By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
A jurist has been defined as someone who is a highly skilled legal expert, scholar, or seasoned judge who deeply understands and interprets the law.
The Supreme Court of Florida no longer teems with such justices. The court’s majority now seems most interested in supporting the hardline agenda of the supremely ideological governor who appointed them.
Last week, we lost a former justice who genuinely met that definition of jurist. R. Fred Lewis, 78, died Tuesday at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital days after he broke his spine in a fall.
Lewis was a practicing appellate lawyer in Miami when Gov. Lawton Chiles chose him to replace retiring Chief Justice Gerald Kogan in December 1998. A day later, in a now unimaginable scenario, Democrat Chiles and Republican Gov.-Elect Jeb Bush jointly appointed the first black woman to the state’s high court, Tampa appeals court Judge Peggy Quince.
Justice Lewis remained on the court until he was forced to retire in January 2019 after reaching the state’s mandatory retirement age of 70. His term on the court was marked by remarkable cases, none more important than Bush v. Gore. He was on the majority that voted to order a hand recount of presidential undervotes – a decision quickly reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court, halting the recount and handing the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush.
I first encountered Lewis in 2006 when I was a reporter with The Miami Herald. He was chief justice then, and I had called his chambers in Tallahassee to ask about a serious problem a colleague and I had found. Courts around the state were hiding the existence of hundreds of potentially newsworthy cases – divorces, lawsuits, foreclosures and the like – often involving judges, politicians, prosecutors, high-profile businessmen, governments and even a former presidential speechwriter.
Reporters never know what kind of response they’ll get when they ask ticklish questions of the high and the mighty. Chief Justice Lewis told me he was reading the newspaper at breakfast the day our first story published and “I almost swallowed my tongue when I read about this. To have such hiding occur . . . that’s not America, is it?”
I still remember the inflection in his voice as he said it. He wasn’t just uttering words. He meant it.
LEWIS’S ACTIONS SECURED TWO UNANIMOUS RULINGS
What he said and how he said it sum up what Justice Lewis was all about. Not only did he say it to a reporter he didn’t know – justices these days rarely, if ever, talk to the press – he knew what had happened was wrong and quickly began taking action to fix it.
Judges blamed court clerks; the clerks blamed judges. Soon reporters at other newspapers around the state were finding “supersealed” cases in their local courthouses, that is cases where everything – even the docket number – was secret.
Lewis ordered the chief judges in each of Florida’s 20 judicial circuits to report to him about their procedures for sealing and challenging the sealing of court files. He instructed two Florida Bar committees to investigate the matter and fast-tracked deadlines to suggest how the rules governing the administration of justice in Florida should be changed.
Meanwhile, that November, reporter Patrick Danner and I reported that prosecutors in Miami-Dade County were not just hiding cases, they were also secretly falsifying the public docket to protect informants. In two cases, court dockets were changed to cover up informants’ felony convictions and instead make it appear as if their criminal charges had been dismissed.
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle’s top assistant, Jose Arrojo, said that judges altering public records in informant cases at prosecutors’ request was “an established practice in this circuit” for two decades. It was also a crime. The law forbids anyone from altering or falsifying court records, even judges.
The Florida Public Defenders Association was outraged and demanded an investigation. Prosecutors said it was a necessary tool. Rundle, squeezed about it, later promised not to falsify any dockets. Chief Justice Lewis told the Florida Bar to add the issue of the doctoring of dockets to the ongoing rules examination.
On April 5, 2007, following oral arguments, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that neither judges nor clerks may hide civil lawsuits of any kind from the public, while also adopting new rules to make it harder for litigants to close off records they file.
“The public’s constitutional right of access to court records must remain inviolate,” Lewis said in a 23-page order.
“We conclude with an observation,” he wrote. “This court would never have learned of the concerns we seek to address here had it not been for the media. For that, Florida’s media are to be commended. The pioneering broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow is reported to have observed that the two things that truly distinguish a free society from all others are an independent judiciary and a free press. In this instance, the free press has shown its value to the people of Florida by helping the judiciary identify and quickly correct unintended practices that tended to undermine public trust and confidence in our courts.”
Three years later, in a second landmark ruling on the public’s access to court records, the justices spoke unanimously again. They abolished secret dockets, by applying its prior ban on hiding civil cases to criminal cases, and prohibited falsifying official court records, including the public docket, to shield informants or for any other reason.
COAL MINER’S SON
Many other stories written in response to Lewis’s death have noted the numerous achievements of this West Virginia-born coal miner’s son who rode a basketball scholarship to Florida Southern College in Lakeland in 1965 and then a NCAA academic scholarship to a law degree from the University of Miami School of Law in 1972.
As chief justice from 2006-2008 Lewis established the first statewide diversity training program for judges. In 2023, however, a new crew of very conservative Supreme Court justices, mostly appointed by anti-DEI Gov. Ron DeSantis, ditched part of a rule that had allowed judges to take “fairness and diversity” courses to meet a continuing-education requirement.
A strongly worded dissent by Justice Jorge Labarga, appointed by Gov. Charlie Crist in 2009, said the decision “paves the way for a complete dismantling of all fairness and diversity initiatives in the State Courts System.”
In addition to strengthening access to court records, Lewis led the push to ensure physical access to the state’s courthouses for individuals with disabilities by removing physical barriers. Likewise, he worked to address mental health issues the courts must deal with.
Lewis’s proudest achievement was the establishment of Justice Teaching, a civic education program that arranges for about 4,000 volunteer lawyers and judges to meet and talk about the law with middle and high school students across Florida. The Justice Teaching Center for Civic Learning is now based at Florida Southern College, where Lewis returned as Eminent Professor of Law and Letters in 2019.
Lewis married Judy Munc in 1969. It was a partnership that lasted 57 years. The couple had had two daughters, Lindsay and Elle. Lindsay was afflicted from infancy with a rare mitochondrial disorder that left her deaf, legally blind and unable to walk. Still, she graduated from high school when she was 22. She died in 2012.
Elle is married and lives in Texas with her husband and their two children.
Justice Lewis will lie in state in the Florida Supreme Court’s rotunda from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on June 11. A memorial service will be held in the courtroom there at 11 a.m. June 12 and will be livestreamed on the Florida Channel.
The Miami Herald, in a comprehensive obituary on Sunday, called Lewis one of the court’s “liberal lions.” But he didn’t see himself quite that way. He acknowledged his progressive mindset, but when asked about the stands he took his reply was always, “I voted what I thought was right.”
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