The Florida Bar deepens the comprehensive, compounding failure of Florida lawyers in the Schofield case
Without explanation, the Bar has concluded it is fine for a lawyer paid by state taxpayers to falsely assert to a tribunal that a "defendant" has confessed to a crime he did not confess to.
Coming briefly out of my hiatus to address this failure by the Florida Bar.
Leo Schofield is the defendant in the murder case against Leo Schofield.
Leo Schofield, as defendant, has never confessed to killing his wife. He has always, without wavering, maintained his innocence since Michelle Schofield’s 1987 murder, throughout his three decades of obviously wrongful imprisonment.
Longtime former State Attorney Jerry Hill referred to Leo Schofield as “defendant” 18 times at Schofield’s parole hearing in 2020 before saying this:
“In September, the defendant sends a letter to counsel admitting to the murder of Mrs. Schofield.”
This is a false, material, uncorrected statement. It as an open-and-shut violation of Florida Bar rules. It was the core of my Florida Bar complaint against Jerry Hill.
And yet, after months of investigation, the Florida Bar has now chosen to ignore, without explaining why, this false, uncorrected, material statement that clearly violates its own “candor toward the tribunal” rules.
Lawyers protecting lawyers
Above all else, the Schofield debacle is a moral, ethical, and professional failure of lawyers — of prosecutors, of judges, and of Schofield’s huckster trial defense lawyer, Jack Edmond.
I am the proud descendant of lawyers who risked and suffered much — personally — in order to do right with and through the law. Thus, cowardice and indifference and self-protection in connection to the law disgusts me — particularly when it sacrifices other people, as it has Leo Schofield.
So I am disgusted — but not surprised — that the final Bar committee, after months of investigation, completely shirked its ethical, moral, legal responsibility in order to silently protect Jerry Hill. In fact, I really expect nothing else from any legal institution in Florida.
The final Bar committee wouldn’t even defend Jerry Hill. They wouldn’t make an argument for why his false statement about a confession is fine and dandy. They just sent a pathetic form letter. Here it is:
When you can’t answer yes-or-no questions, you’re losing
When I received the email from the Bar, I sent a quick, simple, clarifying email to the 10th Circuit State Attorney’s Office. I asked a simple yes-or-no question based on the fact that Jerry Hill was the highly paid representative ($5,833 per month) of 10th Circuit State Attorney Brian Haas when he asserted that the defendant, who is Leo Schofield, confessed in writing to his wife’s murder.
Is it the 10th SAO's position that "the defendant" Leo Schofield confessed to the murder of Michelle Schofield as Jerry Hill said in his 2020 appearance before the Commission on Offender Review? I want to clarify for the record.
Instead of a simple “no,” I got this tortured, angry acknowledgment from SAO spokesman Jake Orr that, yes, Jerry Hill made a false statement to the commissioners on behalf of Brian Haas. (But it’s really no big deal to state that a “defendant” confessed when he didn’t, so shut up about it. LOL)
Mr. Townsend,
I do not know why you continue to mislead your readers regarding the parole hearing in 2020. Mr. Hill never said that Leo Schofield, Jr. confessed to murdering Michelle. In fact, three different times during his address to the Commission that lasted less than 10 minutes, Mr. Hill directly acknowledged that Schofield, Jr. has not confessed to killing Michelle. When discussing Jeremy Scott, a defendant in other cases, Mr. Hill noted that the defendant had sent letters confessing to all the murders that took place in Polk County in 1987 and 1988 (including the murder of Michelle Schofield) and requesting that all inmates be released from Florida State Prison. Those letters referenced are part of the court file in the Schofield case, they are public records, they have been litigated extensively, and no one (State, defense, or otherwise) has ever claimed they were written by Leo Schofield, Jr. Your suggestion that anyone was confused about who authored those letters is absurd. Your assertion that Mr. Hill misled the Commission is simply false.
“No,” was all I was looking for. And I got that.
This is probably the Bar’s reasoning, too. But it seems be too embarrassed to say it publicly. So it prefers to leave the record uncorrected in violation of its own rules. Pathetic.
It’s going to get even less comfortable, SAO
Anyway, does Jake Orr sound like a guy comfortable in the ethical, moral, and legal durability of a conviction that high-profile prosecutors are ripping in Florida and beyond? Or is that the brittle institutional defensiveness of a guy playing defense lawyer on a wrongful conviction and its perpetrators?
Remember, when former prosecutor and GOP state Sen. Jonathan Martin, chair of the Criminal Justice Committee, blasted the Schofield conviction, he was talking about Jerry Hill and Brian Haas and Jake Orr and Victoria Avalon and Keith Spoto and Kevin Abdoney and everybody in the “criminal justice system” protecting each other by keeping Leo Schofield a wrongly convicted, wrongly incarcerated murderer. Add the Florida Bar to the list of failures cited by Sen. Martin at Schofield’s 2023 parole hearing:
Everything that I’ve seen about this case turns my stomach. I don’t know why Leo Schofield wasn’t released years ago when he went before this board.
