Seeking enlightenment.
Is he being blamed for 1990s crime or because he fired Angela Corey 2006-ish?
According to a t-u report based on the unending feud between Corey and Shorstein
Shorstein wouldn't discuss the Tanner investigation because it remains sealed, but defended the others as legitimate issues for grand jurors to examine. Those investigations looked at the failed Shipyards development downtown, overspending on the new Duval County courthouse, violations of Florida's open meetings law and improper no-bid contracts with ProLogic Consulting, owned by a friend of the mayor.
So, he was totally willing to go after the power brokers of this city. Did Corey do any investigations like this?
http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2009-09-06/story/corey_rift_with_shorstein_stews_spreads
(http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2009-09-06/story/corey_rift_with_shorstein_stews_spreads)
This is vaguely familiar. Details?
Shorstein and my father have frequently been at odds, so I can give some insight on that end.
First and foremost, Shorstein is unpopular with law enforcement because he just wasn't a very good State Attorney. He wasn't a good manager of people and cases. The office had a very low rate of filing charges and a low rate of convicting on those charges. This included people arrested for violent crimes, and Jacksonville Journey found that it contributed to our rising crime rate at that time. At the same time, the office was slow in processing cases, meaning that people were routinely sitting in jail for years on end awaiting trial.
He further upset a lot of people with his ego and willingness to use his position to bludgeon those he thought were his enemies. In particular, he repeatedly used the grand jury process to attack perceived enemies, resulting in him getting reprimanded for misconduct and bias several times. There are a number of examples, but the Tanner investigation mentioned above is one of the most troubling, and is pretty typical of them.
John Tanner was the State Attorney in Daytona. He got on Shorstein's bad side because he once fired Shorstein's son. In the case, Tanner filed charges of prisoner abuse against some corrections officers in his jurisdiction, but his daughter was one of the prisoners alleging abuse, so he stepped aside for objectivity reasons. Shorstein requested to replace Tanner in the investigation. However, he dismissed the abuse charges and instead used the Grand Jury to go after Tanner, and apparently the report focused entirely on Tanner's supposed wrongdoings instead of the case at hand. That was far beyond the investigation's bounds, and Tanner was understandably taken by surprise. He accused Shorstein of misconduct. The judge overseeing it found that Shorstein had indeed greatly overstepped his authority in pursuing Tanner; he exonerated Tanner, issued an order against Shorstein, and sealed the whole thing (it's still sealed, afaik). This is apparently the only time in Florida history that such a thing has happened.
However, one thing Shorstein was good at was PR. He framed himself as "fighting the power" and suggested people only got upset for that reason. This overlooked the fact that the biggest complaints and censures weren't over what he was investigating, but how he ran the investigations. In some cases (like Daytona), a Grand Jury could have found something useful and important, but Shorstein was unable to get past his own preconceptions and repeatedly abused his position.
My father, in his way, would probably close with something positive - Shorstein is a good lawyer on his own, has many friends and supporters in town, and he's apparently a decent guy if you don't get on his bad side. But to my mind, he fully deserves the criticism he's received.
The tanner thing was an abominable waste of tax dollars. John is generally a nice guy, though he has his own critics. Those critics would point out that there was a lengthy series of allegations involving physical abuse and deaths in police custody by the Flagler Sheriff's Office, but that he wasn't much concerned about it until they beat up his own daughter. Then suddenly it was priority #1. She'd been arrested for something stupid after one of the holiday celebrations in Flagler beach, and they tied her into a restraint chair and went to town. The video was pretty awful, and was front page of the news journal at the time.
The bottom line was FCSO needed investigating. But as tachacale explained, it wound up being co-opted into this bizarre circus where two political enemies used it as a way to fight with each other. FCSO wound up walking out of it unscathed while the bickering raged on. The abuse continued for several more years. The final straw came, as it always does in those situations, when the captain who was promoting that culture got into a road rage incident on the highway and pulled out his service pistol and blew the other guy away. He claiming later he'd been 'threatened', but witnesses contradicted him. I think he ultimately pled to manslaughter and did some time. The sheriff's office did its own investigation, and got better after that.
The last article I read said the Shorstein vs. Tanner debacle, or whatever you want to call it, cost the taxpayers $1.2mm.
^That cost doesn't surprise me at all. $1.2 million on an investigation that accomplished nothing besides damage to reputations of the investigators.