Whether the white powder found on South Florida rapper Kodak Black in December came from the same prescription pill bottle he got at a pharmacy in 2022 became the focus of a heated argument between attorneys in Broward court on Friday.
Assistant State Attorney Jonathan Goodman pointed to the picture of the oxycodone pill bottle as insufficient evidence for the judge to dismiss the most recent drug case against the rapper, saying it should proceed to a jury. But defense attorney Bradford Cohen argued that the burden of proving the prescription isn’t valid is on the state if they want Black to face felony charges.
“There is nothing they have shown, nothing they have given, nothing they have traversed to say it’s not valid,” Cohen said Friday. “He wants me to prove Santa Claus doesn’t exist.”
Judge Barbara Duffy ultimately decided not to rule on dismissing the new drug case against Black or reinstating his bond, though she says she plans to within the week.
Black, whose legal name is Bill Kapri, was arrested in Plantation in December after police said they saw his Bentley SUV stopped in the road. When an officer approached, he saw Black asleep at the wheel, according to the probable cause affidavit. When he walked up to the car again, he said he saw the rapper with white powder stuffed in his mouth. The powder field-tested positive for cocaine at the time, according to the affidavit, but a lab test later came back positive for oxycodone.
Black is now charged with one count of possession of oxycodone and one count of tampering with evidence. He is also facing charges of trafficking in oxycodone in a separate case from July 2022.
The rapper could not appear in court himself because he remained in a Miami federal detention center on Friday. A federal judge had revoked Black’s bond in another case after his arrest in Plantation, and Cohen was unable to get him transported in time as he had hoped.
At the heart of Friday’s argument was a picture of a pill bottle that Cohen had provided to the judge. The pills, prescribed to Black in January 2022 for pain from a gunshot wound, are to be taken every six hours as needed, according to the instructions on the bottle.
Goodman accused the defense of using the exact picture of a prescription pill bottle as evidence that he had presented in Black’s drug trafficking case from July 2022. He questioned the likelihood that Black was still using the bottle of 40 pills a year and a half later.
“Mr. Cohen is trying to get a double bite at the apple,” he said. “… he’s trying to use the same evidence indicating he has that prescription, that was, if you look at the printout provided in the defense motion to dismiss, provided in July 2022.”
Cohen fired back that he had simply sent Goodman the photo as evidence that Black has an ongoing prescription for the drug, which he says is sufficient to dismiss the felony charges. If the state attorney’s office really wants to charge Black, it should charge him with storing his medication outside of his pill bottle, not possession of oxycodone, he said.
“Their only hope and prayer is that these pills don’t match the prescription,” Cohen said. “The problem is, they do. The problem is not only that they do, they can’t prove they don’t. It’s not up to me to prove that.”
But Goodman said that it is routine for prosecutors to try to match the pills to the prescription. If there’s no way of knowing that the crushed pills were prescribed to Black, he said, then it’s a question of credibility that the jury should decide.
“You can’t have a bottle of oxycodone that I got prescribed five years ago, and if I got caught with them that prescription would still be valid,” he said.
Duffy also appeared skeptical. She asked Cohen to come back to her with existing case law on how long a prescription is valid.
“If I got a script 10 years ago for something, and I have that narcotic with me now, for rest of my life, I can just have whatever that narcotic is?” Duffy asked.
She plans to rule by next Friday, after which she will consider two other motions: to reinstate Black’s bond, under the stipulation offered by Cohen that he revokes his license, and to suppress the evidence due to the nature of the traffic stop.