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On Nov. 2, 2003, a guy named Jim Latent was sitting in a wheelchair in the parking lot of the Twilight Zone. The Twilight Zone is a bar on the corner of State Road 60 and County Line Road in eastern Hillsborough County.
Unfortunately for Jim, a white car hit him as it exited the parking lot. The impact broke his leg in three places. The white car sped away. It was a classic hit and run.
Jim could not relate many details to the Florida Highway Patrol. All he knew was that the car in question was white, and that other people in the parking lot told him it was driven by a woman.
However, a little while later, across the Polk County line to the east, a white four-door Buick plunged through a fence and struck a tree. A different Highway Patrol trooper arrived there.
The white Buick was driven by a certain Tina Esler. She did not have a valid driver's license and appeared to be drunk. Esler was issued her Miranda rights and taken into custody. Putting two and two together, troopers brought her to the scene of the earlier Hillsborough accident.
Esler told them that:
(1) Yes, she had been driving her white Buick earlier that day.
(2) Yes, she had been in the parking lot of the Twilight Zone earlier that day.
(3) Yes, she had been drinking before pulling out of the parking lot.
You will notice that she did not specifically confess to hitting the victim.
Neither, at Esler's trial in Hillsborough Circuit Court, was any physical evidence presented that showed her Buick to be the same white car that hit Jim Latent. No eyewitnesses testified.
Nevertheless, Esler was convicted of driving under the influence with serious bodily injury, leaving the scene of an accident with injuries, and driving without a license. She was sentenced to five years in prison and five years of probation.
She appealed. The ruling came down just the other day.
Now, if you have ever watched lawyer or cop shows on TV, you might have heard the phrase corpus delicti. The words are from Latin. They mean, in a literal translation, "the body of the crime." In a practical sense, the phrase means, proof that a crime really occurred.
In a murder case, for example, the corpus delicti might be ... well, the corpse. (But not necessarily. There have been successful murder prosecutions where the body was never found.)
The point of requiring a corpus delicti is that a confession, by itself, is not enough to prove that a crime occurred. Otherwise, crazy people could confess to anything. Cops and prosecutors wouldn't need to worry about gathering evidence.
To quote the Florida Supreme Court in a landmark 1976 case:
The judicial quest for truth requires that no person be convicted out of derangement, mistake or official fabrication.
In this case, to prove the DUI-serious-injury charge, there had to be some independent proof that Esler was in fact drunk and driving the car that hit Jim. That evidence did not exist. The case boiled down to (1) Jim saying somebody in a white car hit him and (2) Tina saying she had been driving a white car in the area.
The appeals court reversed her conviction.
On the other hand, the court upheld her conviction on the charge of leaving the scene of an accident with injuries.
How could that be? Because there was a corpus delicti for that charge. The independent evidence showed that Jim had, indeed, been hit by a car that fled the scene. Therefore, Tina's statement that she had been there could be used.
Now, you think might be thinking: "Are those judges crazy? The guy was creamed in a wheelchair, for Pete's sake! What more proof do they need?"
Let's not be too hard on them. The local prosecutors probably thought they had corpus out the wazoo. But they were wrong. The principle that the government has to prove a crime really occurred is so important that it is worth letting the Tina Eslers of the world go free on occasion, no matter what actually happened that day in the Twilight Zone parking lot.