Miami-Dade Judge Faces Fine, 30-Day Suspension
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TALLAHASSEE (CBSMiami/NSF) - A Miami-Dade County judge faces a $10,000 fine, a 30-day suspension without pay and other punishment because of alleged misconduct involving comments she made during an election campaign and notes she took while hearing a case.
Judge Jacqueline Schwartz and the state Judicial Qualifications Commission initially agreed that the penalties should involve a public reprimand and a letter of apology.
But last week the state's Supreme Court rejected that agreement, known as a stipulation, and called for the addition of a fine and a suspension. That led to the revised agreement filed Friday.
One of the allegations involved comments Schwartz made to a Coconut Grove convenience-store owner last year during what the initial stipulation described as a "heated" re-election campaign.
After the store owner declined to let Schwartz display a campaign sign, she made an obscene comment to him and threatened to file a lawsuit, the initial stipulation said.
The other allegation involved notes that Schwartz wrote on scrap paper and on documents in a court file during the course of a case. The judge later instructed her bailiff to remove those pages from the court file and place them in an envelope. A party in the case had requested certified copies of the pages, but a clerk could not make the copies because the notes had been removed from the file, according to the initial stipulation.
Schwartz acknowledged she didn't know what happened to the original pages that had been placed in the envelope.
"By removing those pages from the clerk's file, and making further inspection or copying impossible, Judge Schwartz interfered with the official record of that case, and inhibited the appeal of any decisions or rulings she made based on those pages,'' said the initial stipulation, filed in February.
The News Service of Florida contributed to this report.