Reno posthumously honored with FSCHS Lifetime Achievement Award
JANET RENO and law students at the 2005 Minority Mentoring Picnic in South Florida.
Reno posthumously honored with FSCHS Lifetime Achievement Award
Senior Editor
Sandy D’Alemberte remembered playing volleyball — or something like volleyball — with Janet Reno.
It really wasn’t volleyball because “there were no rules,” he recalled.
But then he also played softball with Reno and young kids. “There were rules,” D’Alemberte said. “All kids eight and under got on base.”
That was only one of many sides of the late former U.S. Attorney General who was honored with the Florida Supreme Court Historical Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the society’s annual dinner January 19 in Tallahassee. (Reno died at her Miami-Dade County home on November 7.)
She was the first woman staff director in the Florida Legislature, the first woman state attorney, and the first woman U. S. Attorney General.
“Janet was first in many ways, but that’s not what we celebrate tonight,” D’Alemberte said. “She held these jobs, but what she did in these jobs is the important thing.”
Working for the Legislature, she drafted laws that lawyers follow every day “and she drafted Article V” of the Florida Constitution, he said. “Chesterfield Smith and I always try to take credit for it, but the person who drafted it was Janet Reno. She also drafted the no-fault divorce law and the Baker Act.
“An awful lot of what we do as lawyers today was influenced by what Janet did.”
As state attorney, Reno “invented the whole diversion idea in the criminal justice system. She started the drug court that has been copied everywhere. She began to care about issues like the environment. She cared about whether fathers paid their child support,” D’Alemberte said. “She cared about being a reforming state attorney and a lot of what she did was copied by other people.”
As Attorney General, Reno, whose undergraduate degree was in chemistry and who consequently “hated junk science,” overhauled and improved the standards at the national FBI lab, embraced studies on the reliability of eyewitnesses, and eagerly supported the developing science of DNA testing. She also embraced the development of innocence projects around the country.
“Janet Reno cared about law reform,” D’Alemberte said. “She cared about justice.”
Reno’s sister, Maggie Hurchalla, who accepted the award on behalf of the Reno family, told another story about Reno.
After she had retired from public life to the family home in Miami-Dade, a man came by to see Reno.
“The most wonderful people would wander into our yard in the last 10 years presuming, because it was Janet, that it was perfectly OK to wander into our yard,” Hurchalla said.
In this case, the man was a retired Miami-Dade deputy who wanted to thank Reno before he left town.
Years before, Hurchalla said, he had been a Miami Beach police officer who was present when another officer killed someone. He and his partner had been wrongly charged with perjury, and placed on leave without pay at the time the officer’s wife was pregnant. He had gone to work hauling furniture while the case dragged on for three years.
Then Reno was appointed as state attorney. “My lawyer told me, ‘I’ve worked with her; she’s straight. Come meet her with me,” Hurchalla recalled of the conversation.
So the officer met with Reno who reviewed the file, and then told the officer, according to Hurchalla, “You know, if I had been state attorney, I wouldn’t have charged you for two reasons. One I believe you. And two, I don’t prosecute people I can’t convict.”
The officer continued, “After that, she had to run for the office, and I called my lawyer and said, ‘Is she going to get in trouble because she got a supposedly bad cop off?’ And he said, ‘She would have done it anyway.’”
“She really did care about justice, and she really did care about people, and she would want all of you to remember that your pro bono, your public service is part of that great public service that leaves us with an orderly world to live in,” Hurchalla said. “There’s a quote from Cornel West: ‘Justice is what love looks like in public.’ Be proud that you represent that. She was very proud.”
