On Accepting the 2018 Pete Weitzel Award

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Several friends have asked for a copy of the speech I gave last night accepting the Pete Weitzel Award from the First Amendment Foundation. Here it is:

I feel very fortunate that Gerald Kogan is here in the audience tonight.

Very candidly – without Chief Justice Kogan, I would not be receiving this award.

In fact, the State of Florida is very lucky that he first established the communications program that has existed in our state courts system for the last 23 years.

He asked me to run it because I was both a lawyer and a former journalist.

That program was based on a simple idea framed so well by the great American judge Louis Brandeis:

Sunshine is a great disinfectant.

Kogan felt that openness and adherence to the First Amendment were needed for government to avoid the corruption that power attracts.

You see, when Justice Kogan first gave me this task in 1996, he was fearful of two things.

In some ways, they were like two ghosts that haunted every meeting we had on this subject.

They represented past mistakes that Kogan believed we must avoid as I undertook the new job he was giving me.

The first is the ghost of David L. McCain.

Most of you in this room are too young to remember the era that David McCain came to represent in Florida history.

He was the most notorious of the Florida Supreme Court Justices caught up in a corruption scandal in the 1970s.

The scandal led to impeachment hearings against a majority of the sitting Justices.

Eventually, McCain resigned and became a fugitive from justice.

He died on the run, using an alias instead of his real name.

There were drug smuggling charges still pending against him at the time his body was identified by authorities in a hospital morgue.

That scandal horrified the state enough that its citizens voted to restructure Florida’s appellate court selections just a few years after the scandal broke.

The era of secrecy that McCain symbolized also horrified Justice Kogan.

So Kogan’s first instruction to me was to work as hard as possible to put the ghost of David McCain behind us.

Kogan wanted me to make sure that the Florida Supreme Court became a place that did its business so everyone could see it.

But there was a second ghost that also worried Justice Kogan in 1996.

It was a ghost from something that happened in 1995, only one year before Kogan asked me to undertake this new role.

It was the ghost of the O.J. Simpson trial.

In 1996, everyone in court circles around the nation was still talking about the madhouse of a trial that had happened in Los Angeles.

Many judges at the time were convinced that openness with the press led to the circus atmosphere that marked the O.J. Simpson case.

Kogan was not one of these judges.

He believed that the O.J. Simpson case unfolded the way it did because the court itself failed to establish a good set of rules for the press to follow and for its own press office to use.

So Kogan asked me to build a program that also would steer clear of the disorderly ghost of the O.J. Simpson trial.

These two ghosts became the two extremes Kogan wanted to avoid.

Kogan wanted openness with order. Transparency with dignity.

This was a tall order in 1996. – At first I despaired.

That was when I turned to an old colleague I had met when I still was a reporter for Gannett – Barbara Petersen of the First Amendment Foundation.

She suggested that I meet with a man who, at the time, was an officer in Florida’s most prominent press associations.

His name is Bob Shaw, who at the time was an editor at the Tallahassee Democrat.

Barbara, Bob, and I went to lunch a few blocks from here at Andrews – and Bob Shaw gave me an earful.

At the time he was doubtful of what I was doing, especially whether it would last.

And he also told me everything he disliked about the way the Florida Supreme Court operated.

I took detailed notes on what we could do to fix these problems.

I took that list back to Justice Kogan – and he approved the entire list as the backbone of our new program.

That backbone remains in place to this day.

It has been expanded over the years, of course.

I think its finest hour was on display when the Bush v. Gore controversy hit the Florida Supreme Court in the fall of 2000.

The entire world watched in amazement as a court posted its documents on the Web, transmitted its oral arguments to the world via satellite and the Web, and quickly told everyone about its decisions.

But we did not stop there.

In 2002, Chief Justice Charles Wells took the structure Kogan had created and asked me to expand it into a statewide network of court PIOs.

That was how Florida developed the first statewide professional association of court PIOs in the entire nation.

And it was done as part of crisis planning that occurred after the terrorist attacks in 2001.

In 2015, Chief Justice Jorge Labarga expanded this model even further.

He obtained court approval for a statewide communications plan that still is being implemented today by our professional association of court PIOs.

But all this effort began with the decision first made by Gerald Kogan in 1996 – when he decided that sunshine and not secrecy was the best approach.

And he was right that courts can achieve openness and maintain order in the process.

Justice Kogan, I am so grateful to be able to turn to you and say two words to you tonight: Mission accomplished.

I also can now repeat to everyone else in this room two more words that you first told me 23 years ago this spring:

Openness works.

Thank you everyone. And thank you to the First Amendment Foundation.