Charles Canady

Charles Canady is a popular Justice on the Florida Supreme Court, reelected twice by a landslide vote of the people and also chosen by his colleagues to be Chief Justice at one point. Prior to becoming a state supreme court justice, Canady successfully served for years in the Florida legislature and then in Congress.

He has written hundreds of decisions. One of his most significant was to uphold the constitutionality of a drug statute in Florida that shifted the issue of knowledge of illegality from the prosecution to make it an affirmative defense by the accused:

Here, the Legislature's decision to make the absence of knowledge of the illicit nature of the controlled substance an affirmative defense is constitutional. Under section 893.13, as modified by section 893.101, the State is not required to prove that the defendant had knowledge of the illicit nature of the controlled substance in order to convict the defendant of one of the defined offenses. The conduct the Legislature seeks to curtail is the sale, manufacture, delivery, or possession of a controlled substance, regardless of the defendant's subjective intent. As a result, the defendant can concede all elements of the offense but still coherently raise the "separate issue," Patterson, 432 U.S. at 207, of whether the defendant lacked knowledge of the illicit nature of the controlled substance. The affirmative defense does not ask the defendant to disprove something that the State must prove in order to convict, but instead provides a defendant with an opportunity to explain why his or her admittedly illegal conduct should not be punished. "It is plain enough that if [the sale, manufacture, delivery, or possession of a controlled substance] is shown, the State intends to deal with the defendant as a [criminal] unless he demonstrates the mitigating circumstances." Patterson, 432 U.S. at 206. Thus, the affirmative defense does not improperly shift the burden of proof to the defendant.

State v. Adkins, 96 So. 3d 412, 423 (Fla. 2012). Only two of the seven justices on the Florida Supreme Court dissented from Canady's decision.

Legal Style

Justice Canady's writing style is crisp, concise, and consistent. On December 22, 2016, he wrote in dissent to support the abilitiy of physicians to enter into arbitration agreements with patients as a way of efficiently resolving disputes. Justice Canady effectively debunked the majority decision by exposing its inconsistency:

In condemning the arbitration agreement based on the reasoning of Bowers, the majority relies on a crisis that the majority has said is nonexistent.

Hernandez v. Crespo, No. SC15-67, 2016 Fla. LEXIS 2718, at *23 (Dec. 22, 2016) (Canady, J., dissenting).