Florida cop accused of luring working women online and encouraging them to meet and bring drugs

A Florida deputy is accused of turning his patrol car into a hunting blind.

According to Martin County Sheriff John Budensiek, Deputy Justin Lee didn’t just stumble onto felony drug and prostitution cases during “lucky” traffic stops. Investigators now say he allegedly set the whole thing up online, then lied about it under oath and tried to wipe the evidence.

Suspicious Arrest Pattern Triggers Internal Probe

Sheriff Budensiek explained at a press conference, carried by WPTV, that this case started with sharp-eyed supervisors doing real supervision.

He says Lee was making “only two traffic stops a night” but somehow “coming out with felony arrests almost every night.” Every boss in Lee’s chain of command had narcotics experience, Budensiek noted, and they knew that kind of hit rate “is not physically possible” if you’re just running normal traffic.

So a sergeant and lieutenant started showing up on Lee’s stops. In one incident the sheriff described, Lee claimed a car’s exterior swab had tested positive for cocaine and used that as his justification to search. 

When the lieutenant demanded to see the supposed positive swab, Lee couldn’t produce it. The lieutenant shut down the search and told him he had no probable cause.

Budensiek says bodycam and report reviews showed a pattern of Lee being “overly articulate,” as if he were “trying to make it up as he went along.” 

That combination of unlikely stats and over-polished stories was enough for the sheriff to order a full internal affairs investigation.

Sheriff: Deputy Used Prostitution Sites As Hunting Ground

Once internal affairs started talking to people Lee had arrested, the story got darker.

Sheriff Budensiek says many of Lee’s prior felony cases involved women arrested for drugs who were already working as prostitutes. When detectives interviewed them, “multiple girls” said they had first been contacted by Lee on prostitution websites, not on the roadside.

In the WPBF report by Rachael Perry, Budensiek says these women told detectives they had chatted with Lee online, agreed to meet for sex, and were encouraged by him to bring drugs to the meetup. While doing that, he allegedly gathered their vehicle information, including tag numbers.

Then, according to the sheriff’s explanation to Perry, Lee would wait in uniform in a marked patrol car, spot the vehicle he already knew was coming, and pull it over “as just a regular deputy that got lucky.” 

On paper, he wrote it up as a routine stop for a stop sign or minor violation. In reality, Budensiek says, “he knew the drugs were there” and was trying to “make it look like he was doing it in a legal fashion, but he was not.”

That distinction matters. The sheriff stressed that Martin County does run sanctioned internet stings for prostitution and predators, with supervisors, policies, and full disclosure to prosecutors. 

What Lee is accused of doing was something very different – a lone patrol deputy freelancing online in the middle of the night, with no oversight and no transparency afterward.

Lies Under Oath And A Scrubbed Phone

The real trouble for Lee didn’t stop at bad tactics. It escalated when the case hit the prosecutor’s office.

Sheriff Budensiek says Assistant State Attorney David Lustgarten, who runs the Stuart office, brought Lee in under oath as part of normal felony case review. 

Lee swore to tell the truth, then allegedly told Lustgarten he’d never spoken to the women before, didn’t know who they were, didn’t know the tag number, and had never called or texted them.

At the same time, internal affairs had screenshots of messages, call logs, and interview statements indicating the opposite. Detectives even dug into their own system and found that before one key stop, Lee had run the vehicle’s tag 42 times before the car ever showed up in front of his patrol unit.

After that sworn interview, things got even more suspicious. Budensiek says that in the single day between the state attorney hearing and being called into the sheriff’s office, Lee replaced his phone and tried to wipe it. 

Forensic work on the seized device later showed Google searches like “how to get rid of the information on your phone,” plus searches for Florida statutes on obstruction of justice, evidence tampering, perjury, prostitution, and official misconduct.

To the sheriff, those searches screamed consciousness of guilt. By the time internal affairs finished, Lee was arrested for making false statements under oath and tampering with evidence, and fired from the Martin County Sheriff’s Office.

