1990—In Cross v. State, Florida chief justice Rosemary Barkett dissents from the Florida supreme court’s ruling that probable cause existed for an arrest. After Cross consented to a search of her tote bag, police found a hard baseball-shaped object wrapped in brown tape inside a woman’s slip. Having seen cocaine packaged in this manner on “hundreds of occasions” in their combined 20 years of law-enforcement experience, they then arrested Cross. Barkett’s dissent incorporates the analysis of a lower court that did not even acknowledge, much less credit, the experience of the police officers.
2005—Sitting on the Eleventh Circuit (to which she was appointed by President Clinton in 1994), Rosemary Barkett issues a solo dissent from the Eleventh Circuit’s en banc ruling (in Johnson v. Governor of Florida) that Florida’s felon-disenfranchisement law does not violate the Equal Protection Clause. Barkett and another Clinton appointee also dissent from the ruling that the law does not violate the Voting Rights Act.