You have the opportunity to release him immediately. He wasn’t released last time because he wasn’t remorseful. You cannot be remorseful for something you did not do. It’s not your job to consider guilt or innocence, but if you are going to consider whether someone is remorseful and whether they should be released today or should have been released years ago, you have to at least crack the transcript, wonder why the fingerprints of a serial killer were inside Michelle’s car and were never tested and never presented to the jury in Polk County over 30 years ago. I was 5-years-old of when Leo Schofield started doing time for this murder.
I stand by the criminal justice system here in the state of Florida. We’re one of the best on the planet. But there’s a whole lot of doubt right now about how good we are. You guys have the chance today to restore credibility to a system that thousands of people know an injustice happened and is continuing every single second that Leo Schofield is behind bars.
Jake hears that coming.
Leo Schofield will be exonerated; Jerry Hill is already convicted in the public eye. He will get even guiltier.
Attention to the Schofield case is going to grow. Parole is coming. A second season of Bone Valley is coming. More scrutiny and media is coming. And scrutiny is death for this conviction. It cannot stand even rudimentary scrutiny. Nor can Jerry Hill’s official behavior as the leader of the justice system that did this. Ask “The Prosecutors.”
Leo Schofield will eventually be officially exonerated.
Some governor, perhaps even DeSantis, will see it as politically advantageous — or just the right thing to do — to pardon Leo. Perhaps some honorable lawyer, inside or outside of the SAO, will challenge Hill’s protege/puppet Brian Haas in an election and drop the charges as part of restoring decency to the 10th Circuit. Perhaps Jonathan Martin and others will pass laws aimed at preventing this type of wrongful conviction? Who knows; anything could trigger it. But it will happen.
The only question: will Leo Schofield and Jerry Hill both live to see it?
When exoneration happens, I want it to be as painful and humiliating as possible for Jerry Hill and everyone who enabled him, cowered before him, sucked up to him for a generation. That now includes the Florida Bar.
I’ve already used the public attention to the Schofield case to convict Jerry Hill’s conduct publicly in the county in which he lives. Other than the people indebted personally to Hill’s familial or professional nepotism (or who are protecting their precious wrongful conviction), no one has pushed back on me.
No one. I meet overwhelming agreement and/or gratitude for writing about it.
Trust me on this, no one paying attention in Jerry Hill’s home community who is not personally invested in preserving the wrongful conviction thinks Leo Schofield is guilty. No one. And they all know Jerry Hill is the real villain of this entire atrocity.
I intend to use the continuing attention to morally convict Jerry Hill over and over again in the public eye.
And yes, I fully expect Jerry and the SAO and his nepo-judges to keep saying “Fuck you” to the public that pays him $5,833/month to make uncorrected false statements about confessions. Like the Bar has now done silently on his behalf.
About that supposed immunity deal for Jeremy Scott
Yet, it’s also a strange fact of 2024 and the demise of local journalism that more than anyone else in this county, I control the public record here.
I’ve been putting Jerry Hill on trial in public over and over again because I want this public trial to be the record his descendants find when they go looking for him in 50 or 100 years. I want him to get the Willis McCall treatment from history. And I can do something about that. I don’t need the Bar. The Bar complaint was just a test of Florida’s lawyers’ capacity to hold themselves to some basic standard. The result: LOL.
I’m focused now on making sure Jerry Hill’s descendants know that Jerry was afraid to even testify in his own defense when I prosecuted him in public.
So if you thought this public trial was ending with this anti-climactic murmur of timidity from Florida’s cowardly collective of lawyers, … well, it is not.
In the coming weeks, when I’m back from hiatus, at my leisure, we will resume the trial.
We’ll examine The Ledger’s cozy relationship — under Skip Perez’s leadership and Suzie Schottelkotte’s hopelessly conflicted coverage of the case — with the prosecutors responsible for keeping Leo in prison. We’ll look at my failures as a reporter, too.
But we’re gonna start with the apparitional “immunity” deal that John Aguero supposedly offered Jeremy Scott on Jerry Hill’s authority.
Right after Jake Orr sent his tantrum response to my yes or no question, I sent a new question, for which I have not yet gotten an answer:
Does any assistant state attorney in Brian Haas’ office today have the authority to offer immunity to a murder suspect without writing down the offer or getting formal approval from Mr. Haas?
We’ll see if any craven lawyer conspiring morally to protect this wrongful conviction is willing to testify publicly about that.