J.A., a juvenile, Petitioner, v. HOUSEL (2019)

J.A., a juvenile, files this petition, seeking issuance of a writ of habeas corpus and contending that J.A. is being held illegally in secure detention. For the reasons that follow, we grant the petition.

During the pendency of a juvenile delinquency proceeding, the trial court held J.A. in contempt for violating a “do not run” order by running away from home and remaining away from home for ten days. The trial court sentenced J.A. to serve 100 days in secure detention. See § 985.037, Fla. Stat. (2019).¹

Several weeks later, however, J.A.'s counsel located a treatment program that would accept J.A. as a patient, ultimately securing her placement at Agape, a residential psychiatric and substance abuse program.

On January 28, 2019, the trial court granted J.A.'s request to enter the Agape residential treatment program, and expressly pronounced that her 100-day contempt sentence was mitigated to the twenty-four days J.A. had already served in secure detention. The trial court ordered J.A. to be released to the custody of Agape during her treatment, and ordered that, following her treatment at Agape, J.A. was to be released to the custody of her mother.

The mitigated sentence was not conditioned upon J.A. performing any required act, such as the successful completion of the Agape treatment program. The State was present for, but did not object to, the court's order mitigating the sentence to the twenty-four days already served by J.A. Pursuant to the trial court's order, the Department of Juvenile Justice released J.A. to the custody of Agape the following day.

On April 5, 2019, the trial court was notified that Agape discharged J.A. from the program due to inappropriate relationships with other patients. The trial court concluded that this constituted grounds to take J.A. back into custody to serve the remainder of her original contempt sentence. Defense counsel objected to this on double jeopardy grounds, explaining that J.A.'s sentence (as mitigated by the trial court) had already been served.

The trial court rejected defense counsel's argument and took J.A. into custody, ordering her to serve the remainder of her 100-day sentence until its expiration on April 19, 2019.

Because the trial court mitigated J.A.'s 100-day sentence to the twenty-four days already served in secure detention, and attached no conditions, the trial court was without authority to “reimpose” any portion of the original 100-day sentence following J.A.'s unsuccessful discharge from Agape.² In other words, once the trial court mitigated the sentence from 100 days of secure detention to “time served”, J.A. had completed serving her sentence and that sentence could not thereafter be increased by the trial court. See Rodriguez v. State, 899 So.2d 471, 474 n. 5 (Fla. 3d DCA 2005); Comtois v. State, 891 So.2d 1130 (Fla. 5th DCA 2005); N.H. v. State, 723 So.2d 889 (Fla. 5th DCA 1998).

We therefore grant the petition.³

FOOTNOTES

1.   This Court upheld J.A.'s contempt sentence in J.A. v. Housel, 271 So.3d 54, 2019 WL 321034 (Fla. 3d DCA Jan. 25, 2019).

2.   The trial court could have permitted J.A. to continue serving her 100-day contempt sentence at Agape, upon the condition that J.A. comply with all of Agape's rules and successfully complete the program. Had the trial court done this, it then could have deferred ruling on the motion to mitigate until J.A. successfully completed her treatment.

3.   This court treated the petition as an emergency and, following review of the petition and the State's expedited response, issued a clerk's order granting the petition and directing the immediate release of J.A. from secure detention. We indicated in that clerk's order that this opinion would follow. Because J.A. has already been released from secure detention, we grant the petition but withhold formal issuance of the writ.

PER CURIAM.