More than six months after they landed him a reassignment on the Broward Circuit, a series of vulgar comments Judge Gary Farmer made last August, combined with newly uncovered indiscretions and biased actions from the bench, may earn him a suspension.
The Florida Supreme Court has acknowledged that it received a notice of formal charges, recommendation of suspension and notice of confidential information about Farmer’s conduct.
“Through his extensive misconduct, occurring over a lengthy period of time,” the recommendation said, “Judge Farmer has damaged the public’s perception of the judiciary and the judicial branch in such a way that he has demonstrated a present unfitness to serve.”
It comes less than two weeks after the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission’s (JQC) Investigative Panel voted to recommend that Farmer be suspended after he no-showed a hearing on the matter, blaming an “unspecified ‘emergency situation.’”
Farmer, a former Senate Democratic Leader, made headlines in September after he was reassigned to the Broward court’s civic division for sharing a trifecta of lewd thoughts while ruling over several cases the month before.
The inappropriateness happened on Aug. 15, beginning with a grand theft auto case in which he told a defendant who was expecting children from three different mothers to wear a condom while on probation.
“You are shooting all over the place,” Farmer said, referring to ejaculation, before telling the man not to get his defense attorney pregnant too.
Later that day, he recited wordplay from an “In Living Color” sketch featuring a pair of flamboyantly gay men talking about football while riffing with a lawyer.
“He likes it when the Oilers play the Packers,” Farmer said. “He used to be a tight end and now he’s a wide receiver.”
Later still, Farmer grew impatient with how long it took to remove a hostile defendant from the courtroom, saying, “What the f—,” before stopping short of completing the word.
The Investigative Panel found “numerous other instances” from other dates in which Farmer talked and behaved similarly.
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