Jurors finally return to Miami-Dade courts under COVID rules
For the first time in one year, jurors on Tuesday took their seats in two separate Miami-Dade County courtrooms.
Both cases were relatively minor but they represented a major step toward slowly cranking back up the machinery of criminal and civil law stalled by the coronavirus pandemic. For everyone involved in the milestone events, it proved an experience both familiar and strange — especially for jurors.
That was most evident from a domestic abuse case overseen by County Judge Eleane Sosa-Bruz. During jury selection on Monday, she was flanked by tables, one for the prosecution, another for the defense, large clear panels between them. Jurors sat in chair spaced out facing the legal teams.
Everybody wore masks. The judge, in her opening comments to jurors, noted she was wearing two.
“We are the first. As with anything, there will be some hiccups,” she said. “We are going to try and minimize that ... Who is excited to be here today? This is the first criminal jury trial. Are you not excited to be a part of this?”
No prospective juror appeared to raise a hand — pretty much the same response you’d expect before the pandemic. Serving on a jury, though immensely important, is not always a popular civic duty.
The juries began listening to evidence and lawyers’ statements on Tuesday. At 10:03 a.m., masked jurors sat not in the jury box, but spaced out in the pews of courtroom 4-1 at the historical Miami-Dade civil courthouse downtown. Next to each juror was a box with pen, notepads — and gloves. With no public observers allowed in as usual, three webcams streamed different views on YouTube.
“We thank you for answering the call. You’re doing something, we haven’t been able to do in quite a while,” lawyer Hector Mesa, representing the Granada Insurance Co., told jurors. “This past year, we’ve lost a lot ... some see this jury as the first step in building back what we lost. It’s the first step to reaching the post COVID era.”
Five minutes later, in the family courthouse down the block, MiamiDade prosecutor Lisa Wyrsch stepped up the podium and immediately launched into case against Oscar Mondeja of Hialeah, accused of grabbing and pushing his ex-girlfriend in a jealous rage in 2019, right after she recorded their spat with her phone.
“I urge you to pay attention to this live recording. You are going to see the danger build and build and build,” Wyrsch told jurors.
Miami-Dade Assistant Public Defender Kai Fiske, his opening statement, fired back — that the woman was upset that Mondeja had started seeing someone new.
“She hated seeing how happy he was,” Fiske said. “That jealousy turned to anger, and in her anger she falsely accused him of a crime.”
In Miami-Dade, Florida’s most populous and busy court circuit, a backlog of cases has been building since the novel coronavirus largely shut down in-person court hearings in March 2020.
“After so much planning to establish health safety procedures that would enable us to restart our jury trials during the pandemic, it is very gratifying to see our trials running smoothly,” Miami-Dade Chief Judge Bertila Soto said Tuesday. “We are especially grateful to our jurors, who understood the importance of the jury trial and did not hesitate to serve.”
With COVID-19 numbers declining in recent months across the state, other counties across Florida already have begun in-person jury trials. Miami-Dade court officials had hoped to resume them in late 2020 on a limited basis. But no cases could be found to be tried — and the holiday surge of COVID-19 cases forced the courts to again suspend trials through Feb. 28.
The need is particularly acute in the criminal division because the jail population has swelled back up to about 4,000, around what it was before the pandemic.
For the past year, a task force of court and county officials, prosecutors, defense lawyers and health experts have been meeting regularly to plan how criminal jury trials might unfold safely in Miami-Dade. They rolled out an array of safety measures, including health checks, minimizing the amount of people in court and arranging spacious seating to avoid people sitting too near each other.
The courthouses remain closed for all other hearings, which are being conducted via Zoom.
In both cases, potential jurors who could not serve because of health or scheduling concerns were culled from online and phone questionnaires — to eliminate the need for them to come to the buildings.
Monday’s questioning of potential jurors, done with help of a microphone, was not unusual, with questions being asked about views on burdens of proof, different types of evidence and willingness to be impartial.
The whole process lasted nearly seven hours. The six who made the cut appeared in person to take their seats at the civil courthouse on Tuesday.
State lawmakers are debating a new bill which would ban tethering dogs and cats and leaving them unsupervised.
If Senate Bill 650 were to become law, any Floridian caught leaving an animal tied up would get a warning, then a series of escalating fines: $250 for a second offense, and $500 for each offense after that.
