By Jan Pudlow
Senior Editor

Calling them “Charlie’s Angels,” Justice Barbara Pariente moderated a playful panel that gave reporters a personal look at the Supreme Court’s four newest justices.

During the Reporters’ Workshop sponsored by The Florida Bar Media & Communications Law Committee on October 13, reporters from around the state learned:

Justice Charles Canady, while in high school, hand-printed silkscreen campaign signs for Lawton Chiles’ first campaign for the U.S. Senate, and caught the bug to run for political office himself one day.

Justice Ricky Polston took road trips to every state except Alaska, and all the major provinces in Canada, camping about half of the time with his daughters when they were growing up.

Justice Jorge Labarga, when he was appointed to the high court, made the newspaper in Cuba, the homeland his family fled in the early ’60s. “I am persona non grata in Cuba,” Labarga said. “Now I am my dad’s real pride.”

Justice James E.C. Perry was once banished from the First Baptist Church of Raleigh, N.C., because he is black.

“They are an incredible group of people. They are all intellectually curious. They have a healthy dose of common sense. And they are a real collegial bunch,” said Pariente, the dean of the seven-member high court that experienced an unprecedented four appointees by Gov. Charlie Crist within eight months in 2008-09, after two justices quit the bench citing family reasons, and another two reached the mandatory retirement age.

After playing a quick round of “Justice Jeopardy” to test reporters’ knowledge, Pariente asked the justices questions that she had gathered beforehand from the reporters:

Question for Justice Canady: “You served in the House of Representatives in Congress before coming back and working for the governor and then onto the court. What kind of challenges did the transition from the legislative to the executive to the judicial branch pose, and do you feel you’ve adjusted?”

“It was really an easy transition,” Canady answered. “I think that probably comes from the fact that I spent part of my career as an appellate lawyer, so I was familiar with the process in the appellate court and I knew the drill there. So it was really a seamless transition. . . .When I moved over to a different role, it was very easy for me to put the past behind me and look at things from the perspective of a judge and the constraints that are imposed on someone who is an official acting in a judicial capacity, as opposed to a policymaker in a legislative or executive capacity.”

Question for Justice Polston: “You actually had a career as an accountant. What made you go to law school?”

“When I graduated from FSU in 1977 with an accounting degree, I considered going to law school and actually took a hard look at it,” Polston said. “But on advice from some professors, they told me I should get practical experience in different things, and also I married Deborah at the same time.”

So, Polston said, he worked for seven years at a Big Eight accounting firm in Tampa, which grew from 13 to 50 accountants by the time he left.

“We had a lot of fun. We worked with very sophisticated clients: SEC-type clients, public offerings, very sophisticated transactions. I enjoyed it a lot. I reached a point in my life where I had to decide if I was going to do that the rest of my life or do something different. I decided to come back to FSU law school,” Polston said.

Question for Justice Labarga: “You served as both an assistant public defender and assistant state attorney. What were the greatest lessons you took from those positions and how do you take those lessons and use them in your role as a judge, and now as a justice?”

“As a public defender and as a prosecutor, the one thing I learned is that these are people we are dealing with. They are not numbers. . . .I think it’s important as money gets short, and we are pressured to work more with less, that we don’t lose that respect. . . .If I have brought anything with me from that experience, it’s that these are not just numbers, they are not just files, they are not just cases. Somewhere along the line, somebody got hurt. That is the main thing I learned from that experience.”

Justice Perry was recovering from nonmalignant vocal chord surgery and had to rest his voice, so he scribbled his answers on a dry eraser board that Labarga would then read aloud.

“Justice Perry, I will do what I call a leading question,” Pariente said.

“You grew up attending segregated schools and you went to an all-black college. You sued the Georgia Bar, based on their discriminatory practices, when no blacks were admitted that year. And you were put out of the First Baptist Church of Raleigh, N.C., for being black. And yet you became the first and only African-American on the 18th Circuit bench. Did your early life experiences assist you in dealing with the challenges of being a judge? In four words or less,” Pariente added with a laugh.

“Yes!” Perry scribbled on his board, adding: “I learned what is really important and not major in minors.”

