The Fireman’s Son: Flagler County’s Even-Handed, Learned Judge Terence Perkins Retires

Note: this is the second of two articles marking the retirement of Circuit Judge Terence Perkins today. See the first here.

Five years ago a bailiff had the guts to give Circuit Judge Terence Perkins a permanent reminder to–how to put this elegantly?–zip it.

It was in the form of a name plate. Instead of a name, the wording was: “SHHHHHH !!!! DON’T SAY IT !!!” Perkins appreciated the advice. He placed the plate dead center in front of him on his elevated desk in Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County Courthouse, where he’s presided since 2018. No one could see the plate but the judge.




He laughed when asked about it at the end of a 75-minute interview recently. “Remember when we were talking about that visceral response or whatever?” he said, referring back to an instance in the court a few months ago when he’d made a rare, unfelicitous remark about some evidence at the center of a motion being argued in a murder trial. The warning was designed to keep him from making just that sort of off-the-cuff remark. But it was superfluous. Perkins was as disciplined and controlled a judge as they come, his hearings and trials a clinic in restraint, respect and evenhandedness, at least to the extent that Florida law’s disproportionate animus toward the accused allows. His misfires were much rarer than the false notes of a Horowitz concert, and his judicial mistakes even rarer: he made it easy on the judges of the Fifth District Court of Appeal.

Was. Were. Past tense. The name plate is just about gone, as will Perkins be after today’s full docket, then retiring after 14 years on the bench, six of them as Flagler County’s chief judge, and decades in private practice before that. Those included a start out of law school at Cobb Cole in Daytona Beach, then many years in a firm that he founded and grew with Dave Monaco, David Hood, Horace Smith, Rick Orfinger and Mike Orfinger, almost all of whom went on to be circuit or appellate judges.

The decision to retire was “extremely difficult,” he says. You could see that difficulty on his face when, during the Oct. 18 Flagler Tiger Bay lunch, U.S. Attorney Roger Handberg–the guest speaker–then members of the club honored his tenure, ending with a standing ovation that clearly made him uncomfortable and seemed to add a glimmer to his eyes. “From the bottom of my heart in Flagler County, thank you for being one of the best judges, mentors, jurists, and overall, I call you my friend,” Ed Fuller, the Tiger Bay member and Flagler County’s dean of civil discourse, told him, offering him a bottle of Tiger Bay’s branded wine. “Thank you for being here.”

Marc Dwyer, a Tiger Bay member and a lawyer who’s appeared before Perkins innumerable times, compared the loss to “brain drain. He’s just one of our most profound and knowledgeable judges. He’s worked in all the different areas of law in which circuit judges have worked. And quite frankly, I’ve had an opportunity to go before him for a number of years, and all you can ever ask is that you know that when you make your argument to a judge, even if he rules against you, that it’s going to be fair and that he cares. And I can tell you that unequivocally: Judge Perkins, he fits that profile.”

But it was time. 




“I’ve worked since I was 15. Every morning I get up and I put on a starched shirt and a tie and I put on my suit or slacks and a blazer, and I’ve done that my entire working life,” Perkins, 68, said, speaking in his modest chambers on the fourth floor of the courthouse. “I think I’m ready for the next chapter, which is not going to be getting up every morning and coming into court and handling what needs to happen. I don’t know if I’m on the top of my game, I’m feeling very comfortable where I am with regard to the legal and the important parts of my job. And part of me I guess wants to quit while I’m ahead, if you know what I mean. I don’t want to deteriorate.”

He speaks of his luck with colleagues, with Susan Price, his judicial assistant going back to 1989, with prosecutors, public defenders, private attorneys. “I’ve just been really, really fortunate, and they deserve a judge that’s on top of his or her game. And I just thought that while everything’s working well and I’m healthy and I can enjoy retirement, it’s probably a good time to go. So it was really that simple.” Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols, a former assistant public defender appointed to the bench in 2014, is replacing Perkins starting next week. 

He’s hesitant about being a senior judge, leaving that possibility to a “we’ll see.” He’ll miss the people around the law more than the law itself. He wants to fly more–he keeps two planes at the Ormond Beach airport (“Why do I have two airplanes? Because I can’t afford three”). He wants to read for his own pleasure–travel books, action books, good histories, particularly around the time of the Miracle at Philadelphia, some fiction. He won’t mind seeing the end of the “profound” isolation that a judicial posting requires–an isolation just about every judge who lives up to the judicial canon speaks of.  

