Florida Supreme Court rejects ex-public defender’s guilty plea to ethics violations

MAR 18, 2021 | REPUBLISHED BY LIT: MAR 19, 2021

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Former Jacksonville public defender Matt Shirk’s conditional guilty plea filed last month with the Florida Supreme Court was rejected.

Shirk had agreed to plead guilty to violating several rules of the Florida Bar — including the Rules of Professional Conduct, violation of the oath taken by a lawyer to support the constitutions of the US and Florida, providing competent representation to a client and others — in exchange for a six-month suspension from practicing law.

The suspension would have taken effect 30 days from the date of the final order, but the Supreme Court said it considered the conditional plea for consent judgment and rejected it.

“The Florida Bar is hereby directed to prepare and file a formal complaint against Matt Shirk,” the Court wrote.

The issues stem from Shirk’s time as a public defender in Jacksonville from 2009-2017.

A grand jury investigation into his actions in office eventually got sent to the Florida Commission on Ethics, which led to public censure, reprimand and a $6,000 civil penalty.

The ethics commission found he violated statutes by hiring or directing the hiring of three young women in a way that went outside normal hiring practices, then fired them for the sake of himself, his wife and their marriage.

It also found he violated state statute by serving or consuming alcoholic beverages in a city building, and by revealing information relating to the representation of a former child client through an interview he gave to a documentary crew.

According to the conditional guilty plea, Shirk’s misconduct was “due, in part, to personal or emotional problems” and that he’s “deeply remorseful for his unprofessional behavior while serving as Public Defender.”

Former Jacksonville public defender Matt Shirk gave away guns, money after failed reelection

AUG 1, 2019 | REPUBLISHED BY LIT: MAR 19, 2021

After former Public Defender Matt Shirk was ousted from office in 2016, he spent or gave away tens of thousands of dollars on himself and his friends, including handing nine state-owned firearms to a motorcycle club without documentation.

A new Florida Auditor General’s report, the culmination of more than two years of investigation, details the repeated ways that Shirk violated state law or policy before and after his failed August 2016 re-election bid.

The report details how Shirk used state employees to staff his personal nonprofit, Vision for Excellence, including assigning attorneys to work at fundraising events. Because that nonprofit receives less than $50,000 a year, its financial records, unlike other nonprofits, are not publicly available from the Internal Revenue Service. This makes it unclear whether Shirk was paying himself a salary from the nonprofit. The auditor estimated the value of time Shirk’s employees worked at his nonprofit as more than $14,000.

Shirk did not return requests for comment Thursday morning, and he has not responded to any requests for comment since he left office in January 2017. The Times-Union asked Thursday morning if the State Attorney’s Office will review the report for potential crimes committed. The office did not respond.

Among other things, Shirk still owes the state $5,242, and the auditor general has urged Shirk’s successor, Public Defender Charlie Cofer, to use a debt collector. Shirk owes the state because it paid for his retirement costs on his behalf, his personal fuel costs and costs associated with his damaging a car.

Public records also went missing during his final months in office. In one case, he gave away 10 computers just two days before leaving office. When the computers were recovered, the hard drives had been removed and wiped clean. “It is the belief of the present administration that the hard-drives had been removed from the computers prior to their donation to the charity,” Cofer wrote in a response to the report. “It is believed that the removal of the hard drives was part of a concerted effort by the prior administration to delete emails and other documents in violation of public records laws.”

Deleting public records can be a criminal violation in Florida.

The Auditor General recommended a number of policy changes to ensure these violations don’t re-occur, but Cofer responded and said, “It is difficult to successfully enhance controls to ensure the proper approval of [Tangible Physical Property] disposals if the head of the agency directs subordinates to violate those controls.”

Cofer’s response to the report said that Shirk “over-ruled staff concerns” before donating the computers. Former Jacksonville State Attorney Harry Shorstein said Shirk’s use of staff time for his nonprofit alone warrants an investigation by the State Attorney’s Office.

“You’ve told me of pretty widespread misappropriations on the part of the public defender,” Shorstein said. “I think the media has a duty to point out corruption, malfeasance, if for no other reason to put a damper on future public officials who might consider doing the same thing.”

He also said that grand jury reviews help deter public officials from violating the law. Cofer said he told the State Attorney’s Office about many of these concerns when he took over the office in January 2017.

Following the Times-Union’s reporting in 2013 about past behavior by Shirk — including the illegal hiring and firing of some women, the deletion of records and the building of a private shower with public funds — Gainesville State Attorney Bill Cervone brought a case against Shirk to a grand jury. The grand jury declined to indict Shirk, but it asked then-Gov. Rick Scott to remove him from office, something Scott declined to do.

