It was the height of the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic, and the Broward County Sheriff’s Office was breaking the law to enforce it.
Law enforcement cooked crack cocaine on the seventh floor of the county courthouse. Deputies posed as drug dealers. And the people who purchased it were swiftly locked behind bars. Ultimately, the Florida Supreme Court ruled in 1993 that this practice was illegal. But for 30 years, the people wrongfully arrested, convicted and incarcerated because of these “reverse-sting operations” lived — and possibly died — with that mark on their records.
That ends now, Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor announced this month. His office will work to vacate the decades-old convictions of people arrested for purchasing BSO-manufactured crack cocaine — some of whom purchased the drugs within 1,000 feet of a school, an offense that carried a mandatory minimum three-year prison sentence…