Lauren Ritchie:
Bondi wants reformed man back in jail.
Robert Woodall had served 11 years in prison when an Orange County judge granted his appeal and determined he’d served enough of his 20-year sentence for a 2005 shooting.
In a twinkling, the time-share manager found himself standing outside the gate at the Orange County Jail, where he’d been taken for a hearing, on Feb. 3, 2016. Have a nice life, dude!
“You talk about a person singing praises to God. I thought the courthouse was gonna come down,” said Woodall, 35. “They just kicked me out. It was like if I stayed another minute, I’d owe them money or something.”
He went home to his fiancée Stephanie Walker and their two sons 15 months ago. Together, they built a lawn business, began buying a house in rural Umatilla, joined a Baptist church and adopted a sloppy ol’ crotch-obsessed dog named Camo from the pound. Now, however, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office is after Woodall like a hungry weasel on a lame rabbit.
Bondi wants him locked up for the nine remaining years of his sentence. She’s spending thousands of taxpayer dollars having her lawyers fight a pointless nitpicking battle over a technicality that doesn’t matter anymore because the law under which Woodall was sentenced has since been thrown out.
All this started on a drunken Christmas Eve in 2005. Suffering depression after the birth of their second son, Walker had fled to her family in Texas with the baby and their 3-year-old while Woodall, then 23, was going clubbing and using his paycheck to “buy friends.” He knew he had a financial obligation to look after his kids, but he didn’t really want to be involved.
“Looking back, I can see how self-absorbed I was. Although I had a moral compass, it was skewed,” he said.
Woodall and his friends got into an argument with another group of men in an Orlando parking garage over whether the elevator should stop on every floor so the other men could try to find their car. The disagreement was quelled by a security guard, but the two groups met up again on a street in south Orlando. In the end, Woodall said he fired two shots into the ground, and one ricocheted into the victim’s leg. No one was critically injured. He described the shooting as “so stupid.”
Even before he’d done any real time, Woodall had begun to reconsider his life. He signed up to live in “Four Alpha,” the Christian dorm at the Orange County Jail, where inmates worship three times a day.
Over time, he was transferred to various prisons around the state. Sometimes Walker took the boys to see him. Other times, she couldn’t afford it. Walker dug in for life as a single mother. The boys didn’t get extras such as sports — she was more wor-