For use Sunday, March 15, and thereafter

Longtime Fla. press counsel pushed Sunshine Law

Eds: This is one of six profiles about Florida open government advocates and two related stories moving in advance for Sunshine Sunday.

By BILL COTTERELL
The Tallahassee Democrat

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) Maybe Barry Richard inherited his willingness to fight powerful people over First Amendment freedoms from his father.

His dad was editor of the Alligator at the University of Florida in 1933 when a would-be assassin took a shot at President-elect Franklin Roosevelt in Miami, accidentally killing Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak. A Tampa Tribune editorial said a trial was too good for gunman Guiseppe Zangara, and the state should just execute him.

“My father wrote an editorial in the Alligator, saying that was a horrible thing for a newspaper to say,” said Richard, a longtime counsel for the Florida Press Association. When the Tribune’s publisher, a UF regent, pressured the school to oust Richard’s father, the paper moved off campus.

Both as the media’s top legal voice in Tallahassee for 18 years and previously as a deputy state attorney general, Richard has fought for open government and press freedom in a career spanning pivotal moments in sunshine law. The National Law Journal has rated him among the nation’s 100 most influential lawyers and he has argued over 250 appellate cases.

“He’s top of the list on public records and open meetings, always the first one leading the charge,” said veteran Florida Press Association lobbyist Dick Shelton. “He’d do a lot of the work pro bono, never complained and was always available.”

As press association counsel, Richard played a key role for another Alligator editor decades after his father. The newspaper was back on campus in 1973 when it printed a list of abortion providers, defying a state statute making it illegal to disseminate such information. Richard wrote the attorney general’s opinion that said the law was blatantly unconstitutional.

Alligator Editor Ron Sachs, who would become a Miami reporter and communications director for Gov. Lawton Chiles, and is now a Tallahassee public relations executive, got off the hook when then-Attorney General Bob Shevin declined to defend the abortion-information law. The Alligator was booted off campus again and added “Independent” to its name, this time for good.

Richard is best known as former President George W. Bush’s lawyer in the controversial Florida re-count that won Bush the 2000 election. In those 36 days of court fights, Richard handled 46 separate lawsuits in a case that ultimately was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Richard’s public career started as a deputy to Shevin, who was attorney general from 1971 to 1979. Shevin was known for refusing to defend a “right to reply” law that purported to make newspapers print responses from political candidates they did not endorse.

Speaking in his corner office of the Greenberg Traurig firm, a block north of the Capitol, Richard said the tone for Shevin’s tenure was set in the early days when a reporter discovered a political leaflet in the print shop of the attorney general’s offices. High-level staff met to decide how to “spin” the news.

“I said we should just tell ‘em it was printed in the office and it was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened, we screwed up and it wouldn’t happen again,” said Richard. “That way, I figured, it would be a one-day story, and it was.”

Richard spent about four years as Shevin’s deputy, then was elected to the state House of Representatives from Miami for four years before making an unsuccessful bid to succeed Shevin.

In the 1970s, Florida was coming out of an old-boy era of rural control, closed meetings and little or no financial disclosure of political fundraising or personal holdings.

Older, entrenched department heads and powerful legislators resisted the wide-open approach Shevin, Gov. Reubin Askew and Secretary of State Richard Stone took to public records and meetings nearly 40 years ago. Richard was in the thick of it and, looking back, he isn’t sure if the change has been sincere or just force-fed concessions to public demand.

“The open-government concept has become such a sacred cow, so ingrained in this state, that it makes the public official shy away from closings,” he said. “I think it’s natural for people in public life to want to close things part of it as an ego thing and part as a notion that ‘We know better than the people,’ or that it’s going to make their jobs harder if they release everything.”

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