Is a Criminal Conviction Unsupported by Evidence Legal ?

In Troedel v. State, 462 So. 2d 392, 399 (Fla. 1984), the court reversed one of the defendant's two burglary convictions because "there was no evidence of more than one such unlawful entry." The court held that "a conviction imposed upon a crime totally unsupported by evidence constitutes fundamental error." Id. The court applied this rule in Vance v. State, 472 So. 2d 734 (Fla. 1985), in which the petitioner was charged with two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and was convicted on each of the lesser-included offense of improper exhibition of a dangerous weapon under section 790.10, Florida Statutes (1981), which prohibits such exhibition "in the presence of one or more persons." Relying on Troedel's fundamental error pronouncement, we held that because section 790.10 was only violated once in the single episode, the second conviction was "totally unsupported by evidence." 472 So. 2d at 735.