Key Points

  • The Florida Supreme Court unanimously approved a referee's report finding Omar Medina Jr. not guilty of violating Rules Regulating The Florida Bar 3-4.3, 4-3.3(a)(1) and 4-8.4(a).
  • The court held that to prove a knowing false statement to a tribunal, the Bar must show by clear and convincing evidence that the lawyer knew the statement was false when it was made.
  • The court rejected the Bar's reading of Florida Bar v. Grieco that deliberately typing and filing the statements satisfied the knowledge element.
  • The court found competent, substantial evidence for the referee's findings that Medina was negligent in managing his PACER account but that the Bar failed to prove he knew his statements about notice were false when he filed his motion to vacate.
  • The Bar had asked for a remand for a sanctions hearing. The court instead entered judgment for Medina.

The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday cleared a lawyer who gave a federal judge an inaccurate account of why he missed a court-ordered conference. The court held that the Florida Bar must prove a lawyer knew his statements were false when he made them, not merely that he deliberately wrote and filed them.

In an unsigned opinion joined by all seven justices, the court approved a referee's recommendation that Omar Medina Jr. be found not guilty of the three rule violations the Bar charged. The Bar had asked the justices to find Medina guilty and send the case back for a hearing on sanctions. Instead, the court entered judgment in his favor.

The decision rejects the Bar's reading of the knowledge element of rule 4-3.3(a)(1), which provides that a lawyer shall not knowingly make a false statement of fact or law to a tribunal. The court wrote that the Bar "must prove by clear and convincing evidence that the charged lawyer knew he or she was making false statements at the time the statements were made."

The case began with a suit Medina filed for a client in state court that was later removed to the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. Medina failed to appear at a case management conference the federal court had ordered, and the client's suit was dismissed. He then moved to vacate the dismissal and attached a signed affidavit explaining his absence.

In the affidavit, Medina said he did not receive appropriate notice of the conference. He wrote that despite notifying the court and opposing counsel of the right addresses, "inexplicably the clerk of this court sent notices to email addresses that do not exist and have not existed as part of the plaintiff's counsel's law firm for more than 10 years." The motion also said Medina had "difficulty with the pacer system," referring to PACER, the federal courts' public records and filing system, and that his account there had been deactivated for years.

The referee found that the clerk had sent notice to three addresses Medina listed in his PACER account many years earlier. One of them, his own, was still in use when he filed the motion. A second had been inactive for more than 10 years, and the evidence did not show how long the third had been inactive.

When the federal judge confronted Medina at the hearing on his motion, he said he never meant to blame the clerk. He said neither he nor his staff ever saw the notice, and he apologized for mismanaging his email and PACER account.

The referee found that Medina wrongly assumed the email designations he had made in state court would carry over to federal court after removal, an assumption at odds with the PACER handbook and local rules. The referee concluded that Medina was negligent in maintaining his account but that his negligence did not rise to misconduct and did not prove he knowingly lied.

Before the Supreme Court, the Bar relied on the court's 2024 decision in Florida Bar v. Grieco to argue that it need only show a lawyer deliberately engaged in the conduct at issue. In the Bar's view, Medina's conduct was knowingly typing the words and knowingly filing the documents, and it did not have to prove he knew the statements were false.

"The Bar's interpretation of this element is contrary to our case law," the court wrote. It pointed to its 2003 decision in Florida Bar v. Miller, where the record showed the lawyer knew his statements to a federal court were untrue when he made them. Grieco, the court said, rested on a referee's finding that the lawyer "deliberately engaged in a pattern of dishonest conduct by making repeated false or misleading statements." Here, the referee found that Medina never intended to mislead the federal court.

The court also held that the referee's findings survived even under the correct standard. It noted that the referee identified only one untrue statement, the claim that multiple notice addresses had been dead for more than a decade. The Bar pointed to Medina's testimony suggesting that a former assistant could have used the third address within the past 10 years, but Medina later said he had confused her with another assistant. Bar counsel "failed to elicit that Respondent knew, at the time he filed his motion," that the address had been active more recently, the court wrote.

The justices likewise upheld the referee's view of Medina's statement that the clerk acted "inexplicably." The Bar argued the word could only mean Medina was blaming the clerk for his own negligence. The referee said he weighed that statement for three days before deciding it was just a statement. The court agreed that Medina "may well have been sincerely confused by the clerk's actions given the information he had at the time," and noted that he went on to cite his own PACER problems. That explanation, the court wrote, "assigned the blame to himself."

The court found that Medina's accusation of fraud on the court concerned his objection to removal, not the missed conference. And it found that the referee supportably credited Medina's belief that he had properly notified the court. The referee had found that Medina "did update the Clerk of Court of his address; just not in a way that would ensure he would receive electronic filings."

Throughout, the court deferred to the referee. "The Bar makes inferences of fact and points us to contradictory evidence in the record, but the referee's findings are supported by competent, substantial evidence and will not be reweighed," the opinion said.

The Bar was represented by Joshua E. Doyle, its executive director, Patricia Ann Toro Savitz, staff counsel, and Mark Lugo Mason, bar counsel. Medina was represented by Donald A. Smith, Jr. of Smith, Tozian, Daniel & Davis, P.A. and David M. Caldevilla of de la Parte, Gilbert, McNamara & Caldevilla, P.A., both of Tampa.

The opinion is not final until the time to file a motion for rehearing expires and any such motion is decided.