OCTOBER 1999

Daniels - a talented
administrator in a tough job

By Bayard Stern
Managing editor, Florida State Times

FSU graduate Nancy Daniels never imagined where her education would take her. Today she is the public defender for Florida's Second Judicial Circuit. When Daniels was first elected in 1990, she was Florida's first female public defender.

"I was one of those people who was very happy being a student," Daniels said. "After graduating (B.A. '74) as an English major, I decided to go to law school. I thought law school was interesting as an academic exercise. Even after law school (J.D. '77), I still wasn't sure I'd ever be practicing law."

But a practicing lawyer she became. Daniels started her legal career in the public defender's office - and with the exception of teaching at FSU - has stayed true to that course.

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Daniels

"I started in the public defender's office in September of '79 as an assistant public defender," Daniels remembered. "I pretty much did every job in the office until 1985." Randy Murrell (B.A. '73, J.D. '76), the federal public defender for the Northern District of Florida, said Daniels is well respected for her administrative talents.

"I started in the public defender's office in 1977," Murrell said. "I knew her when she was an assistant public defender. She's a delight to work with and to work for. It's a tough job. Those lawyers are really overworked and underpaid and she's kept people happy and there for a long time." After six years of defending people, a new opportunity came along for Daniels - teaching at Florida State.

"The law school had a new position opening which eventually became a clinical professor position," she said. "The idea was to work with the students who were going out to intern in public defenders' offices or state attorneys' offices and teach them before they went. And supervise them while they were doing their internships."

Daniels enjoyed teaching, but an unexpected opportunity came her way. The public defender was appointed as a judge. "I decided to run for it," Daniels said. "It was totally out of my character to run for political office. But I felt like I had the background for it."

The job of public defender is inherently difficult. The climate in the judicial system has become steadily more rigid with increasingly higher sentencing guidelines for convictions, Daniels said.
That trend takes away the discretion that judges and juries had in the past when dealing with individual cases with unique circumstances. But Daniels describes her position with the vigor of a good defense attorney.
"It's a great job for me," said Daniels, 46. "My overall responsibility is running the public defender's office It's a busy job."

As public defender, Daniels has to be a lawyer, politician and administrator. That combination of duties may seem overwhelming to some, but not Daniels.
"I love it," she said. "There are certainly challenges . We're operating in the midst of an adversarial system. So we're constantly debating and fighting with prosecutors and probation officers and judges and the court.

"Sometimes our own clients don't start out with a good opinion of public defenders," Daniels explained. "A lot of people feel that they're going to get a low-rate lawyer. We have to spend a lot of time trying to build up trust . The hardest part of it all is that we just have too many cases. We have the competence, and certainly the experience, because we do just this. But each of our lawyers carries 150 cases or more, so that's what dilutes our skill level, is just having to spread it out among so many clients at any one time."

Daniels and her office usually meet their clients under stressful circumstances.
"We do everything from bad checks to first-degree murder cases," she said. "So it's varied. We represent mental-health clients from Florida State Hospital or in local mental-health facilities. We represent juvenile and delinquency cases and we represent misdemeanor and felony defendants. So it's a big operation, but it's varied, and there are a lot of interesting things about it. I genuinely enjoy it."

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