Florida's Black Judges - Justices Leander J. Shaw Jr., Peggy A. Quince, Nikki Ann Clark

Black Issues in Higher Education, Jan 4, 2001 by Jennifer Peltz

TALLAHASSEE, FLA.

Three African American judges in Florida played a key role in determining the outcome of the prolonged and historic presidential election between Vice President Al Gore and President-elect George W. Bush.

With both candidates filing lawsuits-- Gore calling for recounts in selected Florida counties and Bush calling for the recounts to be stopped -- Justices Leander J. Shaw Jr. and Peggy A. Quince, as members of the Florida Supreme Court, prohibited Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris from certifying the election results Nov. 18 as she had planned to do.

The state's highest court also ruled that the manual ballot recounts could continue until Nov. 26 and that those votes must be included in the final tally. Harris certified the election in Bush's favor on Nov. 26, only to have Gore contest the results in Miami-Dade, Nassau and Palm Beach counties in Leon County Circuit Court. In a separate trial on the Martin and Seminole county absentee ballot cases, Judge Nikki Ann Clark was one of two Leon County Circuit Court judges who refused to throw out any of the 25,000 absentee ballots challenged in Martin and Seminole counties.

On Dec. 8, the Florida Supreme Court again ordered manual recounts to begin. However, the next day the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Bush's appeal and stopped the recounts in the meantime. In the end, the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision Dec. 12 brought the presidential election to a close, ruling that the statewide manual recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court was unconstitutional.

Here we take a closer look at Judges Shaw, Quince and Clark.

FLORIDA SUPREME COURT Justice Leander J. Shaw Jr.

Age: 70

Education: bachelor's degree, West Virginia State College, 1952, J.D. degree, Howard University, 1957

The longest-serving current member of the Florida Supreme Court, Justice Leander J. Shaw was appointed by former Gov. Bob Graham in 1983. Shaw, now 70, was chief justice from 1990 to 1992. He was the first African American to head the high court.

Born in Salem, Va., Shaw graduated from West Virginia State College in 1952 and served as an artillery officer in the Korean War before earning his law degree from Howard University in Washington in 1957. He then moved to Florida to teach law at Florida A&M University, where his father was dean of the graduate school.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, Shaw was a private lawyer, public defender and prosecutor. He was named in 1974 to the Florida Industrial Relations Commission and in 1979 to a state appellate court, where he served until his Supreme Court appointment.

Shaw has been a defender of equal-opportunity initiatives. He helped found and direct a 1990 commission that studied racial and ethnic inequalities in Florida's justice system. This year, he made a point of writing his own opinion opposing a proposed constitutional amendment to end the state's affirmative action programs. All the other justices also turned it down, but Shaw wrote a separate opinion to give his own reasons.

But he attracted perhaps the most attention with a fiery denunciation of Florida's electric chair. When a majority of his colleagues voted in 1998 to keep the chair, Shaw dissented. Along with his dissent, he put photographs of the grisly execution of murderer Allen Lee "Tiny" Davis on the court's Web site. The photographs got so much traffic that the computer system crashed.

FLORIDA SUPREME COURT Justice Peggy A. Quince

Age: 52

Education: bachelor's degree, Howard University, 1970; J.D. degree, The Catholic University of America, 1975

During the last days of his term as Florida's governor, Democrat Lawton Chiles made Peggy A. Quince the first African American woman to serve on the state Supreme Court. He made the appointment with the agreement of his incoming successor, Republican Jeb Bush. Chiles, a legendary figure in Florida politics, died four days later.

Born in Norfolk, Va., Quince, 52, was educated and began her career in Washington. After earning a bachelor's degree from Howard University in 1970 and a law degree from The Catholic University of America in 1975, she went to work as a hearing officer for Washington's Rental Accommodations Office, which administered what was then a new rent-control law.

After a brief return to Norfolk, she opened a law office in 1978 in Bradenton, Fla.

She joined the state attorney general's office in 1980. She headed the busy Tampa bureau for five of her nearly 14 years as an assistant attorney general, handling death-penalty appeals for another three. Chiles tapped her for an appellate court seat in 1993, and then for the Supreme Court late in 1998. She was sworn in at a 1999 ceremony, where she reserved six rows of seats for young people from her Tampa church.

Quince is still the high court's newest member. In a case of interest to the higher-education community, she wrote a March 2000 opinion allowing a graduate student to sue Fort Lauderdale's Nova Southeastern University over injuries the student sustained when she was robbed and sexually assaulted while assigned to an off-campus internship. Quince wrote that because the school required the internship, it had a duty to warn the student about previous attacks on the premises.