By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
Casey Woolsey, a county court judge in St. Augustine, agreed with ethics regulators that she crossed a line when she wooed a voter by saying, “I am a conservative and my website is…”
But then the arch-conservative Florida Supreme Court informed those ethics regulators they were the ones who crossed a line.
The Judicial Qualifications Commission (JQC) had quickly reached a deal with Woolsey: She’d be chastised for what an ethics rule calls “inappropriate political activity” when she ran for and was elected to her nonpartisan office in 2022. She also failed to reveal she loaned her campaign half of a $100,000 war chest funded by nominally “third-party” sources – another violation.
On June 20 the Supreme Court blew up part of that deal. Woolsey still got a mild reprimand for the funding lapse via the court’s published opinion, one that drew very little media attention. But she skated on the political activity violation.
“The statement ‘I am a conservative’ is not partisan,” the justices ruled unanimously in an unsigned opinion. “Conservative is an indeterminate word of many meanings and connotations.”
Not according to state Sen. Geraldine Thompson, D-Windermere, who alerted Florida Bulldog to the decision. Thompson’s problem isn’t linguistic; she’s concerned about what the ruling means to the justice system.
“Judges can now signal their partisanship without any sanction from the Florida Supreme Court,” she said. “The ruling undermines the role of the Judicial Qualifications Commission, which was created to hold judges accountable and to promote fair and impartial actions.”
JUDGE WOOLSEY’S GREAT DEAL
The Woolsey decision is especially interesting in light of another campaign speech-related case that’s slowly working its way through the judicial disciplinary process, that of Hillsborough Circuit Court Judge Nancy Jacobs. Endorsed by pro-choice and liberal groups, she beat an incumbent who’s a high-profile darling of the Christian anti-abortion movement.
In Woolsey’s case, she and her lawyer participated in a Nov. 3, 2023 JQC hearing where she accepted investigators’ findings that she violated rules against partisan campaigning and misstating campaign funding sources. She stipulated the findings were correct.
Then, on June 20, the Supreme Court approved the funding part of the stipulation and scrapped the section about partisan campaigning.
The justices rejected this explanation from the JQC: “When Judge Woolsey asserted that she was a ‘conservative,’ she inserted partisan politics into a judicial election in a county where its residents are overwhelmingly registered as Republican and voted overwhelmingly for Republican candidates in 2022.” Woolsey’s home court is in St. Johns County near Jacksonville.
Dusted and done. Woolsey, a lawyer in private practice before her election, got an even better outcome than she expected.
Thompson suggested the outcome of the Woolsey case was predictable. She traced it to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis taking “deliberate steps to pack the Florida Supreme Court with ideologues and members of the Federalist Society.”
NO SWEET DEAL FOR JACOBS
Supreme Court files show the Woolsey case was a walk in the park compared to what Tampa-based Jacobs has been experiencing for the past 10 months.
It would be surprising if Jacobs got a deal like Woolsey’s. Her Supreme Court case file listed 105 public documents as of April 19. A final hearing for the hard-fought contest is set for Feb. 3, 2025.
Most recently, JQC chairman Gregory Coleman, a West Palm Beach lawyer, appointed businessman Eugene Muhart to the Jacobs hearing panel. He replaces Abigail MacIver, who agreed to leave the panel after Jacobs accused her of bias.
A Tallahassee political consultant, Abigail MacIver is married to Fifth District Court of Appeal Judge John MacIver. He joined the appellate court in January 2023 following his appointment by DeSantis.
Another DeSantis appointee, Sixth District Court of Appeal Judge Jared Smith, has a lot to do with Jacobs’ predicament. The JQC case is all about her successful 2022 campaign to replace him on the Hillsborough Circuit Court.
Conservative Smith is such a DeSantis favorite that when voters rejected him in favor of Jacobs, the governor promoted him to the new Sixth District appellate court in Lakeland. He was even short-listed for the Florida Supreme Court seat that went to Justice Meredith Sasso.
The JQC’s Jacobs investigation began within months of her taking office.
“Looks like the Florida JQC is lending its weight for judicial payback against Judge Nancy Jacobs for daring to unseat Judge Jared Smith,” said a lawyer who closely follows court politics and spoke to Florida Bulldog anonymously for fear of retaliation.
GUILTY BY ASSOCIATION
Smith achieved national prominence as an abortion foe when he refused to let a teenager end her pregnancy because, he said, her subpar high school grades and other factors proved she couldn’t make mature decisions.
He was reversed on appeal. Then Jacobs, a criminal defense and family lawyer, bested him by about 7,900 votes.
Jacobs’ campaign highlighted Smith’s overturned abortion ruling and his reputation for blurring the line between church and state.
“Religion is important but it seems … it has wrapped up his entire life,” Jacobs said at a candidates’ forum. “Your God and your Bible should not be your moral compass. … You need to set those things at the door and do your job as a judge.”
The JQC deemed her comments about Smith “inappropriate and disparaging.”
The commission also found Jacobs guilty by association because she advertised her endorsement from the Florida Planned Parenthood PAC. That “appeared to be a commitment to rule a certain way in cases involving abortion.”
Similarly, the JQC objected to Jacobs’ endorsement by Indivisible Action Tampa Bay because it’s a “partisan organization whose mission is to ‘resist the GOP agenda’ … and … ‘the right-wing takeover of American government.’ ”
SMITH’S STORY IS ‘IRRELEVANT’
Yet Smith’s campaign wasn’t scrupulously appropriate and non-disparaging in its messaging about Jacobs.
During an appearance at the Smiths’ evangelical church, Smith’s wife, Suzette, told the congregation that the Jewish Jacobs “needs Jesus,” according to a leaked video described by the alternative weekly Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. At the same event, Suzette Smith encouraged “prayer warriors” to rally against Jacobs.
A video attacking Jacobs for her “woke … liberal agenda” briefly appeared on the Facebook page of a digital advertising firm Smith paid $2,000 for social media exposure, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
Smith hasn’t faced any public ethics charges; if the JQC investigated him, it did so secretly. Jacobs learned nothing more than that when she tried to determine Smith’s status.
The JQC refused to let Jacobs question Smith, saying, “anything that Judge Smith may offer in the way of testimony would be irrelevant to this proceeding.”
In the end, after Jacobs gets her final hearing, the JQC will make findings and recommendations to the Supreme Court, which dispenses all judicial and lawyer discipline. She could be reprimanded or removed from the bench.
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