Justice Labarga discuses criminal law and his own journey
Florida Supreme Court Justice Jorge Labarga recalled how he spent 11 years managing the Supreme Court’s judicial education program for new judges. The best advice he ever received came from a more experienced judge who eventually became a good friend and mentor, Labarga said. The friend told Labarga to always remember that whenever a lawyer or pro se litigant appears in court, “the judicial system is on trial.”
From the death penalty to speedy trial and circumstantial evidence, Florida laws have been changing quickly, Supreme Court Justice Jorge Labarga told an audience of criminal practitioners at a June 22 seminar in Boca Raton.
“To say there have been substantial changes in the criminal law of our state is likely the understatement of the year,” he said.
A native of Cuba who began his career as an assistant public defender in West Palm Beach, Labarga was a keynote speaker for “Criminal Law Update 2023,” a daylong seminar by the Criminal Law Section that highlighted the Bar’s Annual Convention.
Labarga was appointed to the Supreme Court by Gov. Charlie Crist in 2009. Five years later, he became the first Cuban American to serve as Florida’s chief justice. The second-longest serving justice recounted his early years with fondness.
Before entering the University of Florida College of Law in 1976, Labarga worked as an investigator in West Palm Beach for then Assistant Public Defender Lois Frankel, who now represents him in Congress.
Frankel could spend hours rehearsing a single question for a key witness, Labarga said.
“Lois was one heck of a trial lawyer,” Labarga said. “I learned so much about how to prepare a case for trial, how to prepare for anything, even for depositions. It was exhausting.”
Labarga spent his first year as an assistant public defender in the appellate division. The experience was invaluable, he said.
“I was very grateful, because there I learned the importance of making sure that all issues are properly and timely preserved for appeal.”
Even experienced lawyers struggle to meet that challenge, he said.
After three years, Labarga became an assistant state attorney. He headed an organized crime unit in the 1980s, at the height of South Florida’s cocaine epidemic.
Lawmakers responded harshly with minimum mandatory sentences, Labarga said. After he was appointed to the circuit bench in 1996, he found the lack of discretion frustrating.
“Those statutes, tragically, are still on the books,” he said. “They were designed to get these big guys, these smuggling cases, and all they would get is just this high school kid, really low end.”
Labarga said judicial canons required him to keep his remarks general, but that didn’t prevent him joking about his frequent dissents.
“That seems to be all I do these days,” he quipped.
He briefly traced the “back and forth” history of the death penalty in Florida, noting that before Hurst v. Florida in 2016, the state permitted a jury to recommend death with a minimum 10-2 vote. In 2020, after several justices retired, the Florida Supreme Court, in State v. Poole, repudiated the previous stance.
Justices said jurors must unanimously find an aggravating factor, but there is no requirement that a jury’s death recommendation be unanimous.
The Legislature didn’t revisit the death penalty until earlier this year, after a jury declined to recommend death for Marjorie Stoneman Douglass mass shooter Nikolas Cruz, Labarga said.
“Then Parkland came, and the verdict, and suddenly the Legislature acted, and now it’s 8-4,” Labarga said. “So that’s how Hurst came around.”
Labarga fondly recalled how he spent 11 years managing the Supreme Court’s judicial education program for new judges.
The best advice he ever received came from a more experienced judge who eventually became a good friend and mentor, Labarga said.
The friend told Labarga to always remember that whenever a lawyer or pro se litigant appears in court, “the judicial system is on trial.”
“You fail because you lost your temper, or you made rulings because you were vindictive, you have let down our judicial system. Because it’s not about you, you are not the center here.”
