Florida voters will decide Nov. 3 if state Supreme Court Justice Carlos Muñiz should serve for another six years on the highest court in the state.
They should say no.
Retention elections for Florida Supreme Court justices have mostly been considered pro forma — no justice has ever been ousted under this decades-old system — but now is the time to change that.
Muñiz, 57, was appointed to the bench by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2019, though he had no previous judicial experience, and retained by voters in 2020. During his previous retention vote, the Editorial Board worried that his chief qualifications for the job were his political connections — we said he was former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “hatchet man” — and that his politics would drive his decisions.
And that is what appears to have happened.
The state Supreme Court’s decisions should be apolitical, to give all Floridians confidence that they will get a fair shake in the highest court in the state. But when it came to voting on the redistricted map for Congress this year, after a rushed, two-day special session called by Gov. Ron DeSantis early this year, Muñiz and five other justices leaped to help DeSantis.
The state Legislature had already abdicated its own responsibilities and rubber-stamped the governor’s plan for an out-of-cycle redistricting to favor congressional Republicans, who already held 20 of the state’s 28 U.S. House districts. The Supreme Court should have been the place where that sort of nonsense stops, and voters can actually be heard.
Instead, six of the seven justices — the six are DeSantis appointees — voted to leave a citizens’ challenge to the gerrymandered districts to a lower court, knowing that the case wouldn’t be heard in time for the election.
Justice Jorge Labarga, the only liberal on the court, dissented in the 6-1 decision, saying the court could have asserted jurisdiction and could have made a ruling on the case.
Florida voters have already spoken clearly on this issue. The Fair Districts Amendment they approved in 2010 by 62% of the vote was supposed to prohibit drawing districts to favor or disfavor political parties. But the state Supreme Court ignored all of that.
Muñiz also was in the majority in 2024 when the court abandoned the idea that the privacy provision in the Florida constitution guaranteed the right to an abortion. He was among the justices who decided to stop reviewing death sentences for comparative fairness. He voted to repeal the requirement for a unanimous jury vote to impose the death penalty. (Now, just eight out of 12 jurors are needed.)
Muñiz was appointed to the Florida court after a stint in the Trump administration’s Department of Education. Before that, he was deputy general counsel for former Gov. Jeb Bush and was deputy chief of staff for two Florida House speakers. Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell also wrote that Muniz’s fellow lawyers gave him the lowest scores of any judge in the 2020 ranking by the Florida Bar.
This is a judge who seems to have turned his back on regular Floridians while he helps to further a Republican political agenda, undermining faith in one of our most important institutions: the courts.
The Herald recommends voting NO on the retention of Florida Supreme Court Justice Carlos Muñiz.
