Florida has given us a lot of things over the years: theme parks, retirees with lead feet, and an entire genre of headline-worthy news. Now, the Sunshine State has added a new entry to its long and storied catalog: arresting a man over a license plate frame on a car he didn’t even own.

Last December, Demarquize Dawson was pulled over and arrested in Davie, Florida. The offense? A license plate frame on his rental car was slightly covering the first letter of “Sunshine State” printed at the bottom of the plate. Not the plate number. Not any identifying information. The decorative slogan. And the letter in question — the letter S — was still visible. Just a little framed, the way dealer plate frames have been doing to license plates since roughly the invention of the car dealership.

So how did we get here?

Florida’s License Plate Law Is Getting Outta Hand

Florida had a legitimate problem on its hands. Drivers were rolling around with tinted plate covers, vinyl wraps, and other creative modifications that made it genuinely difficult to read or photograph license plates — a real issue for law enforcement. So on October 1, 2025, the state tightened things up with a new law making it a second-degree misdemeanor to apply anything “onto or around any license plate which interferes with the legibility, angular visibility, or detectability of any feature or detail on the license plate.”

Sounds reasonable enough, right? Well, like a lot of laws written in broad strokes, this one turned out to have some very wide edges. The language is so sweeping that it could technically apply to virtually any license plate frame — including the totally standard, completely inoffensive dealer frames that come pre-installed on millions of cars across the country. You know, the ones that say “Happy Honda Days” or whatever your local dealership is called.

Floridians Are Fighting Back

That’s exactly what a company called Ticket Toro is now arguing in a lawsuit against the State of Florida. Their legal theory isn’t free speech — it’s something called the “void-for-vagueness” doctrine, which holds that a criminal law must be written clearly enough that an ordinary person can actually understand what’s illegal. When a law is so fuzzy that police can use it to arrest someone over a rental car frame that barely grazes a state slogan, the argument is that it fails that basic test.

Davie police, to their credit, eventually acknowledged the whole thing was a mess. In a statement, the department admitted the law’s wording was “vague, unclear and appeared to be open for misinterpretation,” and said that since receiving a clarifying memo from the Florida Police Chiefs’ Association, officers have been better educated on how to actually apply it. They also extended an apology to Dawson, which is nice, though presumably not quite as nice as not being arrested in the first place.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: that clarifying memo isn’t law. The statute still sits on the books exactly as written. Which means the next officer who doesn’t have that memo — or simply interprets things differently — could pull the same move tomorrow. And given that traffic stops disproportionately affect people of color in this country, handing officers a vague catchall statute is the kind of thing that tends to cause real harm to real people.

The lawsuit is pushing to have the law invalidated entirely on constitutional grounds. Alternatively, Florida could simply do what New Jersey apparently already did and write the actual clarifications into the statute itself — you know, the place where laws are supposed to live.

Until then, if you’re renting a car in Florida, you might want to check whether the dealer left a license plate frame on it. Because apparently that’s where we are now.