PANAMA CITY — An appeals court has agreed to give a man convicted of narcotics possession a new trial after being locked up based partly on the testimony of a discredited drug analyst, according to court records.
Jeremiah Beazley, 38, was sentenced to more than 15 years in prison after a deputy saw him sell drugs, run away and throw hundreds of pills, some of which landed in a watery ditch and were unable to be recovered, before he could be taken into custody. The Florida 1st District Court of Appeal reversed some charges against Beazley on Tuesday, meaning he could be retried on some of the charges.
Though the court granted Beazley a new trial for the charges of oxycodone and dilaudid possession, the court said his conviction for tampering with evidence would stick.
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Bay County Sheriff’s deputies reported 378 pills were collected and submitted to the FDLE lab for testing, but the lab returned only 288 pills. The drugs had been handled by a Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) analyst who was later arrested on trafficking charges in connection with evidence in drug cases being stolen.
“The testimony of the FDLE analyst was not essential with regard to the tampering charge,” the court’s finding read. “It was the testimony of the arresting officer who had chased Beazley and who observed Beazley toss a bag of pills into a ditch which was dispositive as to that charge.”
The difference could reduce Beazley’s sentence to five years, but his lawyers said the case should be dropped due to the possibility that the pills also were swapped at the FDLE. Walter Smith, Beazley’s attorney, argued the pills, regardless of whether they were shown to be controlled substances or not, were rendered inadmissible by virtue of the tampering committed by the FDLE analyst.
“If there is a substantial likelihood the evidence has been tampered with, then it is unreliable,” Smith said. “Who’s to say the pills seized here were the same to go off to the lab?”
After Beazley’s conviction, Joseph Graves, the FDLE analyst who testified at Beazley’s trial as to the nature of the abandoned pills, was arrested for trafficking of controlled substances taken from an FDLE laboratory.
Graves testified he weighed the pills because the weight of controlled substances determines whether a defendant will be charged with trafficking and face a possible minimum mandatory sentence. Graves said he didn’t count pills submitted to the lab, and BCSO testified they either must have miscounted the pills or entered the wrong number on their report.
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The 14th Circuit State Attorney’s Office could choose to retry the possession charges against Beazley. The assistant state attorney who worked on the case could not be reached for comment.
Many other prosecutors’ offices throughout the state have decided to drop cases effected by Graves’ arrest, but Smith was doubtful the case would be thrown out.
“We’re going to be fighting the good fight all over again,” Smith said.