Monroe County State’s Attorney Dennis Ward joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the county.
Judge Mark Wilson has qualified unopposed to take over Circuit Court.
Ward said, “I’m all for conservative judges, and I’m all against liberal progressive judges too, because they just decimate a community with decisions that they make and put people’s lives and property in jeopardy by not doing their jobs or bringing their political viewpoints into the courtroom, and congratulations to Judge Jones for such a wonderful term of judicial competency and professionalism. And that guy is a great judge, a great person, and I wish him nothing but the best in his future. I hear that he’s going to take up some defense work, criminal defense work, so it’ll be interesting to see him on the other side there. Judge Wilson brings years of experience. And this guy was a law professor at Kent State University Law School. He was a highway patrolman in Wyoming. He’s a very, very smart, brilliant guy. He’s, I believe, a staff sergeant as well, so he’s got a lot of experience. He’s a conservative person on the bench and it’s very important here in the Florida Keys, because once a judge gets elected or even appointed, we’re stuck with him. It’s like a Supreme Court appointment, because if somebody comes out and runs against them, and in the past, this has happened. You’ve got to be a lawyer for five years before you can run for judge, and you run against the judge and you lose, and the next thing you know, well, I can’t be fair and impartial, so you’re going to have to go to another courtroom. So there’s not a lot of people that want to run against judges. So when they get into these positions, it’s like a lifetime appointment. The governor has appointed a couple of judges here in the last few years, and one of them is great. One of them is fantastic. The other one is still struggling to run a calendar. It’s frustrating, and it’s not fair to the people in our community that rely on the judicial system to get some type of settlement, and whether they’re criminal cases or civil cases, and it’s just very unprofessional. That’s what happens here in a small community like this. All in all we’ve been lucky in most cases. Every once in a while, one gets through there, and it’s just so frustrating in court for me and for my prosecutors, when you get in front of a judge who’s pretty much of a progressive liberal, and we deal with victims, and people that are victims of violent crimes, or people have stolen their monies, their funds, and some scams, and they’re left hanging. So these are very serious decisions here.”
How much latitude do the judges have in a courtroom?
Ward said, “I think this came from the civil portion of the Florida Bar, but some years ago, they said, well, these judges work hard and they don’t have time to run for election, and let’s give them six year terms. If you have a bad judge, you’re stuck with that judge for six years, and then you want to find out if they’re aggressive liberals or if they’re a little bit more conservative, but you can’t ask them questions like that. Oh, that may come up before me, so I can’t answer that question. Well, what’s your favorite color? I can’t answer that one. How about your lucky number? Oh, I’ve got to be fair and impartial. For example, let’s take the United States Supreme Court. These men and women, all came up through this type of process, but you get to learn them, at least by rulings that they’ve made over the years before they get there. So you know what you’re getting. But when you get down in the lower court, in what they call the People’s Court, the county courts and the circuit courts, these people running, you have no idea who they are. They come in from another community. Hey, I’m going to run for judge, great. What do we know about you? We don’t know anything about you.”
The only real recourse then is a possible appeal, but that’s not a certainty.
Ward said, “But at least you know who the appellate judges are, and it depends who you put it in, what are they going to do? But, I mean, we’re talking about people’s lives, people’s property, and their well being, their community or environment or natural resources. If you have some progressive guy up there or girl up there talking about, well, how about some rehabilitation? Oh yeah, let’s give this person another opportunity to kill somebody, or rape somebody, or even this clown on the federal bench, like, what clown apologizing to a guy who’s going to kill the president and then his staff? Well, you dumbass Judge, I don’t know where you came from, but the department of corrections, they have a great responsibility. This guy said, well, I’m not going to be around much longer, so you got to treat that as a thought of suicide. And guess what? If he kills himself in jail, big investigation, all these corrections people, now they come under scrutiny, and they’re investigated, facing possible jail time, and here’s this federal court judge sitting there apologizing to this jackass that just tried to kill the president and people of his staff. I mean, come on.”
The grand jury serves for six months and their input is so helpful – a new one will be selected soon.
Ward said, “We need to thank these people. I ran into a couple of them yesterday. We spoke briefly, and then I ran into the secretary of the last grand jury, and spoke with her for a while, and she said, it was just such a great experience. And she said I was in between jobs at the time, and I was able to spend a lot of time, and we did call them in quite a bit, this past grand jury and the one before them. And she said, if I had a job, I couldn’t have made all those grand jury meetings, but she said I was in a good position, and it’s an experience that I cherish and I enjoyed the time there. And then the wife of the other guy was on the grand jury, he wants to stay on there. Can you keep him on there? I’d love to, but we’ve got to rotate them in and out. What a great job they did. It was very, very time consuming on the grand jurist parts, but they were very, very good. And they listened, they were very attentive. They asked great questions. We had various witnesses appear in front of them. And they were very professional, and they learned a lot from some of the witnesses we brought in to try and educate them about the process of planning and zoning and building officials and what their jobs are and what the oversight is, and what their responsibilities are. You have to give them some type of education in that. And every once in a while we have somebody that is a former building official or former construction company owner that’s there in the grand jury, and they’ve applied a lot of insight to their fellow grand jurors, and just a great couple of grand juries here, and they did a lot of things.”
A recent residential burglary case saw a pretty hefty sentence of 18 months in Florida State Prison.
Ward said, “We listen to jail calls all the time, and so many times we’ll hear these defendants talking to their loved ones or their friends or whatever, and so many times we hear them say don’t come down here and do those type of things because these guys don’t play down here. And it’s true. I mean, you look at their criminal activity and you’ll see that they’ve had a number of arrests up in Dade County, and charges have been dropped, or a small amount of time in the county jail. We tell them over and over again, our sheriff, we’ve been pretty clear. We don’t take crime in Monroe County. So proceed at your own risk. These drug dealers that come down here and where leave here is go up to Florida State Prison, and then we put them on probation for a number of years after they already served a good portion of time in the prison system. So it’s a pretty clear message.”
Memorial Day is coming up.
Ward said, “As we approach the 250th birthday of the United States of America, Memorial Day is for the people that gave it all. They gave their lives, and that’s what Memorial Day is. We need to honor our war dead.”