“I have one fellow judge who said after he retired he finally got his civil rights back, which was kind of an interesting way to put it,” Dave Monaco, Perkins’s former partner, said. “Yeah, you give up a lot on becoming a judge. While it’s I think one of the best jobs on the face of the earth, there’s definitely a sacrifice you pay for that.” 

If a judgeship is a form of exile from the everyday, retirement may be a form of homecoming. Ending this morning’s three hours of arraignments and other hearings, Perkins let drop that for that his wife and daughter would be present for his afternoon session. A circle was closing.




Perkins’s father Robert was a fireman in Montvale, N.J., where Perkins grew up until he was 12. His father became a fire chief. His parents loved Ormond Beach and had considered moving there for a long time. He graduated from Seabreeze High School and discovered the law through political science studies, though it was his father’s influence that encouraged him to go that way. “He had the utmost respect for lawyers,” Perkins said. “He just thought that it was the most professional of the professions and, and I think he motivated me to at least consider that. And then I took my first law class at University of Florida and I was hooked.” It was an introductory class on conflicts and law, requiring students to read cases and apply holdings to specific facts. He loved the legal analysis it required.

Still does: a Perkins hearing is often a clinic in law, but in terms anyone can understand, not just the lawyers. There’s a reason for that. It isn’t to condescend, but to make sure the defendants or the litigants in a civil case understand as much of what’s happening as possible. It is for them, after all, that court is in session, not for its own sake. In Perkins’s courtroom, you never get the sense that he loses sight of that, that he ever places the pomp and trappings of the bench ahead of the individuals before him. He seems to have telegraphed the same light hand to his bailiffs, who–with the public at least–act more like ushers than enforcers (it’s a different story on the other side of the bar as bailiffs stand guard next to felons, down to forbidding them from looking back at the gallery, or nodding off.) 

“This is the courthouse for the citizens of Flagler County. We are trying to serve the citizens of Flagler County,” Perkins says. “So whatever we can do to involve the citizens, show them what we’re doing, help them understand and appreciate the effect of that, we should do in that regard. If that’s education, we should do better at that. We have judges that do all types of marvelous things that never make it into the media. And I don’t mean just on a case, but I mean in the way they handle cases or in the way they run clinics to get people their driver’s licenses back and all of these other things to benefit the community. We do that every day in different locations, and we should be better at communicating that.” 

The purpose of court as a means to an end rather than an end in itself is just as clear when, in very difficult, emotional cases–murder trials, sentencings–Perkins addresses the families on both sides of a given case in the gallery. He does so to ensure that whatever a witness may be testifying, whatever the verdict, whatever the sentence, they keep their composer and respect the court. He typically uses a sports analogy only to revoke it, reminding the families that it isn’t a contest, and that there are no winners and losers. But his preemptive admonitions are conveyed gently and with great respect for his audience. They sense it, too: he’s not lecturing them. He’s welcoming them, while reminding them of the self-control owed the gravity of the situation. Perkins’s even-tempered, even-handed demeanor means there’s never been a serious incident in his courtroom’s gallery. 




Price, his judicial assistant, will tell you that that’s how he always is. Price had been working in the legal field in Connecticut for five years when she moved to Ormond Beach and interviewed with Dave Hood, working with him for a year before switching to Perkins service in 1989. She’s been his legal and judicial assistant ever since. “He’s the most easy going, nicest person,” Price says. “So luckily, he doesn’t get mean or angry or cranky or anything. He’s just very easygoing.” 

Perkins married an elementary school teacher, now retired from Volusia County schools. (Both her parents had been educators. Ormond Beach government in 2019 declared April 5 a day of remembrance of her father, Jack Surrette, a West Virginia native who’d led Seabreeze High School’s basketball team to two state championships–1961 and 1964–became principal, then rose to assistant superintendent.)

After law school he worked with Cobb Cole in Daytona Beach, leaving that firm in 1987 with Hood and Dave Monaco. They formed a firm of their own. Gov. Charlie Crist appointed him judge in the Seventh Judicial Circuit in 2010. He replaced the retired John V. Doyle.

Of course Perkins wanted Price to be his judicial assistant, or JA. It was a big pay cut for both, but it would have a more disproportionate effect on Price. “It really had to be her decision. And I was fortunate enough that she said, Yeah, sure,” Perkins said. “She was the very first person that could keep up with all of the things that we’re doing and when we have a lot of stuff going on, she was able to, keep up with that, master it and do everything. So what she’s not telling you is, she’s extremely good at her job. And I think she’s the best JA that we have.” Price was not ready to retire: she’s now Circuit Judge David Wainer’s JA, Wainer being one of the most recent appointees to the bench and likely in need of the kind of schooling only Price can provide. 

