Eric Myers has the robe and the gavel that mark him as a Hillsborough County judge. Now all he needs is the judgment. Myers was rightly criticized again the other day, this time for intervening in a way that helped a Tampa radio talk-show host, Connie Burton.
Myers presided in 2002 over the trial of Burton. A jury found she should be removed from public housing because of her son's marijuana arrest. But Myers ordered a new trial - not based on the reasons Burton asserted, but on his own observation that a juror was "consistently asleep" while evidence was being presented.
No lawyer on either side reported seeing a juror sleep. Nor did Myers raise the issue at trial. While the 2nd District Court of Appeal Wednesday upheld the retrial order, Judge Craig Villanti wrote a blistering dissent.
"It is patently implausible that not a single litigant or lawyer observed the juror whom the judge later described as "consistently asleep,' " Villanti wrote. The trial record, the appeals court judge said, does not establish that a juror was asleep, that Myers took any corrective action or that this alleged sleeping juror "actually prejudiced" the case.
Myers, Villanti wrote, must have based his conclusion on "speculation and conjecture" because he "failed to conduct a hearing to establish whether any prejudice actually resulted from the sleeping juror."
This isn't the first time that Myers has shown poor professional judgment. Ordering a retrial without first establishing that Burton was denied justice the first time around "was tantamount to the judge's taking the bat from the tenant, corking it and then hitting a home run for her," Villanti wrote.
