Odonovah Mairs v. State of Florida

• Court: District Court of Appeal of Florida
• Decided: June 17, 2026
• Docket: 3D2024-1231
• Status: Published

Opinion

Third District Court of Appeal State of Florida

Opinion filed June 17, 2026. Not final until disposition of timely filed motion for rehearing.

________________

No. 3D24-1231 Lower Tribunal Nos. F23-7590, F23-7591, F23-7593, F23-7595, F23-7596, F23-7597, F23-7598, F23-7601, F23-8901, F23-8902, F23-8903, F23- 8104, F23-8906, F23-8108, F23-8109, F23-8110, F23-8915, F23-8433, F23-9328, F23-12816 & F23-13975. ________________

Odonovah Mairs, Appellant,

vs.

State of Florida, Appellee.

An Appeal from the Circuit Court for Miami-Dade County, Lody Jean, Judge.

Melanie A. Malave (Ft. Lauderdale), for appellant.

James Uthmeier, Attorney General, and Camilo Montoya, Assistant Attorney General, for appellee.

Before SCALES, C.J., and MILLER and GORDO, JJ.

SCALES, C.J. Odonovah Mairs appeals both the trial court’s revocation of his youthful

offender community control in twenty-one criminal cases1 and the sentences

imposed by the court following the revocations. We affirm.

I. Relevant Background

On July 17, 2023, Mairs, then a juvenile, pled guilty in twenty-one

criminal cases, the majority of which charged Mairs with burglary and

stealing luxury cars that, collectively, were worth millions of dollars. In each

case, the trial court withheld adjudication and imposed a concurrent youthful

offender sentence of two years of community control, followed by four years

of probation. The court required Mairs to complete a boot camp program as

a special condition of his community control and probation in each case.

In May 2024, after Mairs had reached adulthood, Mairs’s probation

officer filed affidavits of violation of community control in each case, asserting

that Mairs had violated the terms of his community control by committing a

new crime (a battery) and by failing to complete the boot camp program. In

June 2024, the trial court conducted a community control revocation hearing

and, finding that Mairs had willfully and substantially violated the terms of his

1 The lower tribunal case numbers are: F23-7590, F23-7591, F23-7593, F23- 7595, F23-7596, F23-7597, F23-7598, F23-7601, F23-8901, F23-8902, F23- 8903, F23-8104, F23-8906, F23-8108, F23-8109, F23-8110, F23-8915, F23- 8433, F23-9328, F23-12816, and F23-13975.

2 community control by committing a battery (a substantive violation) and by

failing to complete the boot camp program (a technical violation), the court

revoked Mairs’ community control in each case.

In lower tribunal case number F23-7597, the trial court adjudicated

Mairs and sentenced him as a youthful offender to five years in state prison.

In the remaining twenty cases, the trial court adjudicated Mairs – opting to

forgo sentencing Mairs as a youthful offender in favor of imposing adult

sentences under the criminal punishment code – and sentenced Mairs to

state prison sentences of five and/or fifteen years, depending on the

underlying charges in the cases. The trial court gave Mairs credit for time

served and directed that all sentences were to run concurrently. Mairs

appeals both the revocation of his community control in each case and the

resulting sentences.

II. Analysis

A. Revocation of Community Control

Without further elaboration, we affirm the trial court’s revocation of

Mairs’s community control in each case because (i) the trial court’s findings

of Mairs’s willful and substantial violations are supported by competent,

substantial evidence, and (ii) the trial court did not abuse its discretion in

3 revoking Mairs’s community control. See Edwards v. State, 296 So. 3d 986,

987 (Fla. 2d DCA 2020).

B. Resulting Sentence

Mairs’s challenge to his sentencing presents a more difficult question.

Mairs claims that the trial court reversibly erred by considering at the

sentencing hearing – at the State’s urging and over defense counsel’s

contemporaneous objections – prior criminal charges against Mairs that had

been dismissed when Mairs pled guilty to the underlying crimes for which he

was placed on community control.

