Election 2004

Win extends female judge trend

Courthouse sages credit a young lawyer's gender for her win over an experienced man in a judicial race. Liz Rice differs.

By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD
Published November 21, 2004

TAMPA - On the campaign trail, judicial candidate Henry Gill liked to say he had served under seven United States attorneys general by the time his opponent, Liz Rice, got her high school diploma.

At 65, Gill was 25 years older than Rice. A former U.S. Navy captain, assistant U.S. attorney and Department of Energy lawyer, he had more than twice her legal experience. His campaign fliers showed a distinguished, grizzled countenance, full of worldly lines and judicial-looking crinkles.

"Vote maturity," the fliers urged, reminding voters that Rice had never even handled a jury trial. "Our county courts are no place for on-the-job training!"

Still, on Nov. 2 the Hillsborough electorate preferred Rice by nearly 30,000 votes, installing her on the county bench with 53.9 percent of the vote to Gill's 46.1 percent.

For close observers of the local bench, the result should have come as no shock.

While it has been two decades since the Hillsborough bench was an all-male enclave, the election further reinforced the conclusion that voters have drifted dramatically from traditional notions of what a judge should look like.

By now, it has become a truism among courthouse watchers that in judicial races, voters value experience far less than other factors.

"If I were still a political consultant, I would not take any judicial candidates that were not female," said Wayne Garcia, a former consultant who now writes a political column for the Weekly Planet. "I couldn't look him in the eye and tell him he had a good shot at winning."

But Rice, a commercial litigator admitted to the bar in 1990, said gender alone does not explain her victory. She pointed to other female candidates, like Leland Anne Baldwin in 2000, who have lost a bid for the Tampa bench. "It's just something you don't take for granted," Rice said.

In fact, Rice brought numerous advantages to the race. One of them was her longtime involvement with the Florida Bar, which included a stint as president of the Young Lawyers Division, and the attendant network of friendships.

Also, her war chest dwarfed Gill's: she spent $92,032 on the campaign to Gill's $38,662, permitting her to blanket target voters with campaign fliers. And Rice's law firm allowed her time off to campaign, while Gill continued to work full time.

"Henry (Gill), having come from up north and working for the government, a lot of folks just didn't know who he was," Rice said.

Rice, who says she has dreamed of being a judge since law school, said she called Judge Elvin Martinez's office to confirm he was retiring after rumors of it reached her.

That gave her a head start on Gill. She declared her candidacy in early 2003 for Martinez's seat, while Gill waited until early 2004 to jump in.

She said she logged 225 miles on her tennis shoes, often spending whole days knocking on doors.

"Literally, I walked eight to nine hours a day," she said. "I walked from 9 in the morning until it got dark. I lived on Power Bars for a couple of weeks. My greatest joy after the election was fixing myself pancakes, because I hadn't had a normal meal in weeks."

Gill said he also campaigned hard, but said "I think she was out on the hustings a lot more than I was."

Gill's fliers touted both his legal and life experience. One picture showed him as a young man in a Navy flight suit, returning from a 1966 deployment, meeting his wife and young daughter at the airport.

"I figured older people would identify with experience," he said. "I figured they would identify with a veteran."

He said Rice outspent him on advertising, and her decision to jump into the race early gave her an advantage.

"There's wisdom in the theory that if you want to run for judge, at least here, you make up your mind very early and do what she did," Gill said. "I didn't make up my mind until I knew for sure Elvin (Martinez) was retiring."

The election marked Gill's last chance at becoming judge, since age requirements prevent him from running again.

"This is a true last hurrah," Gill said.

In Tampa, the clearest parallel to the Gill-Rice race played out two years ago.

In 2002, veteran attorney Woody Isom vied for a Hillsborough circuit judge's seat against much less experienced Monica Sierra. She beat him handily, becoming the youngest judge on the circuit bench at 36.

While Sierra ran an aggressive, well-financed campaign, Wayne Garcia, who helped run Isom's campaign, said he is convinced her gender played a role in her victory.

"It's not a free ride to winning, but it seems to be an advantage that is one of the stronger advantages out there," Garcia said. "No one can explain it, and no one can quantify it."

There are, however, some popular theories, the most obvious of which acknowledges that female voters outnumber male voters (51.9 percent to 44.4 percent in Hillsborough and 53.8 percent to 44.6 percent in Pinellas).

Since voters never learn very much about judicial candidates, many go by instinct. "They tend to err on the side of the women, because they tend to feel it's safer," said Mary Repper, a retired political consultant who has run numerous Tampa judicial campaigns. "People believe that if a woman is in there, it can't go too far wrong."

Further, Repper said, male candidates worry that running a bare-knuckles campaign against a woman will backfire.

"The guys have a hard time taking shots at women," she said. "They don't want to be perceived as being ugly or mean toward women. So they tend to be less aggressive than they would be with a male opponent."

Among Repper's clients: Joelle Ober, who lost a campaign for judge in 1994 running with a first name that some voters apparently found ambiguous. Two years later, she included her middle name, Ann, and won a county court seat. "It made a difference, clearly," Repper said.

About 25 years ago, Repper said, clients sought out women in elected office to run against. "Now there is a tremendous turnaround," she said.

In 1986, Judge Susan Sexton became the first woman elected to the Hillsborough circuit bench, beating a long-serving, well-entrenched judge.

"I ran at the urging of my father, who always preferred to vote for women candidates when he could, even though he would generally be considered a conservative," Sexton said. "My father believed women were better candidates because women generally worked harder."

In the years that followed Sexton's victory, a host of other women campaigned successfully for judge, until by 1994, 11 of 48 jurists on Hillsborough's county and circuit bench were women.

Ten years later, Rice's election makes her the 17th female judge now serving in Hillsborough, out of 52 on the bench, according to court administrators. In the Pinellas-Pasco circuit, on the county and circuit levels, 14 of 57 judges are women.

"I think it's just a trend we're going to continue to see," Rice said. "Here I was, the mother of two young children, out on the campaign trail."

Times staff writer Bill Levesque and researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report. Christopher Goffard can be reached at 813 226-3337 or goffard@sptimes.com

[Last modified November 21, 2004, 00:15:26]