The First District Court of Appeal affirmed the denial of a postconviction motion on November 4, 2026, in Charles v. State, No. 1D2026-0332, applying its earlier decision in Daise v. State. Judge Winokur concurred to say that Daise unjustifiably cuts off a movant’s right to file a timely amended Rule 3.850 motion and that the rule should be amended. The appeal came from Bay County, where Circuit Judge Timothy Allen Register presided. Judges Nordby and Long concurred. Shakeel Charles represented himself.
The concurrence. Judge Winokur wrote that applying Daise leads to affirmance of the order below. He then wrote that, as he indicated in Owens v. State, 401 So. 3d 585 (Fla. 1st DCA 2025) (Winokur, J., concurring), Daise “interprets the current Florida Rules of Criminal Procedure 3.850(g) and (h)(2) in a manner that unjustifiably cuts off a postconviction movant’s right to file a timely amended rule 3.850 motion.”
His description of how the rules should work is this. When a postconviction movant has been given sixty days to amend a legally insufficient motion under rules 3.850(g) and (h)(2) and does not file an amended motion in that time, the trial court “is free to enter a final, appealable order summarily denying the motion with prejudice.” Any amended motion filed after that point would have to meet the standards of rule 3.850(j) for successive motions. But if the court has not yet entered that final order when the movant files an amended motion, “the amended motion should be considered if it is otherwise timely.”
In his view Daise, and the 2015 Fourth District decision it rests on, Ivory v. State, “prematurely cuts off the two-year period in which a defendant may file a rule 3.850 motion.” He concluded: “Rule 3.850 should be amended to clarify this well-settled rule.”
What this does and does not mean. The court’s holding is only the affirmance under Daise. A concurring opinion is one judge’s view and is not binding. The opinion does not describe the order Mr. Charles appealed, so it does not say whether the amended-motion question arose in his case. As a concurrence, Judge Winokur’s reading does not change how the First District applies Daise. The case is cited as Daise v. State, 379 So. 3d 603 (Fla. 1st DCA 2024), as the per curiam gives it; the concurrence prints the volume as 370.
The opinion is not final until disposition of any timely and authorized motion under Florida Rule of Appellate Procedure 9.330 or 9.331.
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Also covered at Florida Lawyer News.
Source: Charles v. State, No. 1D2026-0332 (Fla. 1st DCA Nov. 4, 2026) (Winokur, J., concurring). This article is general information, not legal advice.