He was a prosecutor hired by Richard Gerstein in 1970 for traffic court, and ended his career as chief of major crimes.
He was appointed by Judge Graham to the Circuit Court in 1981.
In 1998 he presided over the longest civil trial in US history which ended with a 145 BILLION dollar verdict against Big Tobacco.
Judge Robert Kaye has passed away.
The Miami Herald Obit is here, and here are some excerpts:
Four years alone were spent on legal wrangling so that the case could even go to trial before Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Robert Kaye in a downtown Miami courtroom on July 6, 1998.
Two agonizing years, the longest civil trial in American history, would pass before a verdict. To get there, jurors and the legal teams sat through 200 days of trial, and pored over some 56,000 pages of testimony from 157 witnesses.
Four nonsmokers, one smoker, one former smoker, a pool made up of an assistant principal, a postal worker, a telephone technician, a welder, a bank teller and a Miami-Dade school employee filled the jury seats.
Judge Kaye, an ex-smoker, finally had their verdict in his hands. Like a master thespian who knows precisely when to deliver a line for maximum impact, Kaye wasn’t about to blurt out the result.
“He looked at that verdict and he looked around the courtroom. And he looked at the verdict again,” recalled attorney Stanley Rosenblatt, who filed that initial suit against the nation’s five largest tobacco companies.
“Tell us already!” attorneys Stanley and wife Susan Rosenblatt, along with the opposing attorneys for the tobacco companies, the media and a fascinated public wanted to scream.
“His comment was, ‘A lot of zeroes.’ And that was typical of him. He had a very good sense of humor,” Stanley Rosenblatt said Wednesday of Kaye, the state circuit judge who died Feb. 8 of complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at his retirement home in Ocala. Kaye was 86.
I don't think "judge Graham" ever appointed a circuit court judge.
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