JUDGE REVERSES GUILTY VERDICT THEN YELLS AT COP AND ATTORNEY

ANFORD — The DUI trial was over.

A jury had found the defendant guilty, and Seminole County Judge Fred Schott had handed down a sentence.

But Schott then got mad and demanded the police officer who arrested the 46-year-old woman be charged with perjury. When a prosecutor refused, Schott threw out the sentence and the jury's verdict.

"This whole case is fishy," said Schott, who pounded the bench with his hand. "You know what? … I'm rescinding the sentence. I'm granting the JOA."

That's a reference to a judgment of acquittal, a formal finding of not guilty.

"JOA for the defendant. You're done," he said to Assistant State Attorney Diana Miers, the attorney with whom he was arguing.

Judge Fred Schott
Judge Fred Schott (Orlando Sentinel file)
Schott, who was elected in 2010, has since been asked by the chief judge of the Seminole-Brevard judicial circuit to hear civil rather than criminal cases.

In an interview Monday, Schott, 55, of Longwood said he did nothing unlawful but said he may have become too upset.

"I was angry," he said. "I probably got more emotional than I should have, but I really feel this woman was treated unfairly."

The blowup came March 11 about 6:30 p.m. at the end of a one-day trial of 46-year-old Licette Gonzalez.

Sanford Officer Michael Wagner had pulled her over the afternoon of Nov. 15 when he saw her sipping from a can of Natural Ice beer while driving on St. Johns Parkway, according to her arrest report.

Wagner took her to the Seminole County Jail but testified at her trial that no one qualified to perform a breath-alcohol test was there, so he booked her into the jail and left.

On the DUI citation he gave Gonzalez, however, he checked a box that said her blood- or breath-alcohol level was above 0.08, the legal limit, and as a consequence, her drivers license was immediately suspended.

Two months later she was pulled over by an Altamonte Springs officer and ticketed for driving with a suspended license.

That's what made Schott angry. He asked Miers to drop the suspended-license case.

"Are you going to nolle pros [drop] that case, or am I going to get mad at you today?" Schott asked.

"Perhaps you can get mad at me, your honor," Miers replied.

She refused to drop the case. Schott then announced he was dismissing it, only to reverse course a few moments later and say he wanted a full-blown hearing, something that would require Wagner to come back to court, as well as an employee with the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, the agency that issues drivers licenses.

Schott accused Wagner of falsifying a sworn document by checking the box that indicated Gonzalez had failed a blood or breath test.

"I want you to take him up for perjury," the judge said. 'He lied. He lied on a sworn citation. … He broke the law."

"That's not true," Miers said. Wagner testified that he had checked that box by mistake.

Shannon Cordingly, a Sanford Police Department spokesman, also described the mark as a mistake and called it a "nonissue."

That mark, the judge insisted, had cost Gonzalez several months of driving privileges and led to her wrongful arrest in January.

He also argued that the evidence at the DUI trial was too shaky to support a finding of guilt.

Lawyers for both sides agree that Schott has the authority to overrule the jury's verdict, but Public Defender Blaise Trettis said it's rarely done and usually not the way Schott did it, which was spontaneously, during a heated argument and with a raised voice.

The morning after the blowup, Schott changed course again and filed a four-page order, saying he was granting a motion for a new trial.

But no one had made such a motion.

Gonzalez's status is not clear. Trettis says she was acquitted, and any retrial would violate her right not to be prosecuted more than once for the same offense.

Assistant State Attorney Tom Briggmann, who heads the misdemeanor division in Sanford, said his office plans an appeal, asking a higher court to uphold the jury verdict.

Schott said he does not expect to hear any more evidence in the case. The Monday after he blew up, Chief Judge John Harris drove from Brevard County, where he works, to confer in private with Schott.

During the meeting, Schott said, Harris asked him to transfer to the civil bench, meaning he would no longer preside over DUI or other misdemeanor trials.

Schott said yes and will make the shift in mid-April.

Harris was out of the office Tuesday. In an email forwarded by a court spokeswoman, he wrote, "I told him that I would be willing to transfer him from the criminal division to the county civil division if he wanted, and Judge Schott thought that would be a good idea."