GOV. BUSH'S DAUGHTER NOT PRESENT FOR ARRAIGNMENT

The attorney for Gov. Jeb Bush's daughter, Noelle, filed papers in Leon
County Circuit Court Thursday serving as the 24-year-old's initial
appearance on charges that she tried to buy the sedative Xanax with a bogus
prescription earlier this week.

Noelle Bush was released from county jail Tuesday under a pretrial program
designed to lessen jail crowding. In exchange for not having to post $1,000
bond, Noelle Bush agreed to seek permission to travel outside the county,
contact the pretrial release office weekly and submit to urine screenings
for drugs when requested.

On Thursday, reports surfaced that Bush might not have disclosed a prior
arrest during her intake interview for pre-trial release. Someone with her
name and birth date was arrested for shoplifting in Arizona in 1995.

Flagstaff Deputy Police Chief Bob White said a woman named Noelle L. Bush
was charged with shoplifting at the Flagstaff Mall.

She gave police an address of an expensive boarding school, Verde Valley
School, in Sedona, Ariz. School administrators declined to say if Bush
attended the school.

White said he could not tell if it was the governor's daughter because the
Social Security numbers listed in Arizona records and those now in Florida
differed.

Jackie Cooper, spokeswoman for Leon County, said that as of Thursday
afternoon, a check of national crime databases turned up no prior arrests
for the governor's daughter.

"The normal procedure is for the pretrial program to check the national
crime database and use that to determine whether a person qualifies for
pre-trial release," Cooper said. "Noelle Bush comes up clean as having no
priors."

Cooper said she did not know if any other investigation was being done to
check a possible shoplifting arrest in Arizona.

The governor's office declined to comment and referred all calls to Bush's
attorney, Peter Antonacci, who did not return calls from The Herald.

Also on Thursday, reports swirled about Bush's poor driving record.

State records show Bush has a long history of traffic violations in
Florida, having been cited at least 12 times and involved in five accidents
since 1993.

She was found not guilty in a 1995 wreck after a witness failed to appear
in court.

The Tallahassee Democrat reported that Bush's daughter acted belligerent
after a car accident she caused in September 2000 and told police she had
taken a prescription drug before the wreck.

Lt. Edward Smith, a field operations supervisor for the Tallahassee Police
Department, told The Herald that neither breath or blood tests were done on
Noelle Bush after the accident.

"The inference you can draw from that is the officer on the scene had no
reason to believe she was intoxicated," Smith said. "We don't give breaks
to people based on who they are."

Herald staff writers Lesley Clark and Tere Figueras contributed to this report.