He’s been barked at and cursed, flirted with and flashed by some of the newly arrested who came before him during nearly eight years as the main magistrate judge in Broward County‘s bond court.
But after ruling in what he estimated were 200,000 cases, Judge John Matthew Brooks Hurley, 55, known as Jay, will begin deciding criminal trials.
“I had promised I’d get him a break out of there for a while,” Chief Judge Peter M. Weinstein said. “That was a long time to do that assignment. He was looking for a little change, and to do some jury trials.”
On Monday morning, more than a dozen judges joined court personnel to fill Weinstein’s courtroom as he swore in brand new judge Michael Davis, who will succeed Hurley.
In May, Gov. Rick Scott appointed Davis, 37, of Hollywood, to the 17th District Circuit Court in Broward County.
“As soon as we sat down and talked, I was instantly impressed,” Weinstein said of Davis. “He’s incredibly intelligent, knowledgeable and a very warm person.”
Davis, a former senior assistant attorney general for Florida, will be the first judge the newly arrested will appear before.
Like Hurley before him, Davis will weigh whether arrests for offenses that range from disobeying a stop sign to DUI, domestic violence and murder are justified in scores of hearings he may oversee each weekday, as well as the immediate consequences they will face, such as jail until trial or release on bail.
During his swearing in, Davis acknowledged he “will going to a very special court, a very public court.”
Hurley knows just how public the court is and the scrutiny it gets.
He became a household name when notorious cases landed on TV news and also, since 2012, on SunSentinel.com’s daily live stream of court proceedings.
There was the 2008 hearing for an armed robbery suspect, later convicted of murder, who barked in response to Hurley’s questions.
And there was the 2012 case of a man accused by police of battery against his wife. She testified that her husband ignored her birthday, and that their dispute escalated but she was not hurt. Police accused him of putting his hand on her neck.
Hurley found the husband had no prior domestic violence arrest and sentenced the couple to marriage counseling. He also ordered the husband to buy his wife flowers, a birthday card, take her bowling and to dinner at her favorite restaurant, Red Lobster.
The decision was unusual because Hurley normally ordered people accused in domestic violence cases and the alleged victims to live apart from each other, without any contact.
“It was a minor incident, in the court’s opinion,” Hurley said then. “The court would not normally do that if the court felt there was some violence but this is very, very minor and the court felt that that was a better resolution than other alternatives.”
Hurley’s ruling drew international media coverage and outrage from advocates for domestic violence victims. Court records show the husband had pleaded not guilty. The state attorney’s office later declined to prosecute the man.
Hurley also may be the only judge in Broward County whose courtroom was visited by vacationers who had watched bond court proceedings on the internet.
He said he was proud of reducing the jail population during his tenure, when people in custody for minor misdemeanors or minor drug arrests were released or put in drug treatment.
“We had a federal mandate that if we went over 95 percent capacity for 10 or more days, we’d have to start letting people go or we’d get fined,” Hurley said. “It was 94.8 percent when I started.”
The Broward Sheriff’s Office manages the county jail system and closed one of the five jails in 2009, saving $11 million.
Now the four remaining jails “are at about 81 percent capacity,” Hurley said.
How Hurley handled some of those accused of violating minor municipal ordinances against panhandling or public urination drew the attention of Broward Public Defender Howard Finkelstein.
In 2014, Finkelstein asked Weinstein to reassign Hurley, faulting Hurley for not making counsel available for some homeless defendants accused of violating city laws.
Hurley would allow arrestees to plead no contest to settle their cases.
Because these arrestees weren’t accused of breaking state laws, assistant public defenders could not defend them. Eventually, cities provided defense attorneys to handle municipal offense cases.
During Hurley’s last docket on Friday, an angry arrestee in one of the jails threw a podium.
“The people who were disruptive, I can’t even remember all the times that happened,” Hurley said.
He said was his most memorable case was from 2011, when an unemployed woman who was accused of leaving her kids, then ages 4 and 7, alone in a hot car with windows slightly open in the parking lot of a blood plasma donation center.
“She said to me she was only trying to feed her kids because they hadn’t eaten in a day,” Hurley said. “That was the closest I’ve ever come to being emotional.”
Contacts with the sheriff’s office and community helped reunite the family, repair her car and get donations so she could move home to Pennsylvania, Hurley said.
“As a judge, people think we’re always tough, but there are times we can use our positions to help people,” Hurley said. “And she needed to be helped. I told her in my eyes she wasn’t a criminal.”
Hurley said the woman did not have a criminal record and felt ashamed to be in jail.
“I’ll remember that to the day I die,” Hurley said.
Calling parents of a young addicted daughter or son to get them into drug treatment “was the part of doing this that I thought really counted,” Hurley said. “There is a human aspect to this. You’ve got to balance it. Not everything is written in criminal procedure or the law books.”
Though he’ll be available if a substitute judge is needed for bond court, Hurley said, “I’m going to miss it, and I’m going to miss the people too.”
He said of Davis, “He seems like a nice guy who wants to do the right thing.”
Davis called Hurley “such a wonderful mentor to me.”
Born in South Florida, Davis said he is descended on his father’s side from Holocaust survivors who worked as retail butchers in New York and later, in the wholesale diamond trade. His maternal branch of the family tree ran kosher hotels in Miami Beach.
Hofstra University awarded Davis a law degree in 2004; he received his bachelor’s of arts degree in English from Stony Brook University in 2000.
Davis and his wife Nili Davis, a private school counselor, have two children. She attended his swearing-in, along with relatives and friends.
After graduating law school, Davis worked for a county legislator in Westchester County, New York and then for the county attorney there in dependency and family court. He also had a private practice in New York.
From 2010 to 2012, he worked for Florida Department of Children and Families, handling dependency prosecutions in Miami-Dade County, Davis said.
“There was a lot of heartbreak, terminating parental rights, some of the most difficult cases,” Davis said.
He was most recently with the attorney general’s office and before that, the Florida Guardian ad Litem program, advocating on behalf of kids.
On Monday morning, after promising to uphold the Constitution and governments of the United States and Florida, Davis said as an Orthodox Jew, oath taking is a very serious matter for his faith.
“I thought about that and thought I would take two oaths today,” Davis said before the audience that had gathered to support him. “I am going to swear a solemn oath between myself, God and the people of Broward County. I swear that I will do my best to uphold the law, to maintain justice, with compassion.”
He also pledged to do the job while keeping public safety in mind.
Davis jumped right in to the new job Monday, presiding over the afternoon docket with Judge Stephen Zaccor at his side in case he had questions.
“Thank you for your faith in me,” he said to the citizens of Broward County, his fellow judges, lawyers and others who attended the oath-taking ceremony. “I will not let you down.”
, 954-356-4233 or Twitter @LindaTrischitta