Justice Canady, a Lakeland native whose ancestors in Florida go back to the 1860s, was asked why he chose to go to college in the Northeast, and if it was his plan to return to Florida.

Canady said he had read about Haverford College in Haverford, Pa., and applied to this “very small school in a nice setting.”

“I had very limited experience in the world. I had never been north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Having led a rather sheltered existence, it was a big culture shock for me,” Canady said. “Haverford was a little bit of a wild place. At one time it was the Acid Capital of the East. By the time I got there, it wasn’t. But it was still a pretty wild place.”

From there, Canady went to Yale Law School, where he said he decided to run for political office.

“I knew that if I wanted to do that, it probably made sense to go home. I thought it would be easier to pursue that, in fact, in my hometown. That is one of the things that drew me back there.”

Pursuing politics was fueled by Canady’s father, who ran Lawton Chiles’ first campaign for the U.S. Senate.

While Canady was still in high school, he helped his father with the “shoestring effort” campaign.

“I spent part of that campaign season printing signs using a silkscreen, hand-printing signs for Lawton Chiles. . . .My father went on to work for Lawton Chiles in the U.S. Senate. My exposure to the political process through my father’s activities caused an interest in politics to grow in me.”

Justice Polston was asked about his decision to adopt children from Florida’s foster care system, after raising his own children.

“I think it is probably fair to say it was not my idea first. Deborah, my wonderful wife, has a great heart, a wonderful heart for children. She can’t say, ‘no,’ and I can’t say ‘no’ to her,” Polston said.

Polston described a frustratingly long process to finalize adoptions, after they had been licensed foster parents for more than six years, a waiting game he said has since improved with new leadership at the Department of Children and Families.

“As we were looking and went through the training, it was actually difficult to find children. You would think, ‘OK, we’ve been through this training, where are the kids?’

“We would actually call different locations in Florida and say, ‘Hey, have you got any kids?’”

Once he told adoption officials he lived in Tallahassee, he would be told, “I’m sorry; we don’t have any kids for you.”

“It’s unique to that particular location,” Polston said. “So it was difficult finding kids. We found this particular sibling group through a friend of a friend, who happened to know a caseworker from somewhere else.

“We located this 10-year-old, 3-year-old, and 2-year-old, and the other three were born after that. We didn’t set about trying to adopt six boys all at once. We did three and the other three came later.”

Justice Perry scribbled on his board that “the betterment of mankind was always my objective in life.”

As founder and president of the Jackie Robinson Sports Association, he built a baseball program serving 650 at-risk boys and girls, the largest in the nation. He was asked what he tells youth about overcoming barriers and encouraging them to reach their goals.

“Keep the faith and spread it gently,” Perry wrote on his board, and then smiled.

Asked about the problems plaguing the court system, Canady said the “overarching challenge facing us” is the court budget.

“We have been cut to the bone,” Canady said. “The system is struggling to keep up and to effectively and efficiently and timely handle the cases that we are called on to handle. As we look forward into the next fiscal year, with the picture being rather gloomy, we are concerned that we not suffer any further erosion of our ability to do justice for the people of Florida.”

How important is it to have the makeup of the Florida Supreme Court accurately reflect the diversity of the state of Florida?

“I just feel our institutions should look like America looks. . . .If all of us were present, you could look at the court and say, ‘This is pretty much how America looks.’ And, in my case, sounds,” said Labarga, with a Spanish accent.

Diversity goes beyond race, ethnicity, and gender, Labarga said, noting Polston’s accounting background, Canady’s experience in three branches of government, and that Perry and he share a background as trial judges dealing with cases on the front lines.

Asked what surprised them most about life on the Supreme Court, Justice Canady answered: “Although I knew that death cases were a significant part of the work of the Florida Supreme Court, it was only after being on the court that I have fully come to understand how significant and what a large part of the work here is taken up dealing with death cases. . . .

“If you look at a typical oral argument week, you will find that the death cases seem to loom large.”

In detailing all that he has to do, Justice Labarga likened it to finals week in college, when he was stressed out to be constantly prepared for the next test.

“That’s every day here,” Labarga said. “I describe our job as being in a constant state of finals week.”