Daniel Rivero

Gummy bears, oils, cocktails, ice cream ... Products with CBD in them have practically become ubiquitous in South Florida. The chemical CBD comes from the cannabis plant and that fact is leaving business owners in a kind of grey zone. But increasingly the federal government is taking notice, while regulations from the state are forthcoming.

A bill that is advancing in the Florida Senate could provide relief for a large chunk of people with felony convictions who want to regain the right to vote following  the passage of Amendment 4 last November.

Former gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum laid out a vision of “registering and engaging” one million new voters across Florida over the next few years at an event in Miami Gardens on Wednesday.

Despite ongoing confusion about the roll out of a recent expansion of voting rights in Florida, county election offices across the state say people who rushed to register to vote when Amendment 4 went into effect in January have been issued voter information cards with no issues.

The Florida Bar has confirmed to WLRN that it has opened an investigation into a tweet sent on Tuesday by Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, which some have interpreted as witness tampering. Gaetz is a Bar certified attorney in Florida.

The tweet was directed towards President Trump's longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen, who is testifying before Congress today about his relationship with the President.

Thousands of homeless residents across Florida have been arrested in recent years on charges of asking for money in public spaces without government authorization. A lawsuit filed this month by the Southern Legal Counsel alleges that those thousands of arrests are violating the First Amendment -- a stance that has previously been upheld by U.S. District Courts for the Middle and Northern Districts of Florida.

One year ago, Michael Riggio was second in command of the New York Police Department's Counterterrorism Division. But just months after the February 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, he left the post to lead a new project at the Broward Sheriff’s Office.

Like many Floridians who have been convicted of a felony, Clarence Office, 61, was excited to register to vote on January 8, when the state’s Amendment 4 went into effect.

With Amendment 4 going into effect in less than a week, there are parts of the process of restoring the voting rights for convicted felons that appear to have not yet been considered, said incoming Democratic state Senator Jason Pizzo. He said it could potentially throw a wrench into the rights restoration process.

With its passage on November 6, Amendment 4 granted over a million felons across the state the right to vote.

It was noon on Monday and Miami-Dade County was about halfway done with its ballot recount for last week’s elections. Yet next door, in Broward County, the official recount hadn’t even started yet.

Mail ballots are convenient but lack certain perks that voting in person gives voters. Namely, mail-in ballots are ten times more likely to be thrown out by county Supervisors of Elections than in-person ballots, according to a report issued last month by the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

As voters across Florida gear up for early voting for the November elections, and as some ballots have already been shipped out to overseas voters, one question is being repeated over dinner tables and text message chains: “How should I vote on this amendment that is asking me three different questions at the same time?”

Every 20 years the Florida Constitution Revision Commission (CRC) meets to propose changes of law to the Florida Constitution. In 2018 the commission met and came up with several ideas included in the 13 amendment proposals to send to Florida voters in the November 2018 elections.

Whether voters will actually ever see those amendments at the ballot box is another story.

A recent series of stories by the Miami New Times found that police in Miami-Dade County have made tens of thousands of arrests for small amounts of marijuana, even after a 2015 policy allowed them to issue civil citations for those same offenses.

Those optional arrests have at times led to life-changing consequences for the suspects.

When Chris Riley created the phone app TIKD from his Coral Gables offices, he had dreams of innovating access to the court system for people who got speeding tickets. What he never imagined was that he would soon butt heads with the Florida Bar, that he would be claiming nearly $20 million in damages from the entity that regulates attorneys in the state and that the federal government would get behind him in his fight.

The Miami-Dade County Police Department has created a new unit tasked with preventing people with serious mental illnesses from reaching a crisis point or potentially shooting someone with firearms, WLRN has learned.

Florida prisons are seeing an increasing number of inmate deaths that authorities blame on a synthetic marijuana substance known as K2, or spice.

The increase in overdoses has prompted state officials to launch an educational campaign intended to show inmates the dangers of using the substance. The campaign was first reported by WLRN's news partner the Miami Herald.

Jason Bellows was a Florida inmate on his way out of prison and back into the real world. 

The Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) is proposing a plan to reduce in-person visitation hours. That comes at the same time it rolls out a for-profit contract with a Miramar-based company for digital visitations. Critics question the motives of the state, while the FDC maintains there is no connection between the two.

The state’s proposal would cut prison visitations in half in most facilities.

In the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, the federal government signed a multimillion-dollar deal with Carnival Corporation to help house federal aid workers and first responders on the company's Fascination cruise ship in the United States Virgin Islands.

A bold proposal written by a committee formed by the Florida Bar is pitching new laws for the state that would broaden the number of individuals who could be banned from not only purchasing, but also from possessing firearms.