Judge Adam McGinnis, 45, is asking Orange County voters to retain him as a county court judge in Group 11 for a third term on the bench. 

“I think I do a pretty good job,” he told VoxPopuli. “I enjoy what I do and I think that if I didn't do a good job that I wouldn't get the support that I continue to get.” He won his last race with more than 64 percent of the vote.

County court judges, who adjudicate misdemeanor, traffic and civil claims up to $50,000, serve six-year terms. County court judges earn $180,616 a year. McGinnis, who campaigns in a military-style cargo truck, sometimes with his 10-year-old daughter, was first elected in 2012, then re-elected in 2018.

McGinnis is being challenged by Lisa Gong Guerrero, the deputy chief assistant state attorney, in the Aug. 20 primary. Early voting takes place Aug. 5-18, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily. The final day to request a vote-by-mail ballot is Aug. 8. Return it by 7 p.m. Aug. 20 to the Supervisor of Elections office.

Circuitous route

McGinnis was born in Detroit and raised in Clearwater, where, he told Chief Judge Lisa Munyon on the Open Ninth: Conversations Beyond the Courtroom podcast, he played baseball against an 8-year-old Ron DeSantis. “I knew half the kids on his team,” he said.

McGinnis, took a circuitous route through college. He attended University of Central Florida (UCF), St. Pete Junior College, Valencia College and then returned to UCF to graduate in 2002. He was four years in and just 16 hours short of an electrical  engineering degree when he decided the field wasn’t for him.

“I picked up a catalog and the only degree that I could really get in, say, a year, was a liberal arts degree, so I changed my major to liberal arts,” he said on the podcast. He said he has one of the few liberal arts degrees with a math/science emphasis.

“Big catalyst”

In 2000, the biggest blunder of his life put him on his career path. McGinnis was arrested for pouring out a rum and Coke outside of a UCF frat party.

“They (his critics) bring it up every time I run,” he said, who is open about it. The way he tells it: he was a new pledge at a fraternity, and it was his job to drive drunk partiers home. He was trying to explain to his inebriated friend that he couldn’t be walking around with an open container when he saw a police officer pedaling over on his bike.

McGinnis grabbed the cup out of his friend’s hand and poured out the beverage for him. The cop demanded the cup, took a sniff and cited them both. Except the drunk buddy got an open container citation while McGinnis was cited for obstruction of justice and tampering with physical evidence and ended up jailed on third-degree felony charges.

The charges were eventually dropped, but McGinnis described it as “a terrifying experience.” First, there was a ticket to appear, then the charges escalated and suddenly he was in a jail cell.

“I really had no idea what was going on. You look at the people and the charges they’re in there for, and I’m going God, it was a rum and Coke, you know?”

The experience was a “big catalyst” for law school,” said McGinnis who was in the first class at Barry University’s Dwayne O. Andreas School of Law after it received its provisional accreditation in 2002.

“I walked into Barry and I walked up to the information counter and I said I want to apply to law school,” McGinnis told the Open Ninth podcast. “I had a check for $125 and my application. And the lady at the information kiosk opened it up and she says, Okay, you’re in. So, I got accepted by the information kiosk lady. “

McGinnis was the first Barry law school graduate elected to the bench and he has served in every division in the county court system. He’s is known for being an efficient jurist.

While in the civil division, he told Open Ninth, he organized two days of panel hearings with the four county court civil judges for a plaintiff’s law firm and a defendant’s law firm, that were litigating how contract language would be applied under a new statute, across hundreds of cases.

“I said you guys are going to come in. You pick any one of these cases from each division and we’re going to sit there as a panel. You tell me everything you want … and you tell me everything you want ,” he said, indicating each attorney for the plaintiff and defendant.

 

“Then we’re going to issue an order. Each judge, we’re going to do our own order. We knocked out almost a thousand cases in two days. I think they all went up on appeal but we knocked those right off the docket. I think it was like 8 or 10 percent of our caseload we knocked out in two days.”

Stability in the law

When it comes to interpreting the law, McGinnis is a textualist.

“I think the words on the paper are the words on the paper,” he told VoxPopuli. “It makes my job a lot easier because I don’t have to interpret it in different ways. It gives people stability in the law if everyone looks at it and reads those words and can come up with one uniform answer. When people start trying to apply it differently in different situations, you end up with a broad law that gives us no guidance.”

McGinnis said he has never been a member of the conservative legal organization, The Federalist Society, which advocates for a conservative originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

McGinnis said he shies away from political issues that aren’t germane to his work on the bench. “I knock on doors all the time and so someone might say, Hey, what's your stance on abortion? At the end of the day, I'm a county court judge. I'm not ruling on abortion.”