If you have, you probably asked your secretary to hold your calls Wednesday afternoon so you could sneak away to a candidate forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters and the Bay County Bar.
Judge James Fensom and attorney Gerard Virga took questions from Nancy Gaglio in front of a crowd primarily of attorneys and legal professionals. Attorney Shalene Grover, the third candidate for the seat Fensom has held since Gov. Jeb Bush appointed him in 2006, could not attend because of a scheduling conflict.
Fensom and Virga spoke briefly about their backgrounds and their qualifications, their role models in the judiciary and some of the highlights of their careers.
They also took a lot of questions that are probably not interesting to anyone except lawyers. For instance, Gaglio asked the candidates when, if ever, it was appropriate for a circuit judge to break from established precedent.
Only in rare situations, both said.
(As for scheduling orders, Fensom believes they might be appropriate in complex civil cases, and he admires Judge Michael Overstreet and Judge Hentz McClellan. Virga said scheduling orders probably would speed things up and he would consider them in family law cases, and he admires former Judge Glenn Hess’ work in criminal cases and former Judge Judy Pittman’s work in civil cases.)
Both candidates said they had tried more than 100 cases. Fensom said he can tell people he meets “about this case and that case … and then I say I grew up in Port St. Joe, and they say, ‘That’s all I need to know.’ “
Virga, a former civics teacher at the Panama City Marine Institute, said he was enamored with
“I don’t think our law should be shaped by lobbying or anything else,” Virga said. “I think our law should be shaped by what’s right.”
Neither had filled out the Florida Bar’s voluntary disclosure form designed to provide voters information about candidates who face legal restrictions on what they can say publicly. Seventy percent of the candidates in circuit judge contests statewide had filled them out, so Gaglio asked why Fensom and Virga hadn’t.
Virga said he wasn’t totally clear at the time what he could and couldn’t say, and he didn’t want to say the wrong thing. Fensom said he hadn’t anticipated much public interest in such a disclosure, and he focused instead on what would help his campaign.
Fensom said he’s most proud of streamlining the adoption process, which cut the average length of an adoption in half to 180 days, and while he doesn’t have regrets or shame, there is an old civil case that haunts him because he thought it was winnable but his client lost.
Virga said there was a criminal case in which a defendant he believes was innocent was convicted; cases like that can keep an attorney up at night. He said he was proud of one case in particular wherein a father needed help getting his child away from the mother, who’d become a drug addict and taken up with a violent boyfriend. Years later, he bumped into the child and got a hug.
“That’s what being a lawyer is all about,” he said.
The three candidates will face off in the primary election Aug. 26. If no candidate receives a majority of the votes, the top two vote-getters will face off in the general election in November. The winner will serve a six-year term.