Consolidating courts looks dead, and it had better be | Editorial

Lawyers, judges, sheriffs — indeed, the entire judicial community — appears to be against the Legislature's scheme to consolidate circuit court districts. But this is only the latest attempt at politicizing the courts in Florida; it's a shame they didn't speak up sooner.

A bit of shopworn folk wisdom ought to be taken as self-evident truth: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Applying that principle, a committee appointed by the Florida Supreme Court has put down — we hope — House Speaker Paul Renner’s notion of consolidating some of Florida’s 20 judicial circuits. The 13-member panel voted unanimously on Nov. 3 to recommend against it.

In a state where a bipartisan consensus on anything is very rare, judges, prosecutors, public defenders, sheriffs, lawyers and activists all forcefully opposed the idea. The usually timid Florida Bar Board of Governors even weighed in against it.

Leave well enough alone

The committee heard an abundance of reasons to leave well enough alone and none for shaking up what doesn’t need to be.

Hearings and fact-finding demonstrated a need for more assistant prosecutors, defenders and court personnel, who should be paid like the professionals they are. The Legislature has long treated them like entry-level jobs despite the fact that top-notch courts are essential to everyone’s life, liberty and property.

Merging some circuits into others would cause pointless disruption in assignments and caseloads, not just for circuit judges but for elected state attorneys and public defenders and their staffs. Opponents said it would hamper access to the courts for rural citizens by creating irrationally huge geographical circuits.

Costlier campaigns a bad idea

It would require affected officials to raise more campaign money, mostly from lawyers, to reach more voters — another bad idea.

Circuits vary widely in size and population to account for inherent differences between densely packed places like Broward, Palm Beach and Hillsborough counties, which each are one-county circuits, and rural North Florida, where some circuits consist of four, six and seven counties each. The elongated Keys, and the time and distance it takes to get to Miami, justifies Monroe County being its own circuit.

The Supreme Court and the Legislature are not bound to accept the committee’s advice, but they should. For the court to override it would be dicey at best, considering that Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz hand-picked its members.

The legal community’s intense hostility toward Renner’s proposal suggests a welcome, if belated, concern over how Tallahassee has politicized the courts. In particular, it aroused suspicions that consolidation could gerrymander voters out of their ability to elect whom they want as prosecutors and judges.

Guess who started it all?

Gov. Ron DeSantis is responsible for that fear. He suspended Democratic state attorneys Andrew Warren of Tampa and Monique Worrell of Orlando on trumped-up charges that they wouldn’t enforce laws. The baseless suspensions seem to have been a wake-up call to a legal community that had been largely asleep while DeSantis and his predecessor, Rick Scott, systematically politicized the higher courts.

Politically charged appointments are wholly incompatible with judicial integrity, honesty and fairness.

Ideology and politics have dominated DeSantis’ appointments to the Supreme Court and to the intermediate District Courts of Appeal (DCAs). The word is out that a lawyer who isn’t a member of the right-wing Federalist Society shouldn’t bother to apply. DeSantis even had a secretive committee, chaired by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, to vet at least some prospective justices.

The fact that there are now six DCAs instead of five owes to raw politics.

Five districts sufficed for 43 years. Their own statistics showed that none was overworked. Nonetheless, a committee appointed by the Supreme Court recommended a sixth, by a split vote. The court went along over a strong and principled dissent from Justice Ricky Polston, who left the court soon afterward, and the Legislature rubber-stamped it.

Politicizing the courts

Skeptics saw it as a scheme to appoint more right-wing appellate judges and reduce the influence of the relatively liberal Second District judges, whose jurisdiction was shrunk. Nobody made even a faint case that the five-district appellate system needed fixing. It, too, wasn’t broken.

Roger Gannon, DeSantis’ recent appointee to the Sixth DCA, epitomizes how the governor has tilted the courts to the right. He had been an attorney at Liberty Counsel, a Christian legal group opposed to the LBGTQ+ community. He represented Kim Davis, the Kentucky court clerk who defied a federal court order to sign a same-sex marriage license, and had lobbied against adding sexual orientation and gender identity to Jacksonville’s anti-discrimination laws.

Prospective judges ordinarily shouldn’t be faulted for whom their clients were. But a lawyer who joins Liberty Counsel is promoting a particular ideology. The same would be true of many career counsel at, say, the ACLU, but they don’t show up on Florida courts or, critically, on judicial nominating commissions appointed by the governor.

Lawyers strongly identified with an ideology rarely survived scrutiny by those commissions when they were created under Gov. Reubin Askew in 1971. But by 2001, Republicans, by then in control of the governor’s office and the Legislature, changed the law to allow the governor to appoint all nine members of each judicial nominating commission rather than three of them.

That was the beginning of the end of an independent judiciary. The commissions, known as JNCs, know whom the governor wants to appoint and why.

Florida’s legal community rose up against the terrible risks of court consolidation. Now it must take on the politicization of the judiciary — a system that truly is broken.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.