An appeals court has cleared the way for a Florida man to withdraw his guilty plea in a major drug trafficking case, ruling that his attorney’s faulty legal advice essentially tricked him into a 15-year prison sentence.
The Sixth District Court of Appeal handed down the decision on May 1, 2026, in the case of Dearek Randy Williams v. State of Florida. Williams had originally pleaded “no contest” to trafficking 14 grams or more of fentanyl, a crime that carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years under state law.
However, shortly after being sent to the Department of Corrections, Williams moved to take back his plea, claiming his lawyer had fundamentally misled him about his rights.
During a hearing on the matter, Williams testified that he never would have accepted the 15-year deal if he hadn’t been told he could simply appeal the sentence later and “be out.”
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In reality, Florida law strictly limits a defendant’s right to appeal after entering a plea, meaning the “exit strategy” his lawyer described didn’t actually exist.
While the lower court in Orange County acknowledged that the attorney gave bad advice, the judge initially refused to let Williams out of the deal. The trial court stated it was unaware of any legal requirement that a defendant be told “what is a meritorious and not meritorious appeal.”
The appellate court disagreed, finding that the bad advice created a “manifest injustice.” Judge Wozniak, writing for the court, noted that affirmative misadvice from an attorney renders a plea involuntary.
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“Williams established that the affirmative misadvice of counsel misled him into accepting a fifteen-year plea offer,” the court ruled.
Because the plea was based on a false promise of a future appeal, the court reversed the lower court’s decision and remanded the case for further proceedings, effectively hitting the reset button on Williams’ legal battle.
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