Florida Justice System Under Scrutiny

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By Associated Press

Published: 02/16/2004

For the better part of a decade, the man suspected of killing an 11-year-old girl whose abduction was caught on videotape had been under the supervision of Florida's criminal justice system. But despite his many brushes with the law, Joseph P. Smith never spent long behind bars.
Now, Carlie Brucia's grieving family is demanding to know why Smith - a drug addict who admitted attacking one woman and was accused of trying to kidnap another - was a free man.
The longest Smith has ever spent in prison is less than 14 months. He was acquitted of the most serious crime on his rap sheet, an attempted kidnapping, after telling jurors he meant the woman no harm.
Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist said last Saturday that his office already was reviewing whether the state's probation laws need to be toughened to deal with offenders like Smith.
Crist said the laws being reviewed deal with probation violators and the options judges are given to punish them.
That review took on new intensity Feb. 6 when Joe Brucia, Carlie's father, called on Gov. Jeb Bush for an investigation of why Smith had served relatively little time in prison despite more than a dozen arrests.
Carlie was abducted Feb. 1 while walking home from a friend's house, and videotape from a security camera at a car wash showed her being led away by a man police say was Smith. The girl's body was found Feb. 6 in a church parking lot.
Smith's first brush with Florida's criminal justice system was a 1993 arrest for attacking a woman on a street in Sarasota, breaking her nose with a motorcycle helmet. He plead no contest to aggravated battery and served 60 days in jail followed by two years on probation.
Since then, Smith has been on probation almost continually.

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