A Miami judge faces fine for skipping work, making staff get Art Basel tickets, run errands

A Miami-Dade judge is facing discipline after a state commission found he routinely skipped work — including an unauthorized trip to Malibu — and often made his staff run personal errands, including picking up tickets to Art Basel, doing online shopping and assembling a scrapbook of his achievements.

The Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission (JQC) is recommending that Circuit Judge Martin Zilber be suspended for 60 days and be fined $30,000. Zilber, according to documents released on Friday, has accepted responsibility.

“Although the scope of Judge Zilber’s misconduct is wide, the Commission’s recommendation, while severe, is tempered somewhat by Judge Zilber’s sincere reflection, contrition, and cooperation,” the commission wrote.

The Florida Supreme Court will ultimately decide on punishment for Zilber, who is assigned to the family division.

According to a finding by the JQC, Zilber routinely engaged in “inappropriate” treatment of his staff, including berating his judicial assistant and commenting on the “inconvenient timing of her pregnancy.”

He also required his assistant, who is supposed to be in charge of keeping the judge’s calendar and running his office, to work on the scrapbook. Once, according to the JQC, he asked his pregnant assistant to wheel his chair up “several floors to the courtroom and then lift it onto the dais prior to hearings.”

The assistant and his bailiff were required to drive him to various events. His bailiff was also asked to register the judge’s car with the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, and pick up the Art Basel tickets, during work hours, the investigation revealed.

The probe also found that between January 2019 and March 2020, Zilber was absent from the courthouse 51 days, without notifying his superiors, and he often left work early.

“The evidence does not indicate that Judge Zilber was unduly delinquent in making or issuing rulings or managing his docket. Similarly, the Commission does not have evidence of abnormally long wait times for hearings,” according to its findings.

After the pandemic forced most hearings to go virtual, Zilber took a “week-long” vacation to Malibu, California. He later claimed “he was going to be working remotely anyway,” and he did do some work. But the probe found that he rescheduled his regular hearings that week — and four “special set” hearings were actually social or educational meetings, such as a Cuban American Bar Association luncheon.

Zilber also tagged himself on social media posts from California during that week.

This story was originally published April 9, 2021 at 12:37 PM.