Censured Commisioner Krista Joseph ends fight with St. Johns commission, not with prosecutor

Steve Patterson, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union
·2 min read
St. Johns County residents line up to speak at a 2021 County Commission meeting in St. Augustine.
St. Johns County residents line up to speak at a 2021 County Commission meeting in St. Augustine.

A censured St. Johns County commissioner has dropped her court fight with the commission over whether she has a right to talk about voting her colleagues out of office.

Commissioner Krista Joseph went to Jacksonville’s federal court last month with her attorney arguing she “faces a credible threat of criminal prosecution for speaking on political matters” at a commission meeting and that her free-speech rights should be protected.

Joseph’s lawsuit quoted a report from a law firm for the county that said she “likely violated” a state law against officeholders interfering with elections when she bemoaned developers’ political influence and added: “you know what, there’s hope. [In] Less than nine months, we have an election.”

Krista Joseph
Krista Joseph

A worse case: St. Johns commissioner's case baffles some

Joseph was elected in 2022 to serve a four-year term, but three of the commission's five members have terms ending this year. All three are listed as active candidates io the county’s elections website. The commission censured her by a 4-1 vote in December.

Attorneys for the commission asked a judge last week to dismiss Joseph’s case and Joseph said the way they asked was reason enough to drop her court fight.

“It is evident from the board’s motion to dismiss … that the board has backed away from its outside counsel’s legal opinion that Commissioner Joseph committed a crime by her political speech,” her attorney, W. Bradley Russell, wrote in a notice Friday that Joseph considered the dispute with the commission over.

U.S. District Court Senior Judge Harvey Schlesinger approved the dismissal Tuesday, but Joseph’s suit was also directed at State Attorney R.J. Larizza, the top prosecutor in St. Johns County and the rest of the state's Seventh Judicial Circuit. Russell wrote last week that the commissioner wasn’t dropping that part of the lawsuit without knowing whether Larizza thinks she can be prosecuted for her remarks.

An attorney from Larizza’s office asked this month for the case to be dismissed as premature since no charges had been filed, but Schlesinger hasn’t ruled on that request.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Commissioner drops dispute with St. Johns County board, not prosecutor