The Florida Supreme Court has thrown out the drug-trafficking conviction of a Jacksonville man after deciding that police made a mistake by not testing every suspicious bag that was found in his house to make sure it really was cocaine.

By combining the contents of the nine bags before they could be tested chemically in a laboratory, police had enough suspected cocaine to charge Baron Greenwade, 32, with trafficking rather than the lesser crime of drug possession. But because the bags were mixed together before being tested, Greenwade's conviction was reduced to drug possession, and he will be re-sentenced.

He originally got 15 years in prison for drug-trafficking. The maximum sentence for someone convicted of drug possession is five years.

The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office raided Greenwade's house on Alderman Road in 2009 and found a green bag in the garage with nine separate one-inch plastic bags inside.

Greenwade admitted the bags contained cocaine.

Every bag was field tested at the site and determined to be the illegal drug. But police then emptied the nine bags into one container, which then was examined by a forensic chemist and determined to be cocaine.

The combined weight of the material in all nine bags was 234.5 grams, and prosecutors are allowed to charge someone with trafficking in cocaine if the amount seized is more than 200 grams.

After a jury convicted Greenwade, Circuit Judge David Gooding sentenced him to 15 years in prison, and under Florida law Gooding had to put him in jail for at least seven years under the state's minimum mandatory drug laws.

But in a 5-2 ruling written by Justice Fred Lewis, the court reduced Greenwade's conviction to possession of cocaine and ordered him re-sentenced. A date for his re-sentencing has not been set.

During oral arguments in front of the Supreme Court, Assistant Public Defender Diana Johnson argued that prosecutors had not proved there really were more than 200 grams of cocaine because each bag wasn't chemically tested separately. This is the way it's done in other Florida cities like Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa, she said.

"In this case the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office and the State Attorney trusted that the nine bags of white powdery substance was cocaine," Johnson said. "But they didn't verify it."

Even though every bag was field tested at Greenwade's home, it's well established that field testing is not reliable, because it's police doing the testing with rudimentary equipment. That's why a chemical analysis with trained chemists in a laboratory setting always occurs afterwards, Johnson said.

Drug dealers will also sometimes sell fake cocaine to make more money if they think the buyer won't notice, so it's possible that some of the bags had cocaine while others had a legal substance that was supposed to look like cocaine, Johnson said.

The majority of the court agreed that all the bags should have been tested.

"The State must chemically prove that each individually wrapped packet contains at least a mixture of a controlled substance before it may combine the contents and determine whether those contents meet the statutory threshold for weight," Lewis said in his majority opinion.

The case also resolves a disagreement among appellate courts. The First District Court of Appeal in Tallahassee previously upheld Greenwade's conviction, but in a similar 1988 case the Third District Court of Appeal in Miami ruled that if multiple bags of drugs are seized, each bag must be individually tested.

Justice Barbara Pariente, who agreed with Lewis' ruling, said during oral argumentsthat she was surprised Jacksonville police regularly combined cocaine that had been seized in separate bags, especially since the Miami ruling had been on the books for decades.

"There didn't seem to be any good reason to throw it all together," Pariente said.

Officials with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office said they had not read the decision and couldn't comment. Jackelyn Barnard, spokeswoman for State Attorney Angela Corey, did not respond to a phone call or email.

Chief Justice Ricky Polston and Justice Charles Canady dissented and said a rational jury could decide when presented with the evidence that Greenwade was guilty of cocaine trafficking.

"It is reasonable for a jury to conclude that a person packaging drugs for distribution would not intermingle visibly indistinguishable baggies containing counterfeit cocaine with baggies containing genuine cocaine," Canady said.

Greenwade also admitted to police that it was cocaine, and the majority of the court shouldn't just dismiss that, Canady said.

Rod Sullivan, professor at the Florida Coastal School of Law, said the case could lead to other people convicted of drug-trafficking getting their charges reduced if police combined the suspected drugs in the same way. But it will happen only if lawyers objected to the practice during the criminal trial.

If a lawyer didn't register an objection, those convictions will stand, Sullivan said.

Sullivan said he was surprised by the ruling.

"Once Greenwade admitted he had cocaine and showed the police officers where it was, I think it was up to the jury to decide whether the amount of cocaine he possessed was more or less than 200 grams," Sullivan said.

But Stetson University law professor Charles Rose praised the ruling.

"The only reason not to test every bag is laziness," Rose said. "Tampa does it this way and there's no reason Jacksonville can't as well."

Larry Hannan: (904) 359-4470