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(CBS4 News) Did you know that just possessing six pills of a prescription painkiller that doesn't belong to you can land you in jail for years? Some are facing a 25-year long prison nightmare in Florida and throughout the United States because of the way the law is written.

Penny Spence's fate changed after she accidentally crashed her car into a tree in Coral Springs last year. She wasn't under the influence of drugs or alcohol, but she had one thing that can land her in jail for 25-years. Police found 49 1/2 pills of the prescription generic equivalent of Percocet that used to belong to her mother.

Spence was dealing with the recent death of her mother, who suffered from Lou Gehrig's Disease. Spence told CBS4's Jennifer Santiago that she was her mother's caretaker in her last year of life and often times had to lift the 130 lb. woman on her own, worsening a pre-existent back condition. Her mother was completely paralyzed. She says she was tired and in pain at the time of the accident.

What many like Spence don't know is that with just six prescriptions pain killers, such as Percocet, allow prosecutors to charge you with trafficking under the state's mandatory minimum drug law. Just 28 grams of the painkiller is enough to serve a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years in jail.

She was originally charged with possession by police, but later prosecutors upped her charges to drug trafficking.

"Trafficking is definitely not a bottle of mom's pill," said Spence as she sobbed.

Penny admits that she always carried her mother's pain pills on her and at times would take some when her back pain would become unbearable. The aspiring nurse never imagined the life-changing consequences of having such pills on her.

The law works against those who are in Spence's shoes, because in Florida statutes there's no need for law enforcement to prove you were actually trafficking the pills. There is no need to prove what you were using the pills for. The statutes rely on the amount the pills you have weigh to charge you with trafficking.

Under Florida's mandatory minimum drug laws, just 28 grams of a prescription pain killer carries a sentence of 25 years. Possession of the same amount of cocaine only gets you a mandatory three year sentence. What is ironic is that Percocet contains a large amount of acetaminophen, the ingredient found in Tylenol, but that does not factor in when authorities weigh in the amount of pills that are found on a suspect.

"I wish I had a dollar for every time I've spoken to a parent or a family member who said, 'I didn't know this could happen in America,'" said Robert Batey.

Batey is a law professor and president of the Tampa Bay Chapter of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), a DC organization dedicated to ridding the country of such laws. Though the group has had luck in pushing for such laws to be removed from several states, Florida has not been one of them.

Richard Paey, a lawyer with an Ivy League education has already fallen a victim of these statutes. He is serving a 25 year sentence at a Florida prison for having pain pills prescribed by a doctor in another state. The lawyer and family man is paralyzed from the waist down and also suffers severe back pains - the reason why he takes the pain medication. Most doctors in Florida feared prescribing the large amount of pain medication Paey required to alleviate his pain. He was convicted on 15 counts of drug trafficking.

To add insult to injury, the jail's medical staff where he is at administers him a much stronger dose of morphine on a daily basis than any dose of medication he ever consumed in the past.

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