By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
A complaint bashing Palm Beach Circuit Judge Darren Shull for gender bias, from four angry mothers to the state’s chief prosecutor, didn’t move Shull to drop an outspoken woman’s child custody case.
Nanea Marcial, one of the women who call themselves Mothers Against Court Abuse, followed the complaint with a court filing that says Shull must drop her case because she’s afraid he’ll retaliate.
It looks like Marcial passed the legally required test to disqualify a judge. Shull denied her motion anyway.
Last month Marcial and the other women petitioned Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier to investigate Shull for civil rights violations. He runs the family division of Palm Beach courts.
The women say Shull treated them unfairly in divorce and child custody disputes – and even broke an inviolate rule against one-sided hearings so he could accommodate their exes.
They want Shull found guilty of “engaging in a pattern of reprehensible discriminatory behaviors,” causing them “immeasurable mental pain and anguish,” their complaint to Uthmeier states. They want more than $4.4 million in damages.
Uthmeier’s media office did not respond to Florida Bulldog’s request for comment.
WHY SHULL KEEPS THE CASE
Shull has threatened to jail Marcial for violating one of his orders. Yet when he rejected her recusal motion, he implied that her anxiety is unreasonable.
“Disqualification is not warranted merely because [a party is] dissatisfied with the manner in which the trial judge is handling the case,” says Shull’s one-page order dated March 3.
“I feel like he is intentionally remaining on the case to counter my efforts to remove him, to stick it to me and show me he has power over me,” Marcial told Florida Bulldog.
“No objective or neutral judge would remain on a case where one of the parties has filed multiple complaints, including a civil discrimination complaint with the Attorney General,” she said. “Something doesn’t smell right.”
Fort Lauderdale criminal defense counsel Adam Swickle, Marcial’s lawyer, told the Fourth District Court of Appeal he’s heading there next. This will be Marcial’s fourth attempt to get Shull recused; the appeals court has issued three terse rulings against her, letting Shull hang onto her case.
In the custody battle over their two sons, Marcial maintains her ex-husband, political consultant David Custin, gets special treatment through his Florida Republican connections. Among his clients are Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nunez.
Public records show Nunez’s political campaign and affiliated Political Action Committees paid Custin’s consulting firm over $455,000 between 2012 and 2020, according to Marcial’s latest motion to disqualify Shull.
‘TEMPORARY’ JUDGE’S RULINGS
DeSantis appointed former criminal defense lawyer Shull to his judicial post in April 2022. Two months later, after a personnel reshuffling and a request by Palm Beach Chief Judge Glenn Kelley, the Custin/Marcial matter landed on Shull’s docket.
The case is pending in Broward, where Marcial used to live. But in a highly unusual move, the entire Broward Circuit bench was barred from handling the case because Custin feared that no Broward judge would treat him fairly, his lawyers claimed.
The case went to the Palm Beach Circuit, where Shull was “temporarily assigned” to it thanks to an order from then-Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Canady. That was on June 14, 2022.
A year later Shull ignored the advice of a court-appointed therapist that Custin’s and Marcial’s two teenage sons should not be reunited with their father immediately, according to Marcial’s recusal motion. Marcial has accused Custin of bullying their sons.
After father and sons were reunited in July 2023, the boys ran away and police returned them to their mother. In court documents, Custin accused Marcial of “conspiring” with their sons and “orchestrating an opportunity for the boys to run away.”
The reunion that Shull seemed intent on arranging for Custin resulted in Marcial pleading guilty to moving the boys between neighboring South Florida counties – though Shull’s original order required only that she move them back to Florida from New Hampshire, where she was working. She did that.
“Throughout this litigation,” Swickle wrote, “the Court has consistently rubber-stamped proposed orders drafted by Former Husband’s counsels, which either contain false or misleading information/conditions, evidence not presented at the relevant hearings, and do not accurately reflect the Court’s findings or rulings.”
Meanwhile, “this Court has intentionally and consistently denied Former Wife access to the Court and hearings, in direct violation of her due process rights,” he wrote. Shull is still threatening Marcial with jail for violating a condition of an order related to the botched July 2023 reunion.
The Florida Code of Judicial Conduct “mandates that a judge disqualify themselves in any proceeding where their impartiality might reasonably be questioned, including instances where the judge has a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party,” Marcial’s motion notes.
‘HE’S STILL ON OUR CASES’
After long struggles, Shull dropped the cases of Angela Bentrim and Andrea Spleha, two of the four women behind Mothers Against Court Abuse. He’s still affecting the lives of the other two, Marcial and Renee Weaver, along with their children.
Weaver’s two sons, 10 and 11, live with their father in South Florida; she shares custody but lives in New York for work. The boys’ situation is bad and getting worse, she said.
Weaver isn’t always able to fly back and forth to see the boys on a tight schedule and their father is using that fact to limit her time with them, she says. “He has informed me he doesn’t plan to let me continue to see them if it’s not every other week,” Weaver wrote in response to emailed questions.
And based on Shull’s handling of their case so far, Weaver must expect him to support her ex-husband’s threat.
“Prior to the divorce, I was a stay-at-home mom and had been with them every single day since birth,” she wrote. “During the divorce, he still only saw them 74 days a year until everything was finalized. He was always away for work. I was always the primary caregiver and now the children barely get to see me or speak to me.
“It’s gut-wrenching,” Weaver wrote.
She has filed multiple Shull recusal motions and appeals, and all of them failed. Now representing herself and short on funds, Weaver didn’t follow up the Attorney General complaint with another recusal attempt the way Marcial did.
Shull’s denial of Marcial’s recusal motion is “disgusting and unethical,” Weaver wrote. “Both she and I have been victims of his bias and he’s still on our cases.”
“There needs to be some way to enforce accountability in this broken system.”
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