Campaign violations lead to judges removal.

A judge who published unvetted, misleading, and erroneous information about his opponent and the opponent's wife and daughter when the judge was running for reelection in 2016 was not worthy of remaining on the bench, the Florida Supreme Court has ruled.

Over the summer, the court had ordered Seventh Circuit Judge Scott DuPont removed from office and issued the opinion September 6 explaining the action.

Justices cited information DuPont had posted on his reelection website against the advice of his campaign manager and despite cautions from two other judges, and he repeated the claims during a televised debate. He also was found to have violated judicial canons during a child support hearing when he had a father searched by a bailiff and confiscated $180, even though the man said it was money he was holding for another person, and when he changed the time of first appearance hearings to accommodate his campaign schedule.

As part of his 2016 reelection campaign, DuPont hired a campaign manager and she in turn at the judge's request hired a third person to do opposition research on the judge's opponent. That person spent about two hours researching online records and warned that his findings needed to be further vetted, as did the campaign manager when she gave the information to DuPont.

Among the information was his opponent had changed his name in 1990 (the opponent and his wife wanted to get rid of a hard to pronounce last name), was affiliated with Hideyourpast.com LLC (which the opponent ran in conjunction with his law firm to attract clients who qualified to have their records expunged or sealed), the opponent had been ticketed for parking in handicapped spaces and for passing a school bus that was picking up or discharging passengers, and that his wife had been arrested three times and his daughter 21 times (neither had ever been arrested).

DuPont implied that the name change and website were linked and intended to help his opponent hide his past and he sought to help others do the same. The handicapped parking tickets turned out to be mislabeled in court records--they apparently were ordinary parking tickets, and there were similar problems with the other claims.

DuPont's campaign manager advised him the information required more research before being used and unsuccessfully tried to get him to sign a document releasing her from responsibility before it was posted on DuPont's campaign website. Two judges DuPont consulted told him the...