Incumbent faces assistant public defender
Seminole County Judge Debra Krause faces a runoff election against Wayne Culver, an assistant public defender, as she seeks to retain her seat on the bench.
Both candidates got more votes in the August primary than the third person vying for the seat, aviation attorney Cameron Shackelford, who pulled in about 21 percent of the vote.
The election is Nov. 6 and early voting runs Monday, Oct. 22 through Sunday, Nov. 4. in Seminole County who has also spent time in private practice and as a prosecutor. He was admitted to the Florida Bar in 2001 and got 36.4 percent of the vote in the August primary election.
Culver studied history at the University of Central Florida, then went to the Suffolk University Law School in Boston. He moved back to Florida, where he grew up, and started working as an assistant state attorney in Brevard County.
In 2004, after 3 ½ years as a prosecutor, Culver opened his own practice in Seminole County. There he took criminal, juvenile dependency and civil cases, he said. After five years he joined the public defender’s office in Seminole and Brevard counties.
As an assistant public defender, Culver supervised the misdemeanor division, teaching rookie attorneys how to handle the kinds of cases that appear in county court, he said.
“I can do more than what I’m doing right now as judge, I can help more,” Culver said.
Culver has two arrests on his record, both from the late 1980s when he was 18 and 19, Florida Department of Law Enforcement records show. One was for getting into the driver’s seat of a friend’s car and driving away as a prank, then crashing. The other was for stealing a pack of cigarettes.
He has not been arrested in the last 30 years, records show.
“I spent a night in this jail and I never came back,” Culver said. “You can make up for it. Do bad things, you make up for it.”
Krause went to the University of Central Florida, where she first pursued a teaching degree but switched to studying business administration, she said. She then went to Stetson College of Law. After law school she went into private practice, taking criminal cases, as well as small-claims and family court clients.
She was elected a county judge in 2012. Krause spent about 5 years in a criminal division, dealing with people accused of misdemeanors, before being moved to a civil courtroom where she handles small claims.
“It’s important to [be] able to understand people and read people and have empathy for them,” Krause said. “Again, it doesn’t change how you apply the law — the law is what it is. Your job is to apply the law.”
The Florida Supreme Court disciplined Krause for “inappropriate political activity” during her 2012 campaign: Krause bought a $250 table at a Seminole County GOP event; used campaign materials that suggested she was an incumbent; and accepted $82,000 in campaign donations from her husband, Mitch Krause.
Krause said the donation was her own money, from an account she and her husband used the jointly, though it was in his name. The Supreme Court ordered her to pay a $25,000 fine for those violations.
The court also suspended Krause for 30 days for posting a Facebook status about her husband’s campaign for circuit judge in 2014. Krause encouraged her followers to “flood” his opponent’s page, saying “that having ethics and integrity means TELLING THE TRUTH!”
Krause said she admitted to both mistakes.
“I realize I can’t turn back time. I can’t turn back and fix it. All I can promise is that it won’t happen again,” Krause said. “I’ve been trying to work hard and earn respect of the attorneys and anyone who comes before me.”