Fla. Stat. § 704.08, Cemeteries; right of ingress and egress for visiting or maintenance

The statute says SHALL HAVE. It does not say “must have.”

An earlier draft of ABANDONED quoted this section as “the relatives and descendants… must have an easement” and attributed that wording to the statute. It is not the statute’s wording. It is the Task Force report’s own unquoted paraphrase, at printed p. 6, introduced with “Pursuant to Florida law…” The report’s appendix quotes the statute correctly, with shall.

The draft quoted the paraphrase and put it in quotation marks beside the statute’s name. Quote the law, not the summary of the law.

HISTORY: s. 36, ch. 80-238. The statute dates to 1980, eighteen years BEFORE the 1998 dignity clauses. Do not imply it was passed alongside them.

READ IT WHOLE. The essay’s first draft quoted around the middle of it and asserted a negative the statute refutes in its own words. Complete and verbatim:

“The relatives and descendants of any person buried in a cemetery shall have an easement for ingress and egress for the purpose of visiting the cemetery at reasonable times and in a reasonable manner. The owner of the land may designate the easement. If the cemetery is abandoned or otherwise not being maintained, such relatives and descendants may request the owner to provide for reasonable maintenance of the cemetery, and, if the owner refuses or fails to maintain the cemetery, the relatives and descendants shall have the right to maintain the cemetery.”

Both “shall have”s are real. But the maintenance right is NOT simply granted. It arrives only after the descendants “may request” the owner and the owner “refuses or fails.” A draft wrote “Shall have. Not may petition.” over a statute that says “may request.” That is argument by omission, caught at Stage 0.

And “the owner of the land may designate the easement.” You have a right to walk in, and the man who owns the ground decides where you walk.

Every right in this section routes through the owner of the land now sitting on your ancestors.

It has one unstated precondition: you must know where your dead are. The easement runs to a place. Zion “disappeared from public view in the late 1920s.” A right that activates only when you can point at the ground is unreachable once the ground is paved and the map is not consulted.

See fl-task-force-abandoned-african-american-cemeteries-2021.