Sketching Out Our (Florida) Courts

a brief run down of the layers of this legal onion. #ReferenceGuide

I am going to ask you to imagine a scene that unfolds annually, usually in festively decorated houses, pulsing with loud music, young people, and bad decisions.

We’re starting here, instead of talking about the complex intricacies of the Florida Supreme Court, the five district courts of appeal, the 20 district courts, and the 67 county courts. All these layers make up the very important legal system that is tasked to mete out justice and interpret the laws by which we Floridians live. How and why they do this, as well as the courts themselves, are crucial for us to know, but can be hard to keep track of without context.

Like trying to remember which court sees who for what. Or what exactly is the difference between an appellate court and a family court? When digging into the history of the Florida Supreme Court itself, you can get lost in trying to remember and understand things like the term limits of judges, or why at the moment when we are gnashing at the bit to vote in our presidential candidates we first find ourselves slowed down by these odd votes to retain or not retain judges we have never heard of? How the heck did British Common Law and the Spanish empire get mixed up in our system? Why does the court library have reference books in different languages for legal codes of empires older than the United States? Who really was the first woman on the court and did Black people actually ever get the chance to sit on Southern courts? Was that before or after Reconstruction? Did the Florida Supreme Court even exist in this configuration before the Civil War? All of those questions matter. And I can tell you now that this very system and its history are full of gripping dramas and are rich with meaning and really cool symbolism. But understanding that meaning and the force it holds in shaping the shape of the state and the nation can’t be grasped unless we understand how it works. 

And all of these configurations of courts and constellations of authority can obscure the plain point of the Supreme Court of Florida in the first place. 

So let’s back it up. 

You are at a frat party. But not just any frat party. The party where new pledges are initiated and where Big Brothers are revealed.

People are drinking a lot. And by people, I mean underage students. And by drinking, all sorts of alcohol that was procured in both legal and illegal ways by underage students with fake ids and legal age fraternity brothers. You see 20 year old pledge in particular, one who has been handed a bottle of bourbon, and maybe you notice that the bottle doesn’t leave his hands for the rest of the night. 

The next morning, you wake up, amble on out, and you happen upon that same pledge. Except now, he's stiff and unresponsive. 

And in this story, from that very moment of discovery, that’s when this invisible, legal clock starts ticking. What do you do? In the moment, what do you owe this 20 year old kid lying on his side, passed out on the couch? 

Now, let’s say you decide to call and text your fraternity brothers. Which is totally understandable given the circumstances. The fraternity hosted this party. The drinking challenges and traditions and initiation are all part of the deal. And these people that you might call? They were the ones who arranged for the ride shares to transport you all to this off campus location. They’re in charge. These people held a meeting a month in advance to discuss the dangers of alcohol consumption, frat parties, and the university’s laws.

But what if you do just that, what if you call those people before you call for medical help? The police? The university? An ambulance even? What if eleven minutes pass by between discovery of this kid and your call for medical help? 

Let’s fill in the real life details to this hypothetical, from an actual case that hit the Florida Supreme Court. The campus is FSU. The year is 2017. It’s been sixteen years since a student named Chad Meredith at Miami University died directly because of hazing in his fraternity. There’s a Chad Meredith Act in place, a legal statute in response to the rampant, pervasive, and coercive abuse of alcohol that is a well known, documented part of Greek life on campuses all over. This is not the first passed out kid for national fraternities that have done little to cull and stamp out the illegal, dangerous traditions that are baked into a frat’s culture. In the planning meeting before this particular party, an entire Executive Council signed off on the plans to get around FSU’s drinking ban, informed pledges that the drinking ban was lifted for the night, and arranged to host the party off campus. A number of laws, both state and university, are broken that night.

This fraternity was an FSU chapter of the national Pi Kappa Phi. The 20 year old was Andrew Coffey, a newbie to campus, as he just transferred to study civil engineering. The bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon was nicknamed -according to tradition- “the family bottle”. Andrew Coffey was supposed to drink all of it. He would end up consuming what was believed to be 7 times the legal limit of alcohol in this tradition. That number, whether it was five times or seven times the limit, depends on what part of his autopsy you read. It does says he died of acute alcohol poisoning. His grieving mother, angered, famously said he died alone in a room full of people. The argument that Andrew Coffey’s family lawyer, the State Attorney, and every lawyer representing one of the nine had to fight out was this: “Did coerced and excessive drinking at the fraternity’s Big Brother Night – perpetrated by the three men – lead to Andrew Coffey’s death?”

