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Awards
Florida Bar award cites Review for three series
April 22, 2004
The Daily Business Review has won the 2004 Florida Bar Media Award for articles on court secrecy, funding for capital appellate attorneys, and lawyer discipline.
It’s the third time in four years that the Review has won the statewide Bar award for publications with circulation under 50,000. This is the 49th year the Bar has given the awards.
In the large-circulation category, this year’s winner was the Orlando Sentinel. It was honored for its coverage of the legal battle over whether a severely mentally disabled woman who became pregnant due to a rape should undergo an abortion.
In the television category, WKMG-TV of Orlando won for its investigation into the case of a con artist who claimed to be a lawyer and who claimed to help the families of federal prisoners seeking shorter sentences.
One of the Review’s winning entries was Dan Christensen’s series of articles last year about federal court records secrecy. In March 2003, Christensen was the first to report on the existence of a federal habeas corpus petition in U.S. District Court in Miami that was kept completely secret by the court. The case wasn’t even listed on the court’s public docket.
Christensen also was the first to report that the rulings of the federal district and appellate courts to keep the case sealed were appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which recently rejected the case for review.
The second part of the Review’s winning entry was Julie Kay’s series of articles on Gov. Jeb Bush’s proposal to abolish the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel offices, which represent death row inmates in post-conviction habeas corpus petitions.
Bush had sought to outsource appellate representation by appointing private attorneys from a state-run registry. Kay identified problems with representation provided by registry lawyers. Her articles led the Legislature to toughen requirements for private attorneys on the registry.
The third part of the Review’s winning entry was a series of articles by Kay and Laurie Cunningham on the Bar’s investigation of prominent Miami mass torts attorney Louis Robles and on the Bar’s re-examination of its attorney disciplinary system in the wake of the Robles matter.
After Kay’s initial articles on Robles were published, the FBI, Miami-Dade County state attorney’s office and U.S. attorney’s office opened investigations of Robles, and a federal grand jury began investigating him.
Cunningham then built on the Robles stories by taking an in-depth look at the Bar’s attorney discipline system. Cunningham reported that even though Florida’s attorney discipline system is considered one of the better ones in the country, many attorneys, clients and legislators have complained that the system is biased, ineffective, sluggish and unfair.
This year’s judges were Matthew Silverman, director of communications at the State Bar of Arizona; Timothy Roche, former Atlanta bureau chief for Time and St. Petersburg Times reporter; Samuel Terilli, professor at the University of Miami School of Communications; and attorneys Ava Doppelt of Allen Dyer Doppelt and Dana McElroy of Gordon Hargrove & James.
The winners will be recognized at the Bar’s media law conference in the fall.
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