TALLAHASSEE -- In a highly embarrassing mea culpa, Florida's powerful trial lawyer lobby admitted Wednesday that it was behind an ugly race-baiting flier in a recent North Florida Senate election.

``Morally and politically, it was indefensible,'' said Scott Carruthers, executive director of the Florida Justice Association, the trial-bar group, who said its leaders had no knowledge of it. ``I accept full responsibility for not having done everything to stop that piece from going out.''

The flier juxtaposed images of the Black Panthers, President Barack Obama, the Rev. Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam and black marchers holding an ACORN banner. The caption read: ``Is this the change YOU want to believe in? Violence and intimidation at the voting booth.''

The admission sheds new light on the growing practice in Florida of electioneering groups known as 527s that transfer large sums of money among each other to buy ads to influence voters while concealing their affiliations. Those tactics exploded in recent weeks in the Senate election after a federal judge struck down a law requiring such groups to disclose their contributions and expenses until long after the election.

The flier also may have damaged the trial bar's reputation with African-American legislators. Said Rep. Joe Gibbons, D-Hallandale Beach, a former president of the legislative black caucus: ``An apology won't do.''

`ARMED THUGS'

``Armed thugs may try and scare you away from the voting booth,'' read the text of the mailer, a message still volatile in Jacksonville since the 2000 presidential recount. The city was the epicenter of the recent state Senate election in which Republican John Thrasher, a former Florida House speaker, overcame a barrage of trial-lawyer attacks to defeat three rivals.

The mailer included a tear-off absentee ballot request form and was the trial bar's way of building a pool of persuadable absentee voters through a phony political group. The so-called Conservative Voters' Coalition was a 527 political organization acting as a front for the trial bar.

Lawyer David Ramba created the new organization and the trial bar enlisted Republican campaign consultant Bill Helmich to design the mailer.

The money for the mailer came from a trial bar-aligned 527 group, the similarly named Conservative Citizens for Justice, which sent a check for $68,999.53 to pay for the piece to go to 88,000 Jacksonville-area homes on Aug. 18-19.

`APPALLING'

On Aug. 21, the mailer's existence was noted on a Jacksonville political blog, triggering an uproar. Tom Edwards, the lawyer whose Conservative Citizens for Justice group paid for it, resigned, calling the piece ``detestable,'' ``appalling'' and ``inappropriate.''

Trial-bar executive director Carruthers said the group's internal process of vetting all political advertising was not followed, including a review by its election-law advisor, attorney Ron Meyer.

Rep. Gibbons said the trial bar's actions are especially damaging, coming at a time when some feel that criticism of Obama has racial overtones.

``That's just bad faith,'' Gibbons said. ``You would like to think nobody would use race, particularly at a time when you have a black president, and you have these hard people out there with all these hard feelings built up. It's an insult to me to think that people just trying to win an office would go to those kinds of depths to win is shocking.''

BACKED OBAMA

What was especially embarrassing about the mailer is that trial lawyers overwhelmingly backed Obama's election, and Carruthers personally gave $2,300 to Obama's effort.

Helmich declined to comment on his role in the mail piece. The trial bar said it paid no money to Helmich directly.

Ramba, the lawyer who filed the paperwork for the group, called his role ``purely administrative.''

Steve Bousquet can be reached at bousquet@sptimes.com. Marc Caputo can be reached at mcaputo@MiamiHerald.com.

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