Those eleven minutes we looked at earlier, by all accounts, wouldn’t have saved Andrew Coffey. He was gone already, sometime in all those hours of illegality and secrecy, hours the courts would later attempt to parse in great detail. Those eleven minutes were, however, indicative of what was prioritized by this group of people. When FSU, Pi Kappa Phi, the fraternity brothers, and the Coffey family all found themselves trying to hold anyone or anything accountable, to understand the events of that night, to look at everyone’s individual and collective decisions and decide where everything went wrong, they did that in context of Florida law. It's these same laws that will be read to indict people, interpreted to try people, and then fought over for years in the courts. It’s these laws that tell us what any given person owes another person, and that we are required to prioritize under given circumstances. This is how we spell out our responsibilities to ourselves and each other. But who decides when we’ve failed and how do they decide that? How did this drunken night and a bunch of fraternity brothers wind up before a bunch of Floridian justices?

When we try to understand and appreciate what the Supreme Court does, we can think in terms of application and interpretation. The business of the Supreme Court is to interpret the laws of our state. Justices that sit on these high courts don’t hold trials, instead they carefully interpret the meaning of a law. How should the law be applied? Is the law in question relevant or not to the facts of the case? The Supreme Court of Florida is the highest state court for decisions regarding how federal law and state law (and our state’s constitution) are interpreted. In the event that one successfully appeals a decision made by this court, it goes to the famous Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Using this case, here is a rundown of how you even get to the Florida Supreme Court. There are four layers. As previously mentioned, there are 67 county courts, 20 judicial courts, five district courts of appeals, and then finally the Supreme Court. Which court you initially end up in depends on what you are charged with and where. The first two tiers are trial courts and the last two tiers are appellate courts. Here’s the difference:

Trial courts  “ resolve disputes by determining the facts and applying legal principles to decide who is right. Trial courts include the district judge who tries the case and a jury that decides the case.” 

“At a trial in a U.S. District Court, witnesses give testimony and a judge or jury decides who is guilty or not guilty — or who is liable or not liable. The appellate courts do not retry cases or hear new evidence. They do not hear witnesses testify. There is no jury. 

Appellate courts review the procedures and the decisions in the trial court to make sure that the proceedings were fair and that the proper law was applied correctly.”

 Now each county has its own trial court, for things like citizen’s disputes. Matters like traffic violations, smaller monetary disputes, and the less serious criminal issues categorized as misdemeanors are addressed here. 67 counties, 67 county courts. 

If you appeal a decision in a county court, or have an issue that is not covered by a statute, you can end up in one of the 20 judicial circuit courts. These are also trial courts, and multiple counties can be covered by one of these courts. 

Now, in 1957, five district courts of appeal were formed. These are all in the appellate category. They have multi judge panels that review the decisions of the previous lower courts to correct any errors and make sure the decisions are consistent with Floridians’ rights and the laws. For the majority of cases that are appealed, this is the final stop. 

But in the case of the death of Andrew Coffey and the subsequent indictment of nine members of the fraternity, that’s not where things ended. Six members went ahead and just decided to served their time, but three of the young men appealed all the way up to the Florida Supreme Court. Now that journey takes us through the courts again. First, charges were brought against the fraternity brothers. Then, a county court dismissed the original hazing felony charges against these three. The State Attorney prosecuting the boys thought this was an incorrect interpretation of the law, and had one of the district courts and their multi judge panel review that dismissal. The 1st district court reviewed everything, and then overturned that county court's dismissal. That meant the felony charges could proceed. But the three members wanted that decision appealed so they asked the Supreme Court to hear the case. 

The Supreme Court of Florida is made up of seven people, one chief justice and six other justices. Five of those members are chosen from five different state districts and two are selected at large (This is to ensure the court has  geographic diversity). This court ultimately decided they did not want to hear the appeals of the three young men, as the court examined the previous court decision and found it sufficient. The three young men now would have a trial, as their criminal prosecution would now go underway unimpeded by the Supreme Court, and their time required to serve would be negotiated. They were to be prosecuted under that Chad Meredith Act we mentioned before, which years before had led to the largest jury indictment in the nation on a hazing case. Now if the Supreme Court did decide to hear the appeals, they would not have done any mysterious, magic, perfectly objective and robotic process. Justices would have been asked to look at all the minutes that made up the last night of Andrew Coffey’s life, to gauge where personal responsibility ended and where group responsibility began, to weigh the actions taken against the inactions, and think about how the law should apply to all of this. It’s the kind of heavy, important work that can determine how everyone else lives. When we turn to look at an even higher court, the Supreme Court of the United States, we might hear heated arguments about who should and should not be there. We might have people say things like only work qualifications, not race or gender or one’s past, should factor into our evaluation of a justice. It’s a whole argument and discussion, and it matters.

We’ll fight through that later, but I hope this dispatch has been at least slightly helpful in sketching out a bare bones outline of sorts.