Minute by minute, some politician somewhere presents fiction as fact.<\/p>\n
In an especially noxious example, Donald Trump claimed that illegal immigrants in Ohio were \u201ceating the pets of the people who live there.\u201d He was parroting JD Vance, who later admitted hearing it from far-right-wing sources.<\/p>\n
For politicians, there\u2019s no such thing as an Official Truth Commission.<\/p>\n
But Florida has something like it for judges. The Judicial Qualifications Commission enforces an extensive code of conduct that takes a dim view of judges and candidates who lie about their opponents, disparage fellow judges, or deceive voters.<\/p>\n
The JQC\u2019s hammer has fallen on Lauren Nichole \u201cNikki\u201d Peffer, elected as a Broward County judge two years ago after voters disregarded our editorial doubts about her (we cited her \u201cpoor judgment\u201d<\/a> on July 10, 2024).<\/p>\n The Supreme Court ordered Peffer to serve a 30-day suspension that will cost her about $15,800 in salary, pay a $10,000 fine and costs and bear a humiliating public reprimand in the official record for remarks she made to this editorial board during that campaign.<\/p>\n Peffer, 40, of Coral Springs, emphasized her high ethical standards in that 2024 race.<\/p>\n To make her point, she cited a salacious book by an ex-court employee from the Orlando circuit that showed \u201can image crisis\u201d in the Florida courts. Asked for proof to support her claims, she shared a recording that purported to be a three-way phone conversation among Supreme Court justices Carlos Mu\u00f1iz and Renatha Francis and Chief Judge Lisa Munyon of the Ninth Circuit.<\/p>\n But it was \u201cfabricated and fake,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0the JQC said. Peffer had not read the book and \u201cother than the fabricated recording \u2026 had no basis to allege a lack of public trust,\u201d the Supreme Court said.<\/p>\n The relevant section of the Code of Judicial Conduct, Canon 7A (3)(b), requires judicial candidates, like judges, to \u201cmaintain the dignity appropriate to the judicial office and act in a manner consistent with the impartiality, integrity and independence of the judiciary.\u201d<\/p>\n It does not matter whether it was unintentional, justices said, because she had \u201cno basis\u201d for the allegations and \u201cfailed to verify them.\u201d Peffer accepted the findings and the proposed discipline.<\/p>\n She could have avoided this misery if she remembered the importance, as she had stressed in our pre-interview questionnaire, of \u201cthorough investigation and fair treatment in legal proceedings.\u201d<\/p>\n Judges must be held to a high standard of truthfulness. Our system depends on it. It certainly doesn\u2019t need judges who shoot off at the mouth the way politicians do.<\/p>\n Peffer has surely learned her lesson. Every other judge, and future judicial candidate, should take note. In the age of AI fakery, this could easily happen again.<\/p>\n The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Minute by minute, some politician somewhere presents fiction as fact. In an especially noxious example, Donald Trump claimed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":427506,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[2853,249,251,250,114,482],"class_list":["post-427505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fort-lauderdale","tag-editorials","tag-fort-lauderdale","tag-fort-lauderdale-headlines","tag-fort-lauderdale-news","tag-latest-headlines","tag-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/427506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}