Local Attorney Backs Judge, Urges Governor to Obey Separation of Powers

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 2, 2026

Local Attorney Backs Judge, Urges Governor to Obey Separation of Powers

Fort Pierce, Florida – Florida’s governor is urging impeachment of a Tallahassee judge. He should respect our Constitutionally-mandated separation of powers, and stop using the criminal legal system and the lives of Floridians to bolster his political career, impugning along the way the good names of public servants who can’t fight back—judges.

So argues local attorney Michael Kessler, a 40-year member of the Florida Bar and a Board-certified criminal trial specialist.

This week Gov. DeSantis signed “Missy’s Law,” requiring that people who plead or are convicted of certain crimes be jailed until sentencing. While many might assume that always happens anyway, it does not. For many good reasons, some defendants routinely are left at liberty until a sentencing hearing.

“This has always been the case,” explained Kessler, “and should remain so absent specific circumstances such as a violent past or an articulated danger to the community.”

Despite numerous valid concerns raised in both the House and Senate, no discretion or exceptions were included in the new law.

Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers President Tania Alavi explains the practical problems with the law, saying “Missy’s death was a tragedy, it should not have happened, and our system let her down. But the answer is not a rigid rule without discretion, especially for pleas. People should not be jailed when even the judge and prosecutor don’t believe it’s appropriate.”

Routinely throughout the State, Kessler noted, judges take pleas and set off sentencing for a variety of reasons for both sides. Some counties have larger dockets where it is not feasible to conduct a thorough, meaningful sentencing hearing in the middle of the docket. The judge will often accept the plea and set off the sentencing to a future date. Sometimes a person will plead to testify truthfully against a co-defendant to assist the State in closing a case for a victim, and sentencing will be set off until after the trial.

No one in the courtroom believes that every one of these people should be jailed automatically due only to timing issues out of their control, and which have absolutely nothing to do with a particular defendant. But they now will be because the state attorney’s office in Tallahassee did not inform the judge of the defendant’s past when given the opportunity.

Last year, the Tallahassee Democrat reported that in 2024, a year prior to the conviction, Missy’s stepfather was investigated for sexually molesting her, but the State refused to press charges. Video from the courtroom showed that when the judge asked the State whether there was any reason not to let the stepfather be released pending sentencing, the State never mentioned this prior investigation. The stepfather also was previously investigated for physical abuse of Missy’s mother, which also was not relayed to the judge.

Absent such knowledge, the judge had no particular reason to hold him until sentencing. This is typical and appropriate. The Tallahassee prosecutor’s decision not to inform or advise the judge is what failed Missy.

However, there now are calls by the executive branch—both the governor and the attorney general— to impeach the judge for her decision. Predictably and hypocritically, the same report from the Tallahassee Democrat detailed how the state attorney’s office stipulated to a release pending sentencing in front of a different judge who is not (and should not be) facing the same demands for impeachment.

Most of us who work daily in the criminal legal system agree that it is flawed. It has always been flawed in some manner or other.

But when the parties each do their jobs and do them well, the system is the best humans can devise.

When the system fails someone, as it did Missy, attacking the judge and demanding jail for anyone who passes through the system is not a solution; it is a deflection of blame, and it is just plain wrong.

Our judges have difficult jobs. They make decisions daily that affect lives, sometimes tragically. That is a heavy burden judges bear.  But judges are at their best when they are left free to use their smarts and their experience to make careful and thoughtful individual decisions in each individual case.

Attacking them does not make them do a better job. It makes them afraid to be independent thinkers doing the best they can for us. If all parties stay in their lanes—prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, law enforcement, and politicians, and just do their jobs, we will usually get the justice we deserve.

We as lawyers are governed by the Rules of Professional Conduct, which require that we not mislead the public, especially about the judiciary.

It doesn’t take the experience of a Board-certified criminal trial lawyer to understand this.

The governor, a member of the Florida Bar who attended Harvard and knows better, knows that he, too, is bound by those rules, and he should stop violating them.