On an Unsettled Day, Judge Dawn Nichols Brings Order to Court as She Begins Post-Perkins Tenure

A week after Terence Perkins’s retirement, Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols walked into court at 1:35 this afternoon, wished the lawyers, a half dozen inmates inmates and a dozen people in the gallery a good afternoon, and got to work with pleas, a couple of sentencing hearings, bond and status hearings with workmanlike cheer and speed just shy of breathless.

So went the judge’s first appearance in a courtroom that for the previous six years had been Perkins’s domain, on an afternoon when the rest of the county was bracing for Hurricane Milton and the courthouse itself was preparing to shut down Wednesday and Thursday.




There was nothing remarkable about this first day other than the change of face and pace and the subtle ways Nichols immediately put her stamp a way of going through the docket without upsetting norms that had preceded her. “I know you all usually call the docket, but what I usually would like to do is we have a sign up list, because I’d like to know,” she said, “who’s ready to go.” She certainly was–with no letup between cases except to give her time to sign documents and read the notes about some of the cases she’s inherited from Perkins. Copious notes, in some cases.

Her first case took all of two minutes: Cory Waring pleaded to violating his probation he was serving for a couple of drug charges and driving on a suspended license, which reinstated his probation. Then it was Evan St Pierre’s turn for a plea on two drug charges of his own, resolved with a pretrial diversionary program that, if St. Pierre abides by, will result in the charges being dropped. That took three minutes.

“Welcome to Flagler County,” attorney Josh Davis, who was representing St. Pierre, told Nichols when he was done.




“Yeah, I practiced here for 20 years, this was a long time ago,” Nichols said, a surprise to most. “I won’t say how long ago. But you’re right. Flagler’s a great place to be. I’m happy to be here.” Gov. Rick Scott appointed Nichols to the bench 10 years ago in place of Hubert L. Grimes , who had been Volusia County’s first Black judge. Just last week she was presiding over somewhat of a high profile trial in Volusia County–that of Devin Perkins, 24, who was found guilty of three counts of vehicular homicide as he drove drunk at 100 miles per hour and crashed into a pickup truck in Dec. 2022. Three passengers in his car were killed: Kyle Jacob Moser, 25, of Daytona Beach, Ava Fellerman, 20, of Treasure Island, Alexandra Dulin, a 21-year-old TikTok personality known as Ali Spice. Perkins is awaiting sentencing.

Nothing remotely that grave occupied today’s docket for Nichols, though she sentenced two people in separate cases to significant prison sentences: James Michaels, a 35-year-old former resident of Casper Drive in Palm Coast, was sentenced to seven and a half years in state prison for burgling a house and car in Flagler Beach last December. Andy Hicks, 49, got seven years for a half dozen drug and drug-related charges. Someone in the gallery among a group of three people quietly cried as Hicks was ushered to the fingerprinting station before being escorted out of the courtroom. “Good luck to you Mr. Hicks,” the judge had told him, as she had Michaels.

The judge immediately established an easy rapport with the defendants. In one case, she asked a 64-year-old defendant if he had any mental health issues. It’s part of the normal plea colloquy. The defendant said he did not. “A little bit?” she asked him. He prevaricated. “I think I’m going to go with a yes,” she told him, before establishing whether that stopped him from understanding her at all. It did not. “That’s why I asked the question,” she told him. He was placed on 48 months’ probation for a felony battery charge (he’d attacked his roommate of four years while drunk. It was his third such offense since 1992).




But she had a gift for him: “I’m going to waive the cost of probation supervision, just because you have a lot of things here, a lot of tasks to do,” Nichols told the defendant, “and I want to make sure you’re successful. Okay? And you know your maximum exposure, if you went to trial in this case and lost, would be up to five years in state prison.” She wished him good luck.

In another case, one of several bond hearings, she found Nafissah Exantus’s story about needing to go to Haiti to get the money she owes in restitution not credible. She owes $2,000 to her ex-husband after demolishing some of his property. She’s owed the money since March but never made a payment, and has already traveled to Haiti once. “I’m sorry, I’m not buying it,” the judge said, denying her motion to travel.

In a different case, the judge found the bond on Kevin Cichowski–a man who’d briefly announced a run for Palm Coast mayor in 2021 then retracted it–too onerous. Cichowski, 44, faces two felony charges of domestic violence against his wife, who has since left the state for South Carolina, he told the court. His bond was set at $130,000. Nichols had no problem with the no-contact order. But she found the bond amount “really high for somebody who has no prior history and is 45 years old.” She set bond at $7,500.