Former state attorney Ashton announces run for circuit judge

Former state attorney Jeff Ashton wants to sit on the other side of the bench.

Ashton, who lost his position as Orange Osceola state attorney last year to Aramis Ayala, filed to run Tuesday for a seat as a judge on the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court in 2018.

He is one of two candidates who have filed to run for the open seat along with attorney David Hamilton Harris.

Marc Lubet, the judge serving in the seat, is retiring at the end of his six-year term.

Ashton was elected state attorney in 2012 after defeating his former boss and fellow Democrat, Lawson Lamar, in an open primary after making his name as the prosecutor in the 2011 Casey Anthony murder trial.

In 2015, he was caught up in the hack of the Ashley Madison dating site for married people and admitted to visiting it while at his office.

Ashton claimed he never had an affair stemming from his use of the site, saying at a news conference, “While I indulged my curiosity about the site, it never went beyond that. These were incredibly stupid choices.”

But while he said he used public Wi-Fi to visit the site on his personal laptop, he said he broke no laws.

His defeat by Ayala in the 2016 Democratic primary came after a Washington, D.C.-based PAC connected to billionaire George Soros poured almost a million dollars into her campaign, which ended up outspending Ashton’s campaign by about 14 to 1.

TV ads and mailers accused Ashton of unfair racial policies, which he denied as “lies.”

In an opinion column in the Orlando Sentinel in March, Ashton criticized Ayala’s decision not to seek the death penalty in capital murder cases, for which she had been stripped of her authority to try such cases by Gov. Rick Scott.

“Adherence to the statute is mandatory, morons,” Ashton wrote.