2 blacks, 3 women seek Fla. Supreme Court seat
TALLAHASSEE (AP) – Gov. Charlie Crist asked for more diversity among judicial candidates and he got it Tuesday, although only seven judges and lawyers applied for a Florida Supreme Court vacancy, the fourth in the span of a year.
Two applicants are black men, three are white women and two are white men. None are Hispanic.
They are vying to replace one of the four white, non-Hispanic males on the seven-member high court, Justice Charles Wells, who will retire in March. Two other sitting justices are women, one white and the other black, and the seventh is a Hispanic male Crist appointed last month.
The black applicants are Circuit Judges Hubert Grimes of Deland and James Perry of Sanford. The women are Circuit Judges Debra Steinberg Nelson of Sanford and Renee Anne Roche of Orlando and Orlando lawyer Tracy Marshall.
The white men are Orlando lawyer Daniel Gerber and 5th District Court of Appeal Judge Alan Lawson, a finalist for the last high court vacancy. Crist filled that at-large seat with Justice Jorge Labarga, a native of Cuba.
The Supreme Court Judicial Nominating Commission next will interview the applicants. Then it will submit three to six nominees to the governor for the seat representing the 5th appellate district. It covers parts of north and central Florida including Daytona Beach, Melbourne and Orlando.
The latest vacancy will give Crist an unprecedented opportunity to appoint a majority of the Supreme Court in his first term. It’ll also be the first time a majority has been appointed solely by a Republican governor in the 32 years since Florida stopped electing justices.
Chief Justice Peggy Quince, the high court’s only black member, was a joint appointee in 1998 of outgoing Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles and his Republican successor, Gov. Jeb Bush.
Crist filled the first two openings last year with a pair of conservative, white, non-Hispanic males although one of those vacancies resulted from the resignation of Raoul Cantero, the Supreme Court’s first Hispanic justice.
To fill Cantero’s at-large seat, the Republican governor passed over Labarga and another Hispanic nominee to name Justice Charles Canady, a former appellate judge, GOP congressman and state legislator. No women or minorities were nominated when Crist then appointed Justice Ricky Polston, a former appellate judge, to a north Florida seat after Kenneth Bell resigned.
For the third and fourth vacancies, though, Crist urged the nominating commission to send him more female and minority finalists.
“Our state’s judges should reflect the racial, gender and geographic diversity of the people that they serve,” Crist wrote in a letter to the panel.
Crist appointed Labarga to replace retired Justice Harry Lee Anstead after initially declaring him out of the running, citing his decision to name Labarga, formerly a circuit judge in West Palm Beach, to an appellate court. Crist declared that left him with only four nominees – one woman and three men, all white, non-Hispanics – and he asked the commission to add more diversity to the slate.
At a contentious public teleconference meeting, the panel voted 5-4 to expand the list.