The auditor’s report focused on Shirk’s last year and a half. Thursday morning, Cervone said the grand jury might have indicted Shirk if he had done everything the auditor found before Cervone presented evidence to the grand jury. Cofer, who beat Shirk in the 2016 primary election by a three-to-one margin, invited the auditor general to investigate the office in April 2017. Cofer provided the office with a list of issues he wanted reviewed.

The Times-Union also requested all emails sent to or by Shirk in the calendar year 2016 in order to see whether any emails appeared to be deleted. Cofer said the office only has eight emails sent from Shirk’s official account, and 217 emails sent to it for that year. Cofer’s staff was able to also find another 1,057 emails sent to or from Shirk’s personal account that related to work. But some of those referred to emails from Shirk that the office didn’t have.

For comparison, Cofer said during the same time period in 2018, he sent or received nearly 11,000 emails from his official account.

One of Shirk’s post-election emails showed he criticized his employees for quickly providing public records to reporters. “I’m very concerned that multiple people in this agency have determined to drop the very important work that we do to make these requests their priority.”

Shirk still faces complaints from the Florida Commission on Ethics and the Florida Bar.

He initially agreed to a settlement for his ethics complaint, but the commission rejected the settlement as not being harsh enough. The Florida Bar’s grievance committee reviewing his complaint has not yet determined whether there’s probable cause that he violated attorney rules. Cofer said he has drafted another Florida Bar complaint to file against Shirk, in addition to the one Shirk is currently facing.

Shirk gave away the nine handguns to a former employee who was a member of the Buffalo Soldiers Motorcycle Club. Cofer said there are no records that indicate Shirk ensured the people who got the guns were legally allowed to have guns.

Shirk also booked expensive travel, purportedly for office business, that included an $806-a-night hotel room in New York for an immigration law conference, despite the fact that state public defenders don’t practice immigration law. Since leaving the office, Shirk’s primary legal practice is now immigration law.

In total, he spent $4,010 on that New York trip, and he spent another $2,513 for a trip to San Diego to learn more about driving-while-intoxicated cases. He didn’t share anything he learned with his attorneys after the trips, Cofer said, which were both booked after he lost the August 2016 election.

Shirk wasn’t the only one booking expensive trips with state dollars after the August election.

Justin Estes, who handled information technology for Shirk and had his salary more than doubled after the election, booked a conference in Los Angeles for more than $3,100, which included $900 for a hotel. Estes then resigned on Shirk’s final day in office.

The report also confirmed reporting by the Times-Union that showed in the days after he lost reelection, Shirk gave substantial pay raises to 14 employees, including Estes and other friends and political allies in the office. In some cases, he more than doubled their salaries. Nine of those resigned on Shirk’s last day, and a 10th was fired the next day.

In total, Shirk spent about $65,000 of the office’s budget on those salary increases. He did not have any justification for the raises. According to the report, Shirk did not always keep employees’ evaluations in their personnel files. Cofer said Shirk did this in order to hide public records. “If he had a negative thing about someone he wanted to write it up, he didn’t put it in their personnel file. He’d do it in a memo and … keep it in a separate file.”

State offices are supposed to follow a procedure before giving things away to ensure that the objects are actually surplus. The auditor reviewed how Shirk gave away $21,611 worth of stuff and found that more than half of the items — $11,764 worth — was given away without following any procedure. That included nine handguns and 14 computers, 10 of which were given on his second to last day in office.

Cofer alleged that those 10 computers likely contained public records that the office no longer has access to because the hard drives were removed. “I’m certain. I know there are public records gone. … [IT Director] Joe Frasier in 2013, when everything was falling apart, did a backup of all the emails. … most of those emails are no longer in our system.”

Estes told the Times-Union he believed his salary increase was justified. The day after Shirk lost re-election, he fired Frasier, Estes’ boss, which meant Estes had more responsibilities. One of those responsibilities, Estes said, included removing the hard drives from the computers. Estes said he did not delete information on the hard drives, but he stored them in a box in the IT work room. He also said the December conference, which came just weeks before Shirk’s last day in office, was worth it because he learned a lot about computer security issues. Estes said that same month, Frasier told him he should probably start looking for new work, which is why he resigned from his job on Shirk’s last day.

Estes donated $200 to Shirk, and he said he’s never donated to another candidate. The report also said Shirk gave $90,000 to a lobbying firm, The Fiorentino Group. The Times-Union had previously reported that Shirk had hired the group with state funds, but it wasn’t clear how much he had paid the group. According to the report, Shirk “selected the firm and developed the contract without staff involvement,” and there are no records that indicate he used a competitive selection process.

