Openness works, retiring Florida Supreme Court spokesman says | Opinion
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When I started work at the Florida Supreme Court 35 years ago this month, silence was the usual response to any questions about the court’s business. Staffers like me risked being fired if we talked to the press. Judges rarely gave interviews. The court was a deliberate mystery.
Official silence had long roots at Florida’s highest court. While it was a common policy for American courts at one time in history, it also helped drag the Florida Supreme Court into a serious bribery scandal in the 1970s. The court still was struggling to put that shameful episode behind it when I started work.
A few years later in 1996, I had the opportunity to change the policy. And I did, through the direction of a remarkable chief justice, Gerald Kogan, and visionary lawyers like Talbot “Sandy” D’Alemberte.
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I left my own career in journalism in 1984 to attend law school and then landed the job at the court. Soon, I found my way on to the staff of Justice Kogan just before he became chief justice-elect.
I often told Kogan about my own experience as a brand-new journalist sent to cover a capital rape trial in Pensacola in 1977 when no seasoned reporters were available. It was a hard experience. I made serious mistakes in my reporting because judges and lawyers alike would not explain what was happening.
They couldn’t, they said. It was against the rules. We all suffered, including the public who read my articles.
That memory still was vivid when Kogan approached me with a novel idea. He wanted to create a communications office at the court to reduce public confusion identified in recent studies of Florida’s Judicial Management Council.
Those reports showed courts had failed to communicate with the press and the public. That failure was eroding public trust in court – just like what happened when I was a journalist in 1977.
In the years that followed, this model of openness and transparency become the policy I put in place at the Florida Supreme Court. In time, we extended it to every other state court by creating communications offices in all 27 divisions of Florida’s judicial system, stretching from the Keys to the Panhandle.
The worth of that policy was on display in 2000, when Florida’s disputed presidential election contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore thrust our courts onto an international stage.
No court system in the nation was better prepared than Florida’s. People got to see the value of openness and transparency in historic arguments aired from start to finish in livestreams available anywhere on earth.
Today, what happened here in the 2000 presidential election cases has become standard practice for most courts around the nation. We have refined it to include newer technology like social media. And as I retire, the courts are poised to continue extending the basic idea as new techniques come along.
We have learned that openness works.
Craig Waters recently retired after 35 years as a lawyer and communications director at the Florida Supreme Court. He was a reporter for what is now called the USA TODAY Network-Florida, covering courts and state government, before attending law school.
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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Craig Waters, retiring state Supreme Court spokesman, looks back | Opinion