Safe today, Perkins is not about to be replicated.

“You know how he is now? That’s pretty much how he’s always been, always has a ready smile,” Monaco said in an interview.  “He has a very calm, understanding disposition. Terry is a pleasure to work with, he was  wonderful partner.” The words “insightful” and “analysis” are bever far from any assessment by anyone who’s worked with Perkins or been on the other side of the bench. But prankster? 




“He has a very good sense of humor, and frequently his insights are coated in humor, so you have to actually understand where he’s coming from to understand how logical and consistent his thinking is,” Monaco said. “He loves pranks. He’s just that kind of guy. When  I left the law firm to become a circuit judge, I was at a party I think over at his house with members of the firm. Next thing I know, Perkins managed to get a life-size cardboard cutout of me, which he presented to me, and became the subject of a lot of jokes over they years,. That was so-called one-dimensional Dave.” The one-dimensional Dave who, of course, went on to have a storied career that included appointment to the Fifth District Court of Appeal, where he chaired the Conference of District Court of Appeal Judges. Monaco, Perkins and Rick Orfinger got the chance for one day to serve on the same three-judge panel of the Fifth District, when Monaco invited Perkins to sit in as an associate judge. 

There’s also the selfless side to Perkins. “When my mother died, he immediately called and said: I’ll fly you down to the funeral,”  which was to be in Hollywood, Fla. “And that’s what he did. I’ll always be grateful for that. He’s a good pilot by the way.” County Judge Andrea Totten describes a different type of occasion when she had a trial scheduled, with several witnesses appearing by zoom, and intractable problems with the technology. Perkins was in his own trial. “Next thing I know, in strides Judge Perkins, still in his robe, with this bailiff trailing behind,” Totten writes. “He had taken a recess from his trial to come help me!” (See: “County Judge Andrea Totten on Circuit Judge Terence Perkins’s Retirement: ‘He Will be Profoundly Missed’.”)

If some judges consider technology an intrusion in their domain, Perkins considers it a friend of the court. He was a member of the Florida Court Technology Commission, from where he advocated for modernization, and he’s made the Flagler courthouse the most technologically-accessible of the courthouses in the Seventh Judicial Circuit, and one of the most accessible in the state, with hearings and trials streamed online and open to the public. It simply has no equal in that regard. Technology served the courthouse especially well during the Covid pandemic, when Flagler became the first county in the state to resume in-person trials, with some witnesses appearing by zoom. 




He’d managed to do all that after bringing back some calm to a tumultuous period in the Flagler courthouse’s history. He’d been the sixth judge on the felony bench in eight years when he arrived in 2018, on the heels of the scandal that caused then-Judge DuPont to get banished from the courthouse before the Supreme Court ejected him from the bench over improprieties in and out of the courtroom. There’s been nothing nearly as troublesome since.

Perkins’s workhorse nature hasn’t flagged: just as he was putting in every last hour of work today, he approached his hearings and trials with the same meticulous methodology. He takes detailed notes, typed or handwritten, in most proceedings, referring to those notes weeks and months, sometimes years apart. They’re a small, if thickly screened window into the way he reaches decisions. “It’s the facts that make the difference. And so I’m recording what I think are the operative facts that will determine the resolution,” he says of the notes (of which, considering how often he mentions them, he is clearly proud.)  “I want to make sure that I get it right.” He asks questions, takes notes on procedural aspects, keeps track of the state’s changing offers to defendants, and based on that, often talks to defendants as they weigh the risks of trial versus pleas. Of course no one sees the notes, and no one ever will: they’re like jurors’ notes, which though they may not get shredded–as jurors’ notes are at the end of a trial–might as well be in the same inaccessible bin for anyone but the judge. But what a trove of judicial wonders that would be. 

Certain things will never be recorded: not in notes, not in Perkins’s demeanor in the courtroom, and only barely so in his voice, the rare times he falters  just enough that, for those who know his voice, he’ll betray a moment’s emotion.