Defense Attorney Calls It “Predatory” And A Constitutional Mess

Criminal defense attorney James White, who runs the Southern Drawl Law channel on YouTube, called Lee’s alleged pattern “predatory” and “escalating” in his breakdown of the case. As a former prosecutor and police officer himself, White said this wasn’t just bad policing – it looked like “hunting people.”

White told his viewers that based on Sheriff Budensiek’s own description, Lee wasn’t detecting crime so much as creating scenarios he could exploit. 

By initiating contact on prostitution sites, asking women to bring drugs, learning the tag, then staging a pretextual traffic stop, White argues the deputy was building cases on a “fabricated foundation.”

That raises classic Fourth Amendment problems. If the stop is invalid, White notes, everything that flows from it – the search and the seized drugs – is tainted. On top of that, he points to serious entrapment and due process questions, because under Florida law, whether something is entrapment often depends on who initiated contact, what was promised, and how much pressure was applied.

White also goes deeper into the fallout. Once a deputy is caught hiding exculpatory details like prior online contact, the state has a Brady and Giglio nightmare. 

Prosecutors are responsible for all favorable or impeachment evidence known to their agents, including cops. If an officer proves he can’t be trusted to tell the whole story, White says he becomes a toxic witness and “every single case this deputy has ever touched is now tainted.”

From his perspective, this isn’t just an internal policy issue. It’s a systemic constitutional violation that ultimately lands on taxpayers, who will fund the civil suits, overturned convictions, and case dismissals that follow.

Dozens Of Cases Now In Jeopardy

In her WPBF report, Rachael Perry notes that Lee’s firing and arrest could have a huge ripple effect through the local justice system.

Perry reports that dozens of cases Lee worked on may now be dropped, and Sheriff Budensiek publicly estimated that roughly 50 cases could be affected because “we can’t trust a word he says.” If you can’t put him on the stand, you can’t safely move forward on any case where he’s the main witness.

Budensiek told Perry he believes Lee’s motive may have been pride and ambition. The deputy had apparently applied for a narcotics unit slot and had been approved, but hadn’t yet transferred due to staffing issues. 

The sheriff described Lee as arrogant about his “lucky” arrests and eager to be seen as the star drug cop.

From the outside, that detail is almost the saddest part. As Budensiek pointed out, the women Lee arrested “were prostitutes and they were drug addicts.” The sheriff made it clear that doesn’t excuse their conduct, but it also doesn’t justify cutting corners on the Constitution. 

The entire system – judges, defense attorneys, and prosecutors – depends on honest disclosure about how cases are built. When an officer lies or hides key facts, the whole prosecution becomes suspect, no matter how “guilty” the defendants might be.

Why This Case Hits Public Trust So Hard

James White used this case to highlight a bigger trust problem in American policing.

He praised Martin County for acting on its own, noting that the sheriff’s office launched internal affairs, notified the state attorney, and arrested Lee without any public complaint or viral video forcing their hand. That kind of self-policing, he said, is “the rarest of all birds” and should be recognized.

At the same time, White argued that the very rarity of cases like this is proof of how bad things are elsewhere. 

He points out that people are increasingly skeptical when officers claim they “smell marijuana” or describe a convenient traffic violation, because too many cases have shown those claims being used as magic keys to unlock searches.

This Martin County case, in his view, is what happens when “over-articulation” and unchecked discretion go too far. The training that teaches officers to explain their actions well can slide into word games and outright misrepresentation if nobody is auditing them.

The uncomfortable reality is that one deputy’s alleged misconduct doesn’t just stain his badge. It forces the public to wonder how many other cases look “lucky” on paper but would fall apart if someone pulled the bodycam, checked the phone records, or talked to the people on the receiving end.

Sheriff Budensiek told local reporters he’s proud his supervisors caught the “anomalies” and that his office “won’t tolerate” this kind of behavior. White, for his part, says that’s a start – but insists that accountability “is no longer optional” if law enforcement wants to rebuild the trust it has burned.

In the meantime, women who were already living at society’s margins now get to learn they were allegedly used as props in a deputy’s self-made crime drama. 

And the community that trusted him has to ask itself a hard question: if this is what “just a good cop, just lucky” can actually mean, what else is happening when nobody is looking?