DONE AND GONE: A JUDICIAL REMOVAL-RESIGNATION- A BREAKING STORY

     Are you surprised it took this long? Are you surprised that the lawyer with no experience, no demonstrable legal ability, no trial experience, and no qualifications to win a judicial election other than- and lets just call it as it was- a Hispanic name- is resigning from the circuit bench in the face of an embarrassing removal? 

What we know is that a long history of not showing up, canceling court, being rude to court staff, culminated in the judge "losing their sh&t" in court when a litigant mouthed off - is resigning effective December 31, 2023. The Judge will no longer have a court division as of December 1, and will just burn their vacation time at Florida taxpayer's expense. 

We also know that upon assuming the Circuit bench and being hidden in a dark corner of Juvenile Court, she quickly showed that she had no ability to handle those cases. As the months turned into years, and her work became more embarrassing to the judiciary, more accommodations were made until the Judge was mostly assigned to the domestic violence division (technically a circuit position, but traditionally staffed by County Court judges with their eyes on an 11th Circuit spot after faithfully traveling to all the Federalist Society events in DC)  where she spent her days reviewing petitions for temporary injunctions. 

But she could not even handle that, and as problem upon problem piled up, staff complaining about rude treatment, court being canceled or being late at a rate alarming for even Miami judges,  she was given the opportunity to resign before the accusations became official and public. Discretion being the better part of incompetence, she accepted the offer. 

Do we sound mean and bitter? Yes. This person replaced an extremely competent Circuit Judge based only on her Hispanic sur name, and that not being enough, she pandered during the election to the African American Community, covered by the blog in perhaps one of our greatest posts ever here.  

To recap what remains the absolute high (but really low) water mark of Judicial elections in Miami, the candidate said her volunteer work at Camillus House (something later shown to be an abject and arrant lie) for "colored people" (her words not ours) landed like a bomb at the Wilkie Ferguson Bar event (Wilkie Ferguson was an African American Judge and leader in our community before his untimely death). She followed that gaffe with this legendary statement: "I consider  myself a colored woman" for reasons unclear other than her brain-mouth connection was colored dimwitted.  

And yet- she won. 

We railed against the election of someone so obviously incompetent, who potentially could be presiding over death penalty cases. We raged that elections have consequences, and that this person was being given the power to remove children from parents, sentence people to prison, and most importantly for our civil brethren, sign 57.105 sanctions orders. 

In short, we screamed from the Internet roof tops that being a Judge mattered, and this person had no ability to be a judge. That the rolls of Miami Dade Circuit Judges that included Judge Cowart, Judge Dennis Murphy, Judge Rob Pinero, Judge Melvia Green, Judge Gerald Weatherington, Judge Ron Friedman, Judge Herb Klein,  and Judge Phil Knight, would now include a Rose By Any Other Name. 

We were right. And we have the right to say that.