The Florida Supreme Court issues opinions on Thursday mornings at 11 am, and the world of Workers Compensation lawyers are glued to their screens every Thursday. There were none today, it feels like getting coal in your stocking Christmas morning.
I have forwarded some legal quotes from Lou Pfeffer, who also has a case at the Supreme Court, which I used below.
“Justice delayed is justice denied” is a legal maxim meaning that if legal redress is available for a party that has suffered some injury, but is not forthcoming in a timely fashion, it is effectively the same as having no redress at all….The phrase has become a rallying cry for legal reformers who view courts as acting too slowly in resolving legal issues either because the existing system is too complex or overburdened, OR because the issue or party in question lacks political favor.
No one has as little political power as injured workers in the State of Florida. The employers own the legislature, who pass whatever law the insurance industry & employers tell them to pass. Injured workers have no money, so they have no influence over the Legislature.
Injured workers are waiting for the final opinions of the Supreme Court in Westphal(argued in July 2014), and Richardson(briefed January 2015, the next case after the Castellanos Oral argument in November 2014). There is rampant speculation that the Supreme Court is waiting for the Legislature to finish their Special Session on Redistricting(because the Court found the Legislature guilty of corrupting the Fair Districts Amendment) so workers rights aren’t added to it.
There may be a method to the Florida Supreme Court’s delay. If the Supreme Court stands up for the Constitutional rights of injured workers too soon, the Legislature may immediately make the Law even worse like they did during the Terry Schiavo Special Session in 2003. The Legislature has zero respect for the rule of law, nor the Constitutional rights of the middle class.
Delayed Justice has been a theme of the poor and disenfranchised going back to the Magna Carta of 1215, clause 40 of which reads, “To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice”
Martin Luther King, Jr., used the phrase in the form “justice too long delayed is justice denied” in his letter from Birmingham jail smuggled out of jail in 1963, ascribing it to a “distinguished jurist of yesteryear ”
As Chief Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court, Warren Burger noted in an address to the American Bar Association in 1970: “A sense of confidence in the courts is essential to maintain the fabric of ordered liberty for a free people and three things could destroy that confidence and do incalculable damage to society: that people come to believe that inefficiency and delay will drain even a just judgment of its value; that people who have long been exploited in the smaller transactions of daily life come to believe that courts cannot vindicate their legal rights from fraud and over-reaching; that people come to believe the law- in the larger sense-cannot fulfill its primary function to protect them and their families in their homes, at their work, and on the public streets.”
As Florida’s middle class gets decimated by the heavy- handed greed and corruption coming from the Legislature and the Executive branch that has attacked the independence of the judiciary, we can only hope and pray that the Florida Supreme Court is up to the challenge of wielding their power to protect the injured workers of Florida expeditiously.
Maybe next Thursday,,,,, Florida’s middle class waits on egg shells for justice to prevail, while belts tighten.
