Martin DyckmanJustice Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court set off a useful debate over her frank views on the importance of diversity among judges.
Personal experiences, she explained, “affect the facts that judges choose to see.”
To be confirmed, she had to walk back some from a celebrated quote that a “wise Latina with the richness of her experience” might sometimes judge better than a white man “who hasn’t lived that life.”
But if there were ever an example to validate her message, it was the Florida Supreme Court ruling last week that an unauthorized immigrant can’t be admitted to the Florida Bar.
All seven justices agreed, citing the supremacy of federal immigration law.
The majority opinion that five justices signed was a 10-page document as dry as stale toast. It was as colorless as if it dealt with some arcane glitch in the corporate tax.
It was issued per curiam — for the court — suggesting that no one cared to be known as the author.
No wonder.
To read only that, you would know almost nothing about the live human being — Jose Godinez-Samperio of Tampa — whose application forced the issue. You wouldn’t even know his name.
You would not know that his is a classic American success story: that of a super-achieving honor student who would delight any parent as a son or son-in-law.
Nor would you understand that he’s “illegal” through no fault of his own. The parents who brought him to the United States 17 years ago when he was age 9, overstayed their tourist visas.
What was he supposed to do? Leave them here and return to a land that would now be foreign to him?
Fortunately for the record — and for the public — the per curiam was not the court’s only word.
Justice Jorge Labarga wrote a separate opinion, which Justice Barbara Pariente joined, to explain that he had to concur “reluctantly” because state and federal law compels “such an inequitable conclusion.” He also called it “unfortunate” and “myopic.”
The applicant, he said, “is the type of exemplary individual the Florida Bar should strive to add to its membership.” As he had noted in his law school application essay, he is unauthorized only because “he did not resist his parents when they chose to escape their impoverished conditions in Mexico.”
Labarga’s own life experience illuminated what was in spirit, though not in fact, a dissent.
“In many respects,” he wrote, “applicant’s life in the United States parallels my own. He and I were brought to this great nation as young children by our hardworking immigrant parents. We both learned to read, write and speak the English language within a short period of time.”
Both excelled scholastically and graduated from college and law school, Labarga at the University of Florida and Godinez-Samperio at Florida State.
“Both of us were driven by the opportunities this great nation offered to receive the American dream.
“Sadly, however, here the similarities end and the perceptions of our accomplishments begin.
“When I arrived in the United States from Cuba in 1963, soon after the Cuban missile crisis — the height of the Cold War — my parents and I were perceived as defectors from a tyrannical communist regime. Thus, we were received with open arms, our arrival celebrated, and my path to citizenship and the legal profession unimpeded by public policy decisions.
“Applicant, however, who is perceived to be a defector from poverty, is viewed negatively because his family sought an opportunity for economic prosperity.
“It is this distinction of perception, a distinction that I cannot justify…that is at the root of Applicant’s situation…”
Federal law allows legislatures to exempt unauthorized immigrants from the licensing ban. California’s has done so. Florida’s hasn’t. Labarga’s opinion puts Florida’s to shame.
There are two African American justices on the Florida Supreme Court but only Labarga has the immigrant experience. It clearly affected the facts he chose to see.
He’s also one of three justices who once practiced criminal defense, another essential life experience that is too rarely represented on appellate courts. That’s three more than at the U.S. Supreme Court, where there are none.
Labarga was appointed by former (and future?) Gov. Charlie Crist, who made a big deal of demanding minority names from his judicial nominating commissions.
Minority appointments to the bench, and to the nominating commissions, are dwindling under his successor, Rick Scott.
Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the newspaper formerly known as the St. Petersburg Times. He lives at Waynesville, North Carolina.
