollars to cover shortfalls, few Madison County officials express concern about the financial burden borne by drug felons.
These defendants usually leave court owing $500 in fines and another $1,500 in fees payable to the sheriff’s office, public defender and the circuit court.
In a county where the per capita income is $16,500, fines and fees represent a substantial setback.
“What I disagree with is people walking away from their conviction $2,000 in debt,” said Billy Washington, the elected court clerk for Madison County. “It may be the biggest debt they’ve ever had.”
Washington added that some defendants get their driver’s licenses suspended for a year or more.
That happened to 60 defendants prosecuted by Morphonios between 2014 and 2016. Twothirds were black.
“Take away somebody’s license and you take away his ability to sustain himself,” Washington said. “To pay back the debt, you need a car to get to work. It creates a cycle.”
According to Sutphen, the retired University of Kentucky professor, that’s the whole point.
“They won’t say that’s what it is,” Sutphen said. “But the idea is to keep minorities criminalized, to keep them isolated and demoralized, to keep them down.”