Jacksonville Florida Times-Union

An innovative new Gun Violence Offender Court started its first cases last week in Jacksonville designed to speed up prosecutions of some of the city’s most feared criminals to get them off the streets before they can do any more harm.

It will cover all non-homicide cases involving firearms when prosecutors are seeking a mandatory sentence of 15 years to life in prison, according to the administrative order signed by Chief Judge Lance Day. Judge London Kite will oversee all of the cases.

State Attorney Melissa Nelson, whose office helped spearhead the new division, said she thinks it may be the first of its kind in Florida.

“Our office worked in partnership with the courts to establish this particular specialty court,” she said. “Mark Caliel, one of the office’s chief assistants, was integrally involved with Chief Judge Day, Judge [Mark] Borello and ultimately Judge Kite who will be the sitting judge in the court. So it was a collaborative effort. Then Judge Day hosted a couple of meetings with the Regional Conflict Counsel, the public defender, the State Attorney’s Office, so all the stakeholders were involved before the order was issued.”

She said some other jurisdictions across the country have similar divisions, one of which her office learned of in Memphis, Tenn.

“So this is designed to really focus on those offenses and offenders who are the biggest threats to our public safety,” Nelson said.

Will the Gun Violence Offender Court speed up prosecuting cases? How many are we talking about?

“That is the hope,” Nelson said. “Right now we started with approximately 160. We think it will probably have a case count, having looked at the numbers, of around 200. We do expect that it’s going to be a court that realizes efficiencies. But we’re not sure, time is going to bear that out.”

She said Kite was a trial lawyer herself, and she’s willing to try multiple cases a week a

nd hold both parties accountable to deadlines. The prosecutors assigned also understand they’re going be picking juries every Monday.

“This is going to be a lot of work and it’s going to be fast-paced,” Nelson said. “… In a regular courtroom, we might have an important shooting case, but it’s rivaling maybe a third-degree felony that hasn’t waived speedy trial yet and has to bump this case. The cases in this court are all serious cases, they’re all minimum-mandatory cases, they’re all shooting cases. I hope in addition to efficiencies, the swifter we are with and consistent with punishment, it should have some public safety benefit as well.”

Will Judge Kite be removed from current cases like Shanna Gardner and Mario Fernandez?

“She’s going to keep her pending homicides” including the Jared Bridegan case, Nelson said. “Cases are resolved, dictated by statutory minimum mandatories and our sentencing guidelines. But the nice thing about this, there should be hypothetically, there should be consistency and uniformity in outcomes of these similar cases. These are all going to be shooting cases. The sentences and pleas are going to be all in front of one judge.”

With the recent death and arrests in the Julio Foolio case, it’s a reminder about efforts a few years ago to charge gang members rapping about rivals and flaunting guns in videos on firearm charges. Would those cases qualify?

They will not unless they include a shooting charge. But Nelson provided some background on the firearms-possession cases.

“They were doing these rap videos and basically flaunting it in our face because in rap videos there’s always a qualifying-like paragraph before it starts like this is a fake gun or whatever,” she said. “We pushed the envelope on those and hired experts who could use technology to enhance the videos and give opinions about whether or not the firearms were real. We’ve had successful prosecutions.”

She said there was some media criticism about doing this and “there was some pushback too because historically we had always been taught you can’t prove a firearms case unless you actually have the firearm. The world is changing. These are convicted felons, they’re walking down neighborhoods and in my mind taking hostage like people who have been in their home 40 years, using AR-15s. … What we did is we changed behaviors. Once they knew that we were doing this, we saw some pullback from the videos.”

Discussing all of the guns, cash, headstones and R.I.P.’s seen on rapper gang members’ Facebooks, Nelson became fairly animated.

“They’re celebrating murders they committed, they’re threatening murders they’re going to commit,” she said. “So what happened in 2017, I came here [to the State Attorney’s Office] and this was new to me. I left the office in 2009 and when I left there was no social media. When I came back, the landscape had changed.

“So I spent the summer of 2017 … I just watched all these videos, and I was like this is crazy,” she continued. “The craziest thing about it was all the little kids around these gangsters who are showing off these long guns and celebrating having killed somebody. And I’m like, ‘This is nuts.’ So we put together a video … and I got with the gang unit and I said tell me who each of these kids are. And at the end, I think there’s like 14 faces, they were all at the time in prison or dead themselves.”

Her office then used that video to educate people and groups.

“It’s going on in our streets,” Nelson said. “So I’m like OK, if they’re going to roll around with these guns and we know they’re bragging about a murder they just committed but we can’t prove that they did it, then let’s take them off for being a convicted felon and not being allowed to have that gun.”

What is Targeted Prosecution?

“So when we stood up this division, Targeted Prosecution, the goal was to focus on the offender and not so much the offense,” Nelson said. “What I mean by that is we started working hand and glove with law enforcement. I said if they know who the shooters are on the street, we should know too.

“I’ll give you an example, we had a guy who we believed was good for five murders, and we could not prove any of the murders,” she continued. “In a lot of these cases, not surprisingly witnesses don’t talk to us. We’ve done great stuff with NIBIN [National Integrated Ballistic Information Network] and the Crime Gun Intelligence Center, fantastic stuff, but we couldn’t put a case on this guy. He ended up beating up his girlfriend who was pregnant, that’s a felony. So Targeted Prosecution, that unit normally wouldn’t handle that kind of offense but they did because he was a menace that we wanted to incapacitate.

She said the Targeted Prosecution team has done an exemplary job over the last seven years.

“They meet weekly with strategic partners, the Crime Gun Intelligence detectives. They know who these trigger pullers are,” she said. “Then they look to make sure we hold them accountable for whatever we can. So the establishment of the court was a really nice fit for this unit.”