At the Senate Agriculture Committee on Wednesday, the bill’s first stop on the way to becoming law, the measure found support among Democrats and Republicans and passed unanimously.
But one influential group voiced opposition: the National Rifle Association.
“Tethering is a legitimate means of keeping your animals on your own property,” the NRA’s longtime lobbyist Marion Hammer wrote in an email.
“Many, many kinds of dogs are humanely tethered in the out-of-doors rather than being locked up in a cages.”
The group’s opposition came as a surprise. Lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to add a Republicanbacked amendment onto the bill that would exempt hunting dogs from the ban.
This exemption was thought by some animal rights advocates to be a major concern of the gun rights organization; the NRA counts thousands of hunters as members.
Sen. Annette Taddeo, D-Miami, said in an interview she was mystified by the NRA.
“It makes no sense,”
Taddeo said. “I did reach out to Marion Hammer and the NRA specifically prior [to the meeting]...They did not call back,” Taddeo said.
Hammer wrote in an email that even the hunting dog exemption doesn’t change the fact that it’s a “bad bill.”
For the last two years, opponents of a controversial plan to build three new toll roads across Florida have been saying the projects aren’t needed and they’re too expensive.
On Wednesday, a key Republican senator sided with them.
“This is not tenable to do at this point,” said Sen. Gayle Harrell, R-Stuart.
Just 21 months after the plan to build 330 miles of new toll roads was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis, the projects could be in serious trouble. On Wednesday, Harrell’s Senate Transportation Committee advanced a bill that would greatly diminish two of the roads, while leaving one stretch intact.
Chalk it up to the pandemic. Harrell, the sponsor of Senate Bill 100, said the projects were a “fiscal cliff” the state needed to avoid.
“You’re talking about billions of dollars in bonding,” Harrell said. “It’s very, very doubtful that you would have the ability to pay for those bonds with Turnpike monies.”
Harrell’s bill would eliminate the law legislators passed in 2019, which ordered the Florida Department of Transportation to plan and build a new stretch of the Suncoast Parkway to the Georgia border, extend Florida’s Turnpike to the Suncoast and build a third route to link Polk and Collier counties.
Under Harrell’s plan, the Suncoast plan would stay intact and extend to Interstate 10. The other two projects might result in simply widening existing rural roads. The bill diverts the hundreds of millions of dollars the state was to spend on the projects toward improving rural roads that are heavily traveled by tractor-trailers.
“The state has faced major, major problems, and the pandemic has forced us to reevaluate this policy,” Harrell said.
The state has already spent more than $11 million on the roads so far, according to the transportation department, with a plan to spend at least another $730 million in the next five years.
Although Harrell said the state’s fiscal situation has changed, the roads’ cost — and justification — has not.
The 2019 law was a priority of then-Senate President Bill Galvano, R-Bradenton. He said the roads would lead to economic development in some of the most economically depressed areas of the state, mostly rural stretches far removed from urban centers.
Yet despite carrying a price tag that would likely reach into the tens of billions of dollars, the need for them was unclear. The Polk-to-Collier route, known as the Heartland Parkway, had already been discarded by past governors as unfeasible.
Since it passed, opposition to the projects has grown, except from a special interest that could directly benefit: road builders. Local officials have been skeptical, environmentalists have warned the roads would threaten endangered wildlife, and the conservative Florida TaxWatch called the Suncoast stretch a “risky project” with “little demonstrated transportation need.”
On Wednesday, road builders spoke in support of Harrell’s plan, but other groups were skeptical. Paul Owens, president of 1000 Friends of Florida, which advocates for “smart growth,” warned that the bill does not include recommendations that three task forces made to the Department of Transportation that the roads avoid environmental areas, for example.
“A bill with this potential to impact Florida’s environment and communities deserves a very deliberate process of evaluation,” Owens said.
Democrats on the committee also voted against the bill. Sen. Shevrin Jones, D-West Park, said environmental language would need to be added back in to the bill, along with protections that the roads don’t run through “communities of color,” before he could vote in favor of it.
“I have no faith after [the legislative session ends] that those protections will be in place,” Jones said.
Harrell’s bill still must pass another Senate committee before it could be voted on in the Senate and House. The 2021 legislative session is scheduled to end April 30.