A roll of the “die”

To say I am still reeling from what J. Cheney Mason did just over a week ago is a gross understatement. I intend to return the salvo as hard as he threw it. I will not go quietly into the night.

J. Cheney Mason is a high-profile attorney. According to his Web site, he is the recipient of many awards from professional organizations for his work in the legal field. No doubt, he has earned them, and I reluctantly place him in the same league as the Johnnie Cochrans and F. Lee Baileys of the world of lawyering, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a good thing. One is dearly departed and the other was stripped of his license to practice law. Although I wish him no ill will, I would never tip my hat to him.

In the field of criminal defense, he has tried over 200 cases in Florida. His trials run the gamut of high-profile cases including white-collar crimes, corporate, bank, mail and wire fraud; arson, robbery, embezzlement, racketeering, and, of course, homicide. His resumé must read like the underbelly of an Eastern Razorback rattlesnake, as indigenous to Florida as he is.

I had the good fortune of talking to several people recently about what makes Mason tick. Why did he do what he did? What strange notion entered his brain that gave him pause to file the ridiculous and perplexing motion that forced an extremely fair judge to step down? It belies common sense and pragmatic thinking from an otherwise seemingly brilliant tactician.

As a criminal defense attorney, he represents the low-lifes of the world - like murderers. I have always maintained that everyone, including Casey, is innocent until proven otherwise in a court of law, and all people deserve to be represented by counsel. He is most certainly qualified to defend her, but whether his defendants are guilty or not is of no consequence to him. Indeed, he fits right in on this one - his most famous case to date! He’s on top of the world!

What Cheney Mason will tell you is that it is not his job to prove anyone innocent. It is merely his job to find loopholes and errors in law to exonerate his clients. All you need is a lot of money and he will work for you. This is his mantra. This is his credo. (Obviously, in old age, he has bent his rules by taking this case for a few oranges, perhaps, and an exclusive footnote in history.) By creating reasonable doubt, which is his forte, he places criminals back out on the streets we walk every day. I can’t just surreptitiously blame him for it. All lawyers take an oath to represent their clients to the best of their ability, and that includes low-lifes rolling big bucks, whether we like it or not. I will not question the motive of this man who is ready, willing and able to place criminals back out on the streets to roam. It is called ego and the thrill of victory, far removed from compassion for victims and their everlasting  justice. I will not castigate him for it because, unfortunately, he holds no monopoly in this somewhat limited field of unscrupulous attorneys.

It was ego that caused Mason to let the world know he had the power to take out a sitting judge. It was ego and a twisted mindset that caused him to file that dismissal motion exactly 12 minutes before the court closed up shop for the weekend, and it was a bitter ego that made sure the judge had the entire weekend to think about it. That’s called rubbing it in and there’s no other way to explain it. Was it fun to do, Cheney?

What exactly was he thinking? He wanted the judge of his choice in return. He expected to hand-pick Judge Strickland’s successor by playing up his abundant connections with the court and cashing in his chips, only it doesn’t work that way and hasn’t for years, probably since the time Belvin Perry, Jr. unseated an incumbent judge in 1989, something I am very familiar with.¹ All of that courthouse schmoozing went belly up. In the end, the only thing he managed to prove was that his power only reaches the front door of his own office on Orange Avenue in downtown Orlando; his throne and the center of his universe almost across the street from the courthouse. What he never expected was this end result. When a lawyer bites like a rattlesnake, the court takes a heavy dose of serum.

No doubt, he would have loved to have seen any number of judges step up to the plate. “Sure, Cheney, it would be a blast to dosey doe with you.” Only it backfired.

One judge he would have given his right arm to dance with is Bob LeBlanc. He’s a fine judge and less inclined, so the rumors go, to sentence someone to death. Could it be because he is a veteran criminal defense attorney, just like Mason? Getting the death penalty off the table is of primary concern at the moment, and the latest motions filed by this defense attest to that. In my opinion, it is the main reason those motions were filed after Judge Strickland vacated this bench. Mason was giddy with excitement over the prospect of getting to hand select a judge. Yee Haw!

There’s Julie H. O’Kane, only she rotated off the criminal bench last year, and this is no civil picnic through the park. Lest he think in his good old boy wisdom that a female would be a friendlier judge, guess again. Judge O’Kane had no problem sentencing Michael Boykin to life in prison in 2006, but the death penalty was not an option.

A. Thomas Mihok is a well-seasoned judge, but he is back on the criminal circuit after spending the past seven years working in juvenile, domestic and civil courts. Certainly, he is capable, and just prior to leaving criminal the first time, he sentenced an Orlando man to life in prison in 2003 for his role in two grisly murders that occurred in late 1999. He spared Kevin Robinson a death sentence, despite the jury’s recommendation that Robinson be put to death for one of the murders.

Roger J. MacDonald has been on the criminal bench for less than two years and his last stint ended in 1998, when he moved to juvenile and domestic. He could easily go either way.

Walter Kominski comes highly recommended. He has a litany of credentials, and has shifted back and forth between criminal, juvenile, domestic and civil, but he just went back to criminal at the end of the year. At the moment, he has his hands full with Robert Ward, charged with murdering his wife in the exclusive community of Isleworth, where Tiger Woods got into a bit of trouble.

Last, but not least, and without having to name every judge on the Orange County Ninth Judicial Circuit, we have Marc L. Lubet. Not only is he on the criminal bench, he is on the Florida Bar’s Criminal Cases Committee as well as the Criminal Law Committee. Coincidentally, he was the presiding judge at the Lisa “Astronut” Nowak plea agreement last November. Cheney Mason was one of her attorneys. The judge told Nowak that the plea would probably affect her Navy career, but added, “You brought this on yourself, and I don’t have any sympathy for you in that respect.”

Ultimately, Chief Judge Belvin Perry, Jr. had a myriad of judges to from, each and every one of them qualified to take on a burden of this scale, but none of them were sitting idly by, waiting to be plucked by the likes of Mason. They have their own case loads. Any of the judges I cited, plus many others, would have been prime pickings for him, but in the end, Cheney Mason did not play with a full deck. Instead, he became a joker standing side-by-side with the other one, Baez. He had only one die to toss and it came up a snake-eye. He never anticipated that Perry, in all his wisdom and experience, would put his foot down. He thought this would be fun & games. Well, the good ol’ boy club went out of business years ago. A little girl is dead and the woman standing accused of her murder is a step closer, not farther away, to her fate because of this decision. For better or for worse, God works in mysterious ways. If Mason wants to go out in a big blast blaze of glory, I predict he will implode right before our very eyes. No fading away. No more awards, either, because it takes dice to play a game of craps and he only came equipped with one. That spells crap.

Take good care of your health, Cheney, you are going to need it.