Joseph Hatchett: A trailblazing justice who won his seat on merit, not ideology | Editorial

Former Justice Joseph W. Hatchett, who died Friday, served not quite four years on the Florida Supreme Court but his relatively short tenure was one of the most important in its entire history. He will be remembered as a great Floridian.

Among other things, he was the first Black state high court justice in the South, the only African American since Reconstruction to win a contested statewide race in Florida and the first to serve on a federal appeals court in the former Confederacy. He was a trailblazer who richly rewarded the confidence of then-Gov. Reubin Askew, who appointed him to the Florida Supreme Court in 1975, and President Jimmy Carter, who chose him for the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals four years later. He moved to the new 11th circuit and was chief judge when he retired in 1999 to join the Akerman law firm in Tallahassee.

Askew, who was governor from 1971 to 1979, said appointing Hatchett gave him more satisfaction than anything else he did. That was quite a comparison, considering Askew also created Florida’s corporate income tax and constitutional code of ethics over fervent opposition from powerful people.

Hatchett was significant for much more than simply being there or even blazing a trail that had been denied to Blacks for so long.

As the third of Askew’s appointments to the court under a merit system the governor had established, Hatchett provided the critical fourth vote to repair the court’s reputation after a series of scandals that had led to his own appointment. Along with justices Ben Overton and Alan C. Sundberg, whom Askew had appointed earlier, and Justice Arthur England, who was elected as a reform candidate in 1974, he supported an eventual constitutional amendment, ratified after he had left the court, to restrict its own jurisdiction and permit the district courts of appeal to have the last word in most cases.

Under the influence of the senior justice, B. K. Roberts, the court had interpreted its authority so liberally that attorneys felt obliged to recommend their clients appeal lower court decisions even when the jurisdictional grounds were flimsy.

Hatchett’s appointment, following those of Overton and Sundberg, reflected the finest potential of the merit-based system Askew had created in 1971 and written into the Constitution in 1972. It was based on nominating commissions the governor could not control. Back then, those commissions functioned so independently that Askew did not even know any of his four eventual appointees, all of whom were widely regarded for their qualifications and ethics.

The success of merit selection gave the Legislature and the voters the confidence to approve a 1976 constitutional amendment providing that all future justices and judges of the district courts of appeal would be appointed rather than elected. It was ratified in the same election in which Hatchett defended his seat against a Miami circuit judge who ran an openly racist campaign. Black justices since then have won votes to retain their seats, but those were on a yes/no basis with no opponents on the ballot.

Hatchett, who had been born and raised in Clearwater where his parents worked as a fruit picker and a maid, graduated from Florida A&M University in 1954, when the University of Florida College of Law was still closed to Blacks. After Army service as a second lieutenant, he received his law degree from Howard University in Washington, a historically Black school where many civil rights lawyers, including future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, had been trained.

When he passed the Florida Bar exam in 1959, he was not allowed to stay in the Miami hotel where it was administered and where most of the white applicants lodged.

Hatchett then practiced criminal, civil, administrative and civil rights law in Daytona Beach and became an assistant state attorney and, eventually, a federal magistrate judge.

Once seated on the state supreme court, he wrote the opinion disbarring the disgraced justice he had replaced, David L. McCain, who had resigned in the face of almost certain impeachment for rigging cases for friends.

He was also instrumental in the unsigned opinion that allowed Black civil rights pioneer Virgil Hawkins to become a lawyer without taking the Bar exam, making amends for the court having persistently refused during the Roberts regime to desegregate the University of Florida law school, even after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Hawkins admitted. Had Hawkins been admitted when he first applied, and had he graduated, he would have been eligible under the rules of the day to practice without taking the exam.

Unfortunately for Hawkins, the well-intentioned decision to let him practice law ended badly. It had been too long since his graduation from the New England School of Law, and he had to resign from the Bar to avoid being disbarred. In 1988, the court reinstated Hawkins posthumously.

Hatchett also wrote a 1978 opinion establishing a qualified confidentiality privilege for journalists, overturning the conviction and 90-day sentence of St. Petersburg Times reporter Lucy Morgan for refusing to say who had tipped her off to the substance of an unpublished grand jury report. The jury had criticized a local police chief but did not charge him with a crime.

“We cannot accept the view that a generalized interest in secrecy of governmental operations should take precedence over the interest in assuring public access to information that comes to the press from confidential informants,” Hatchett wrote.

Hatchett was the first of four Black barristers to serve on the Florida Supreme Court, but there are none there now. Govs. Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis have distorted Askew’s merit system beyond recognition under a 2001 law allowing the governors to appoint all nine members of each nominating commission. Scott and DeSantis have insisted on arch-conservative credentials on the parts of those people as well as the prospective judges they nominate. When the commission for the Supreme Court nominated just one Black candidate for DeSantis’ first court pick, she did not meet the constitutional qualifications and the court refused to let DeSantis appoint her.

Hatchett’s death brings to mind how the system once worked so much better than that, and why the integrity and respect due Florida’s courts demands that the Legislature restore it to what Askew envisioned.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of consists of Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email letters@sun-sentinel.com.