Although the trial court, at a sentencing hearing following the

revocation of community control, may consider the circumstances

surrounding the primary offense and the defendant’s prior record, it is

generally impermissible for the court to consider dismissed criminal charges

because such consideration violates the defendant’s due process rights. See

Ramirez v. State, 420 So. 3d 570, 576 (Fla. 3d DCA 2025). When dismissed

criminal charges are presented to the trial court at sentencing, and the record

reflects that the trial court may have relied upon such considerations when

sentencing the defendant, “[t]he State has the burden to show from the

record as a whole that the trial judge did not rely upon impermissible

considerations in passing sentence upon the defendant[.]” Mirutil v. State, 30

4 So. 3d 588, 590-91 (Fla. 3d DCA 2010) (quoting Epprecht v. State, 488 So.

2d 129, 130 (Fla. 3d DCA 1986)).2 Hence, our inquiry does not end simply

because the sentencing court was presented with evidence of a potentially

improper factor. See Serrano v. State, 279 So. 3d 296, 302 (Fla. 1st DCA

2019).

To determine whether the sentence imposed by the trial court was

influenced by the improper factor – i.e., the dismissed criminal charges – we

must focus our inquiry on the actual statements made by the trial court at

sentencing and analyze whether those statements “reflect that the trial court

improperly considered dismissed charges in determining the appropriate

2 We note that the Fifth District has suggested that Mirutil’s holding in this regard was abrogated, sub silencio, by the Florida Supreme Court in State v. Garcia, 346 So. 3d 581 (Fla. 2022); see Nelson v. State, 392 So. 3d 174, 180 (Fla. 5th DCA 2024). Garcia and Nelson, though, are distinguishable. While Garcia and Nelson may support the proposition that unobjected to, improper sentencing considerations do not constitute per se fundamental error, fundamental error concerns are not implicated in this case. Unlike defense counsel in Garcia and Nelson, Mairs’s defense counsel, like defense counsel in Mirutil, asserted a contemporaneous objection to the alleged improper sentencing consideration. See Mirutil, 30 So. 3d at 590. We, therefore, are compelled to follow Mirutil and conduct the analysis it prescribes. See Nat’l Med. Imaging, LLC v. Lyon Fin. Servs., Inc., 347 So. 3d 63, 64 n.2 (Fla. 3d DCA 2020) (“Unless the Florida Supreme Court overrules a prior panel’s decision, a subsequent panel of this Court is not free to disregard, and must follow, precedent of the prior panel. Only the Court, sitting en banc, may recede from a prior panel’s decision.”) citation omitted)).

5 sentence.” Ramirez, 420 So. 3d at 576; Senser v. State, 243 So. 3d 1003,

1011 (Fla. 4th DCA 2018) (“[W]hen determining whether a court relied on

impermissible sentencing factors, it is primarily the court’s express rationale,

not the evidence or arguments presented at sentencing, which controls.”).

Here, when the trial court imposed Mairs’s sentences, the court found

that the “underlying offenses” to which Mairs had pled guilty “shocked the

conscience of the court.” Focusing on the underlying burglary offenses

where Mairs had stolen vehicles from the garages of the victims’ homes, the

court commented:

There was a lot of planning in the underlying offenses. They are sophisticated.

Some of them are semi-sophisticated. And I’ll just reiterate, a lot of them were pretty savvy. So, I understand that you may not be formally educated.

But unfortunately, Mr. Mairs, a combination of your lack of appreciation for the harm you’re doing people – taking things that don’t belong to them, violating their homes, trespassing on their property, and quite frankly, taking away their – the – the feeling of safety that they feel in their homes – they don’t deserve that.

After scrutinizing the transcript of the sentencing hearing conducted

below, we conclude, based our de novo review,3 that the State met its burden

3 See Randolph v. State, 355 So. 3d 442, 448 (Fla. 4th DCA 2023) (“We . . . review de novo whether a trial court relied on impermissible factors in sentencing in violation of a defendant's due process rights.”).

6 to show that the lower court did not rely upon dismissed criminal charges

when it sentenced Mairs. We, therefore, affirm the sentences imposed by the

trial court after it revoked Mairs’s community control in the twenty-one

criminal cases.

Affirmed.