Thread: Trial Lawyers Group Admits Role in Racially Charged Flier

[Picture of mailer at source]

Trial lawyers group admits role in racially charged election flier

By Steve Bousquet And Marc Caputo, Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau
In Print: Thursday, September 24, 2009

TALLAHASSEE — In a highly embarrassing mea culpa, Florida's powerful trial lawyer lobby admitted Wednesday that it was behind an ugly race-baiting flier in a recent North Florida Senate election.

"Morally and politically, it was indefensible," said Scott Carruthers, executive director of the Florida Justice Association, the trial bar group, who said its leaders had no knowledge of it. "I accept full responsibility for not having done everything to stop that piece from going out."

The flier juxtaposed images of the Black Panthers, President Barack Obama, the Rev. Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam and black marchers holding a large ACORN banner. The caption read: "Is this the change YOU want to believe in? Violence and intimidation at the voting booth."

The admission sheds new light on the growing practice in Florida of electioneering groups known as 527s that transfer large sums of money among each other to buy ads to influence voters while concealing their affiliations.

Those tactics exploded in recent weeks in the Senate election after a federal judge struck down a law requiring such groups to quickly disclose their contributions and expenses. Now they can wait until long after the election.

The controversial flier also may have damaged the trial bar's reputation with African-American legislators. Said Rep. Joe Gibbons, a former president of the legislative black caucus: "An apology won't do."

"Armed thugs may try and scare you away from the voting booth," read the text of the mailer, a message still volatile in Jacksonville since the 2000 presidential recount. The city was the epicenter of the recent Senate election in which Republican John Thrasher, a former House speaker, overcame a barrage of trial-lawyer attacks to defeat three rivals.

The mailer included a tear-off absentee ballot request form and was the trial bar's way of building a pool of persuadable absentee voters through a phony political group. The so-called Conservative Voters' Coalition was a 527 political organization acting as a front for the trial bar.

Lawyer David Ramba created the new organization and the trial bar enlisted Republican campaign consultant Bill Helmich to design the mailer.

The money for the mailer came from a trial bar-aligned 527 group, the similarly named Conservative Citizens for Justice, which sent a check for $68,999.53 to pay for the piece to go to 88,000 Jacksonville area homes on Aug. 18-19.

On Aug. 21, the mailer's existence was noted on a Jacksonville political blog, triggering an uproar. Tom Edwards, the lawyer whose Conservative Citizens for Justice group paid for it, resigned, calling the piece "detestable," "appalling" and "inappropriate."

Trial bar executive director Carruthers said the group's internal process of vetting all political advertising was not followed, including a review by its election-law adviser, attorney Ron Meyer.

Rep. Gibbons, D-Hallandale Beach, said the trial bar's actions are especially damaging, coming at a time when some feel that criticism of Obama's presidency has racial overtones.

"That's just bad faith," Gibbons said. "You would like to think nobody would use race, particularly at a time when you have a black president, and you have these hard people out there with all these hard feelings built up. It's an insult to me … to think that people just trying to win an office would go to those kinds of depths to win is shocking."

What was especially embarrassing about the mailer is that trial lawyers overwhelmingly backed Obama's election, and Carruthers personally gave $2,300 to Obama's effort.

Helmich declined to comment on his role in the mail piece. The trial bar said it paid no money to Helmich directly.

Ramba, the lawyer who filed the paperwork for the group, called his role "purely administrative."

Steve Bousquet can be reached at bousquet@sptimes.com or (850) 224-7263.

[Last modified: Sep 24, 2009 12:38 AM]

http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/l ... er/1038739

I think there as some truth in this flier as it was worded, and especially with the picture of the panther guys standing with nightsticks at the polling place, and with the Acorn issues. However, sure, there are plenty of white people who act in the same ways, and aligned with at least Acorn, and more, so just showing pictures of African Americans in this is not right.