Judicial race gets personal in mailers
Candidate blasts wife’s old boss: Jeff Ashton
Circuit judge candidate Howard Friedman sent out a campaign mailer last week accusing his opponent, former state attorney Jeff Ashton, of discriminating against Friedman’s wife when she worked at the Orange-Osceola State Attorney’s Office.
“Jeff Ashton wrongfully fired my wife after she got sick with cancer,” the mailer reads, next to a photo of Friedman and his wife, Annette Schultz, who is in bed with a striped pink scarf wrapped around her neck. “... I have never seen an elected official act so coldheartedly and show an utter lack of basic human decency as Jeff Ashton did in firing my wife, a lifelong prosecutor, without warning and for no lawful reason.”
Ashton called the mailer “about as personal an attack as I’ve ever seen in politics.”
“I think that personal vendettas and personal vindictiveness are some of the worst qualities a judge can have. Because today it could be me that, pardon the expression, pissed him off, but tomorrow it could be you, it could be anyone else, and that’s not a quality we want in a circuit judge,” Ashton
“It’s certainly eye-catching for anyone who takes the time to read it.” UCF political science professor Aubrey Jewett on the mailer sent out by Howard Friedman
said.
Friedman, who left his position as a general court magistrate to run for office in the Aug. 28 election, said he believes he has the right qualifications and temperament for the job — and that he also believes Ashton should not be on the circuit bench.
“What Jeff did to my wife was wrong,” Friedman said.
Schultz started working at the State Attorney’s Office in 1991. In April 2003 she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of her plasma cells. She underwent bone marrow transplants and, by July 2004, was still fighting the cancer but ready to return to work, she wrote in an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint filed March 2015.
Still, her immune system was weaker than it once was and she could not be as physically active, she wrote in 2015.
The state attorney at the time, Lawson Lamar, assigned her to an intake unit in Osceola County where she had less in-person interaction with other people, records show. She stayed there until Ashton was elected in late 2012. Ashton eliminated the intake division and assigned prosecutors to essentially follow their cases from start to finish.
Schultz wrote that her immune system was better by early 2013 but she was still taking a chemotherapy medication and was easily fatigued. She was assigned to the economic crimes division in Orange County. On July 16, 2014, Assistant State Attorney Linda Drane Burdick told her she was losing her job. Her last day was Aug. 15, 2014.
In the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against Ashton’s office and the subsequent lawsuit, Schultz claimed she was fired as retaliation because Ashton wanted to move another prosecutor with health problems, with whom he was closer, to the less-physical economic crimes division. Ashton claimed it was because of poor job performance.
The case never went trial.
Schultz had a stroke in December 2016. She was hospitalized for months in a condition her husband called “near death” and Friedman, who had talked to her about the case but was not formally involved with it, now had power of attorney over her affairs.
Friedman, Schultz’s attorney, and the Orange-Osceola State Attorney’s Office settled the case for $85,000 in November 2017, a year after Ashton lost his primary to current State Attorney Aramis Ayala, court records show. The Florida Division of Elections recorded Ashton’s first statement of candidacy for circuit judge in Division 15 on Dec. 5, and Friedman’s on Dec. 21.
Schultz was released from the hospital to a nursing home and is now back in the home she shares with Friedman.
This week Ashton called Friedman’s mailer misleading, in part because the photo of Schultz was taken after she had a stroke, not while she was working for the State Attorney’s Office. Friedman said he is not being vindictive, but that he wants voters to know Ashton’s history as well as his own.
“It’s certainly eye-catching for anyone who takes the time to read it,” said Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida.
Judicial candidates have to abide by the Florida Supreme Court’s code of judicial conduct, meaning they are limited in what they can tell voters before the race, Jewett said. They cannot pre-judge cases, and making false statements about their own records or their opponents can lead to sanctions from the state Supreme Court and high fines.
“This is more like Sunday school than the Wild West, they’re very polite and understated, usually,” Jewett said. “Most candidates maybe talk about themselves, talk about their qualifications, that kind of stuff, just to increase their name recognition. But they frequently don’t attack the other candidate, especially not in personal terms.”
Name recognition is especially important in judicial races, to which voters do not always pay close attention, Jewett said.
“Voters often skip judicial races because they don’t know the candidates,” Jewett said. “And often they will vote for the more familiar name.”