The Fiorentino Group then gave Shirk $1,000 in his re-election bid, and lobbyist Marty Fiorentino gave Shirk $500. A political action committee with the same address and suite number as the Fiorentino Group gave another $500. Shirk’s was the only state campaign that Fiorentino donated to in 2016.

Estes said Shirk almost solely used his private email account, but there was no way for the office store emails that Shirk received or sent from that account unless he was emailing someone else in the office. For example, Estes confirmed, the office couldn’t retain any emails between Shirk and Fiorentino. But Estes said he doesn’t think Shirk was technologically adept enough to know how to delete records.

The report also noted issues Shirk had with the two state vehicles assigned to him. The state paid for his personal fuel usage, and he didn’t reimburse the state. He also got into a car crash about seven miles away from the office on a Sunday in June 2016, but he claimed he was working at the time. He did not say the nature of his work, though, and the report said it wasn’t clear why the state, rather than Shirk himself, paid $2,370 for the accident.

In an email a few days after the accident, Shirk told his assistant that the accident “was my fault. I was pulling out of a parking lot and side swiped the bumper of another unoccupied vehicle. … What do I need to do to be sure the other guy gets his vehicle fixed? Unfortunately he drives a BMW but works for the Tom Bush and said the auto body there would do the work. I did not notify [chief investigator] Jerry [Coxen] and would prefer not to have others be involved in this.” Shirk also owes the state for about $700 in fuel costs and $2,200 in retirement payments.

Public Defender Matt Shirk exchanged dozens of text messages with fired female employee

OCT 17, 2013 | REPUBLISHED BY LIT: MAR 19, 2021

Public Defender Matt Shirk exchanged dozens of text messages with a former female employee whom his wife confronted because of inappropriate text messages, according to Shirk’s cellphone records.

Shirk has acknowledged that he exchanged text messages with former employee Tiffany Ice, and has admitted some of those messages were inappropriate, but he hasn’t been willing to go into detail about the messages.

The records provide some detail about the exchanges between Ice and Shirk. The documents show the dates and times a text was sent or received by Shirk.

The heavily redacted documents show that from early May to early June, Shirk exchanged 52 text messages with the phone number belonging to Ice, then the Public Defender’s data-entry operator.

The redactions, which sometimes include an entire day’s worth of exchanges and the dates of those exchanges, were made by Matt Shirk without the input of Rogers Towers Law Firm, which was tapped by Shirk to help the Public Defender’s Office fulfill records requests on a pro-bono basis.

The messages between Shirk and Ice that are visible on the documents were sent on weekdays during typical work hours.

The redacted documents do not show any text messages exchanged between Shirk and the cellphone number belonging to Kayle Chester. Chester is a former legal assistant at the office and former employee of the Whisky River nightclub. She and Shirk were perceived by some in the office to have an unusually close relationship.

Chester, Ice and a third woman who is a friend of Chester’s and also was an employee of Whisky River were all fired in June from the Public Defender’s Office after Shirk’s wife confronted Ice in the office.

The Times-Union asked Matt Shirk and Public Defender’s Office spokesman Matt Bisbee whether Shirk redacted any information from his phone records showing communication with Ice, Chester or any other subordinate.

Neither Shirk nor Bisbee responded. A statement by the office said the redactions “were private, personal communications.”

The content of the messages between Ice and Shirk are unknown.

Shirk has admitted sending his subordinates, including Ice, inappropriate text messages.

He wouldn’t go into detail about the nature of the messages but said he sent Ice “funny e-cards.” Michelle Shirk wouldn’t go into detail, but she told the Times-Union the messages were more than just e-cards.

What was contained in those text messages prompted Shirk’s wife to visit the Public Defender’s Office in June and confront Ice about Ice’s relationship with Shirk.

Shortly after Michelle Shirk’s confrontation with Ice, Chester, Ice and the third woman were fired.

Ice’s personnel file shows she was placed on a 30-day improvement plan in November 2012, at the end of her first 90 days, for errors in her work. She was recommended to be retained in January.

The personnel file provided to the Times-Union shows no further complaints about her work until June.

ce’s June 25 termination letter said she was fired for continued errors.

Ice’s attorney, Bill Sheppard, had scheduled a “name-clearing hearing” for Ice last week at the Public Defender’s Office. But the hearing was canceled because Sheppard didn’t like the proposed structure of the hearing.

Sheppard instead sent a letter stating that the Public Defender’s Office’s termination for Ice was incorrect and false in several areas. Sheppard wrote that Ice wasn’t written up for any mistakes while at the office.

The letter acknowledges that Ice made some mistakes early in her employment, but it said that’s because Ice received less training than her predecessor.

On Aug. 29, Gov. Rick Scott appointed special prosecutor Bill Cervone to investigate Shirk’s office.