Lawyers for Circuit Judge Rose Marie Preddy, who sits in Putnam County, have filed a motion for a final judgment against Scott DuPont’s qualification to run again for judgeship as he is attempting to do against Preddy in this year’s election.
DuPont was booted off the bench in 2018 and suspended from practicing law in 2019 after he was found to have acted with egregious misconduct during his 2016 re-election run and on several occasions in court, as a sitting judge in Flagler County or Putnam Counties, which are both part of the Seventh Judicial Circuit. The circuit also includes Volusia and St. Johns County. He has filed to run against Preddy, who Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed to the bench last year.
The motion argues that an indisputable matter of constitutional law makes DuPont ineligible to run. He is seeking a term of office that begins in January. He was suspended from the Florida Bar–he was forbidden from practicing law–from October 2019 to June 2020.
The Florida Constitution is unusually explicit and specific in the particular regard: “No person is eligible for the office of circuit judge unless the person is, and has been for the preceding five years, a member of the bar of Florida.” According to the Constitution, DuPont is not eligible to run for Circuit or County judge until the January 2026 term, since the five-year clock began in June 2020.
“Under the plain language of the Florida Constitution as authoritatively construed by both the Florida Supreme Court and the First District Court of Appeal,” the motion reads, “DuPont is currently ineligible for the office of circuit judge and will remain ineligible when the term of the office he seeks begins in January 2025 [sic].”
The motion goes on to argue that one question, and one question alone, need be answered in the case: is he eligible to run, according to the Constitution, or not? “A careful examination of the constitutional text, context, and the authoritative interpretations of both the Florida Supreme Court and the First District all require this question to be answered in the negative,” the motion states.
The Supreme Court had also equated being a member of the Florida Bar with being eligible to practice law. Being disallowed to practice law means being disallowed to be a circuit judge, it had ruled: the Constitution also requires judges to be “a member in good standing of the bar of Florida.” It wasn’t always so: before the 1970s, county judges could be elected without having been lawyers. That’s still the case in seven states.
DuPont had been practicing law just six years when he was elected to the bench in 2010, defeating Donald E. Holmes by less than four points. There’d been issues during the campaign. Judge Matthew Foxman, elected to the bench the same year, warned DuPont not to act inappropriately in his second election campaign. DuPont ignored him. Unusually for a circuit judge, he was challenged in that election bid. His challenger, Malcolm Anthony, drew 38 percent of the vote.
Less than a year later, the Investigative Panel of the Florida Judicial Qualification Commission filed notice that it would formally charge DuPont on eight counts, among them that he “recklessly posted false or misleading information about an opponent and his family on a website created by his judicial campaign in a contested 2016 election,” that he “made false or misleading statements at a televised judicial forum that his opponent was ticketed for passing a school bus while it was loading or unloading children, and cheated during a Volusia County straw poll ,” said at the same forum that it wasn’t the role of a circuit judge to determine the constitutionality of a statute (it is, though constitutional, as opposed to statutory, issues are rare at that level). DuPont, the commission found, had violated eight of the Canons of judicial conduct.
From time to time, the occasional judge among Florida’s 597 circuit judges is disciplined by the Supreme Court for improprieties, publicly reprimanded and sometimes, but rarely, suspended, or even more rarely removed from the bench altogether. By February of 2018, the commission was recommending that DuPont be removed, essentially calling him a reckless liar. Days later Raul Zambrano, at the time the chief judge of the Seventh Judicial Circuit, ordered DuPont to clear out of the Flagler County and Putnam County courthouses, where DuPont split his time.
In June, the Supreme Court ordered him removed in a unanimous decision. Three months later, in a detailed 29-page opinion, the court salted its judgment with Decameron-like detail. His “egregious misconduct,” the court ruled , demonstrated his “present unfitness to hold office.”
He was then disciplined by the Florida Bar, and on Oct. 10, 2019, the Supreme Court found him guilty of multiple violations of Florida Bar rules and suspended him from practicing law for 91 days. That became effective on Oct. 21. He was reinstated on June 30, 2020.
Perhaps DuPont interpreted the word present in the Supreme Court decision with optimistic sophistry. His interpretation of constitutional language, under oath, may raise eyebrows: Last April 23, he paid the qualifying and filed other documents, including a signed oath that claims that he is “qualified under the constitution and laws of Florida to hold the judicial office to which I desire to be elected,” an that he will support the state constitution.
In his answer to the initial complaint, DuPont through his lawyer has argued that the Division of Elections has no authority to pass judgment on his qualifications, which may be the case, but is irrelevant to Preddy’s lawsuit.
Compared to Preddy, who has reported raising $90,000, of which $61,500 is borrowed, for the race since last July–she has spent $7,340 of it–DuPont has not had any reported campaign finance activity, suggesting, possibly, that he may be awaiting the legal decision before soliciting or borrowing money. He lists his net worth at $1.18 million.
Preddy v. DuPont - Motion For Judgment on the Pleadings
