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Schiavo judge no stranger to high-profile cases

By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD
Published March 22, 2005

	James Whittemore

TAMPA - James Whittemore, the U.S. district judge who heard arguments Monday on whether to order Terri Schiavo's feeding tube reinserted, is accustomed to high-profile cases.

Six years after his appointment to the Hillsborough circuit bench in 1990, Whittemore, 52, rejected a legal challenge to a referendum raising the county sales tax by a half-cent. The tax was meant to finance an NFL stadium and other projects.

As a judge in Hillsborough's Circuit Civil Division, Whittemore won the Hillsborough County Bar Association's Jurist of the Year award in 1998. The next year, he was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the federal bench after a recommendation from Sen. Bob Graham.

The U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed Whittemore to the lifetime appointment in May 2000. He has since presided over numerous headline-grabbing criminal cases.

In 2001, he sentenced Gerald Payne, leader of Greater Ministries International Church, to 27 years in prison for his role in a multimillion-dollar pyramid scheme that defrauded thousands of people.

In 2002, he gave the maximum allowable prison sentence, 15 years, to an HIV-positive defendant who had sex with a 15-year-old Largo girl.

In 2003, he oversaw the case of Outlaws motorcycle club leader James Lee Wheeler, who was convicted of racketeering. Whittemore sentenced Wheeler to nearly 17 years in federal prison.

Whittemore received his undergraduate degree from the University of Florida in 1974 and graduated from Stetson University College of Law in 1977. He worked as a private attorney and an assistant federal public defender before becoming a judge.

[Last modified March 22, 2005, 06:26:18]