Florida Supreme Court Justice Renatha Francis, 47, appointed in August 2022, is up for a yes-no retention vote on Nov. 5.

Gov. Ron DeSantis named Francis to the high court through a process known as “assisted appointment,” choosing her from a list of names submitted by a state judicial nominating commission. Francis, the only Black justice on the high court, replaced Justice Alan Lawson, who retired.

New justices serve at least a year, and then voters decide in the next general election if they should stay in the position. Retained justices then serve a six-year term before they face another retention vote. Supreme Court justices earn $258,957 annually.

Francis’ appointment was controversial from the start. In 2020, DeSantis named her to the bench, but a lawsuit saying she was unqualified was upheld. She has never been elected to any judicial position nor tried a case. Her law degree is from a now-closed, for-profit school that had financial and accreditation issues and the state’s lowest pass rate for the bar. In addition, according to investigative news outlet Florida Bulldog, she did not disclose in her Supreme Court application multiple ethics complaints against her when she was a Palm Beach County circuit court judge.

Reliable anti-abortion vote

Francis is a member of The Federalist Society, the conservative legal organization that DeSantis, also a member, has looked to for judicial appointments. Francis adheres to the concept of a limited role for judges and told the judicial nominating commission that she’s a textualist, meaning she follows the law as written not the way she thinks it ought to be written. That’s the best way, she said of “ensuring judges aren’t legislating from the bench,” which she said is “one of the greatest challenges to our democracy.”

However, in two recent opinions, Francis unsuccessfully argued to keep the citizen-led initiatives to legalize marijuana (Amendment 3) and limit government interference with abortion (Amendment 4) off the Nov. 5 ballot and prevent Floridians from voting on them.

Florida Bulldog reported that DeSantis was more interested in Francis’s Christian beliefs and reliable anti-abortion vote than her legal expertise. In approving the abortion amendment’s ballot language, the high court found it “clear, unambiguous” while Francis said it was “vague and undefined.” She also strongly objected that there could be any medical issue to necessitate an abortion, stating in her dissent, “health seems to include nebulous conditions that could be used to justify a late term abortion.”

In her dissent on marijuana, Francis said the amendment violated the single subject requirement because it simultaneously legalized and commercialized marijuana. In writing for the majority, Justice Jamie Grosshans, herself a conservative, noted that allowing businesses to distribute marijuana and customers to possess it was “logically and naturally related.” Indeed, in a separate second opinion, Grosshans took Francis to task for being overly restrictive in her interpretations, writing that it wasn’t necessary to “scour the relevant dictionaries for the most restrictive meanings for terms…”

Undisclosed ethics complaints

DeSantis first tried to install Francis on the high court in 2020. But Francis, who emigrated from Jamaica, where she ran a bar and a trucking company while she attended college, was ineligible because she hadn’t been a member of the Florida Bar for 10 years. State Sen. Geraldine Thompson filed a lawsuit to block the appointment, while other critics argued that more qualified conservative Black judges could have been appointed. The state Supreme Court blocked the appointment, forcing DeSantis to choose another candidate. That's when he named Grosshans, an appellate judge who had 14 years experience as an attorney and is white, instead.

When DeSantis finally installed Francis on the high court in 2022, critics questioned her law degree from Florida Coastal Law School, which had the lowest bar exam pass rate, 31 percent, of any law school in the state. Florida Coastal was one of three for-profit schools owned by private equity firm Sterling Partners. It shut down in 2021 after the U.S. Department of Education denied Sterling’s request to reinstate the school’s federal financial aid, and the firm relinquished ownership.

Francis’s legal resume was also thin. She had never tried a case in court. She worked as an appeals court staff lawyer for six years in Tallahassee, then spent seven months at the law firm Shutts & Bowen, where she represented corporate clients before then-Gov. Rick Scott appointed her to Miami-Dade County Court in 2017. She was there less than a year before Scott promoted her to Miami-Dade’s Eleventh Circuit Court. The following year, DeSantis shifted her over to the Fifteenth Circuit Court in Palm Beach County.

It was in Palm Beach County that Francis had “multiple complaints” filed against her with the disciplinary Judicial Qualifications Commission. The ethics complaints “raised questions about her temperament and fitness as a West Palm Beach family court judge,” reported Florida Bulldog and WPTV.

Meanwhile, the Tampa Bay Times reported that a month after she landed at the Fifteenth Circuit Court, Francis put in an application to be considered for the Supreme Court. Florida Bulldog reported that Francis did not disclose the ethics complaints on her application. When the judicial nominating commission asked her if there was anything they should know, she did not disclose the complaints at that time either.

In one bizarre incident, Florida Bulldog reported that after Francis’s husband Phillip Fender (now deceased) walked up at a West Palm Beach condo pool and without permission took a mother’s 10-month-old out of her stroller, Francis threatened to take the mother’s children away for “abuse and neglect.” Following the pool incident, the Department of Children and Families received a tip from an anonymous caller, who the mother believes was Francis, that the baby was unattended — refuted by the family members present — prompting the Polk County Sheriff’s Office to get involved. DCF and the police cleared the family of any wrongdoing 10 months later.