There are times within him, he allowed, when the emotions are far, far more than what we see. “The hardest part of my current job is sentencing,” he says. “I would say anguish is a fair characterization of it. If you ever get to the point where you don’t feel that, you should go do something different. So it is an incredible weight, and it’s extremely difficult. And again, I keep coming back to: the facts make all the difference. The worse the facts are, the easier the sentencing decision is. But it’s still difficult in that regard. The most difficult are the real close ones, the really close ones. You have to consider everything, the totality of circumstances. You’re not only considering the nature of the crime and the punishment, but the specifics on how it was done and why it was done and who is doing it and what circumstance of life are they in. You may treat somebody that’s 19 or 20 different than you might treat somebody that’s 29 or 31. So it’s the hardest thing that we do. It weighs the most on us. It’s what keeps you up at night. It’s really difficult.” 

Unless it’s a clear-cut case where the judge’s discretion is nonexistent, Perkins doesn’t like to sentence anyone in the heat of a verdict. He sets the sentencing off a few weeks, gives it time for a pre-sentencing investigation even when it’s not required, giving him more facts. Even then, the weight of the decision doesn’t lighten. “The first time I sent somebody to life in prison,” he recalls, “it was a mandatory life in prison. And I walked back to the office and I threw up.”




His office at the Flagler County courthouse–an oddly small space, compared to the palatial digs constitutional officers and superintendents and county administrators shamelessly lavish on themselves, though you could argue that the courtroom is his real office–was a reflection of modesty and understated creativity.

He builds craftsman-style furniture, most of it oak, including the oak and glass case in his office. “It gets away from all the elaborate trappings,” he says of the homemade case. It contains his father’s fireman’s helmet, a signed baseball, from the very first of a dozen years that he coached baseball and softball at his children’s schools, a few books–among them Jeff Toobin’s The Nine, the book on the Supreme Court, Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove, the story of Thurgood Marshall’s defense of four young Black Lake County men known as the Groveland Boys who were wrongly accused of raping a white woman in 1949. “I like the writings of Thurgood Marshall because he was such an advocate, but I admire him more as an advocate than I do as a judge,” Perkins says in what amounts to a rare glimpse at his politics. “I just found him fascinating. His whole life was fascinating in that regard.”

There’s also a 1999 award from the Florida Defense Lawyers Association for community service and a Coke bottle of sorts commemorating the University of Florida Gators’ 1996 football championship. On the top shelf there are a couple of gavels, one of them unusually large, his judicial badge, and behind it all the painted portrait of a dog against a red heart, under the caption: “Recollections of my puppy.” He and his wife have always had rescues. Lexi’s gone. They still have Cody. 

All told, a fraction of a fascinating life in its own right, a major chapter of which ends today. It’s only natural that there would be a few special guests in attendance at his last hearings this afternoon. “My wife and my daughter came to my first appearance,” he said, referring to his first day on the bench in 2010. (His daughter Mandy and his son Brian both graduated from the IB program at Spruce Creek High School and the University of Florida, Mandy, the athlete, to go on to a career  designing competitive shoes for Newbalance and Brian to work as a lawyer in Orlando.) It’s not known what’s in store for him later today at the courthouse. A farewell of sorts had been planned for last Friday, but he was out of town.

Mandy insisted that Perkins wear the same time and the same suit that he wore on his first day, and at his investiture. So Perkins did. Wife and daughter sat to the side of the bench for the next-to-last hearings, took a few pictures, hugged, and left. (Brian is joining the family this weekend.) Perkins was ready to leave too but for Mr. Donald Ray Fitzgerald: the last batter on Perkins’s docket. His case went back five years–to Perkins’s early days in Flagler. Grand theft. Five years’ probation. he was here to settle up and pay the last $650 owed.

He had to absent himself from the court for 90 minutes to run the transaction through at the probation office, so that delayed the judge’s last order. But in came Fitzgerald again, jubilant about being able to drink beer again during Monday Night Football (probation conditions prohibited him from doing so). The judge called him up. Fitzgerald made a ceremonial hum and went up to the podium, and in a minute, it was done.

“Any reason I can’t terminate his probation early and successfully right now?” the judge asked. Assistant State Attorneys Melissa Clark and Tara Libby and Assistant Public Defender Spencer O’Neal saw no reason. “Congratulations,” the judge told Fitzgerald, who was starting to applaud–form himself? for the judge? Didn’t matter–before the judge told him to contact his probation officer and let him know he was done.

“Take care judge,” Fitzgerald told him.

And that was it. The few people in the courtroom gave Perkins a round of applause. “It’s a wrap,” he said, marveling at the speed of the last six years and speaking to the attorneys about all that was accomplished despite Covid. “I’ll miss all of you.”

This much is known: the furniture he built is going home with him. Everyone can now call him Terry. And Courtroom 401 will be, at least for a long while, at least for some, unendurably unrecognizable.