Robin Hood Of the Bench

Some gothic politics in backwater Florida

In the Gulf County, Fla., courtroom of Judge David Taunton these past four years, the rule of law has been compassion for the poor. When an appliance company tried to repossess a washing machine from a black man with no job, a wooden leg and seven children, Judge Taunton reached into his pocket and paid the defendant's $97 overdue bill himself. Without being subpoenaed, he appeared as a character witness for a man convicted of drunken driving who was trying to get his license back so he could take his wife to the hospital for cancer treatments. To spare a penniless 18-year-old loan delinquent, Taunton refused to enter the final judgment in favor of the loan company.

"Robin Hood Judge," the mostly approving state press called him. But the state's Judicial Qualifications Commission charged Taunton, 39, with "conduct unbecoming a member of the judiciary" and a year ago sought to have him removed from the bench. The judge's compassion verged on bias, agreed the Florida Supreme Court last March, but it let Taunton off with a reprimand, calling his motives "wholesome and unselfish." Taunton is not a lawyer. A former high school principal and Methodist lay minister, he defends his leniency to the poor by quoting the Bible: "As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me." He also admits to a "tendency to give the poor party the benefit of the doubt." But Taunton declares that playing good shepherd to indigent defendants was not the real reason why he almost lost his job. "Uncovering" corruption was.

To hear the soft-spoken judge tell the story, when he became the judge of Gulf County (pop. 11,000) he waded into a backwater Watergate. A land of slash pines, Cyprus swamps and oldtime backroom politics, it has been the fiefdom of U.S. Representative Robert ("He-Coon") Sikes, who last year was stripped of a congressional subcommittee chairmanship because of financial misconduct. Taunton publicly charged that former State Senator George Tapper engaged in an "elaborate, corrupt political scheme" with State Representative William J. ("Billy Joe") Rish, Sikes and others to profit from intricate land deals at the public's expense. A state investigation turned up no evidence of wrongdoing, however, and a Gulf County grand jury exonerated everyone accused by the judge. Says Taunton: "It was a whitewash."

Only three months later the judge was hauled before the Judicial Qualifications Commission. In addition to the charge of bending the law to favor the poor, Taunton was accused of using his public office to muckrake and of spending public funds ($11.83) to make his investigations. "Judge Taunton is a right nice fella," John Wigginton, general counsel to the commission, told the St. Petersburg Times. "It's just that he's got what seems to be a deep-seated fetish about poor people. We feel he ought to be doing something else for a living--like welfare work, or social work, or anything other than being a judge."

This week the people of Gulf County have a chance to decide for themselves whether David Taunton should stay on the bench. He is running for re-election against Robert Moore, a lawyer who filed a slander suit against Taunton on behalf of one of the men the judge charged with suspect land dealings. Moore has been drumming up support from local merchants who would like to see Taunton ousted. He has also invested $150 in a red-white-and-blue floodlighted billboard on the main highway to Tallahassee. The Robin Hood Judge, meanwhile, was hand-painting campaign posters with his wife and teen-age son back at--what else--his log cabin home. .

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