Editorial: Florida mourns the loss of two champions of justice

It's a fanciful thing, but comforting to imagine: A sunny corner of the afterlife where the lions of Florida's political history - the champions of transparency and humanity, the enemies of prejudice, corruption and cruelty - hang out over platters of grouper sandwiches and sweating pitchers of sweet iced tea. The stories they'd tell, of fights to protect Floridians (sometimes against corrupt corporations or over-reaching government, sometimes against their own worst impulses). The insistence that justice always mattered. The recognition that the people the law ignores are often the ones who need its protections the most.

In the past few weeks, two more seats have been pulled up to that infinite table. Former Supreme Court Justice R. Fred Lewis, who served during the court's modern acme of judicial courage and fierce independence, died May 26 at the age of 78 - leaving a legacy of towering opinions and equally thunderous dissents, often skewering elected leaders who exceeded their authority.

Before the late Gov. Lawton Chiles appointed him to the state's top court in 1998, Lewis had made his mark as a civil attorney in South Florida. Many initially ranked him as one of Chiles' most conservative picks. But he wasn't about to be constrained by labels: His priority was first and foremost the people of the state of Florida. He showed as much when he blocked misleading amendments, proposed by lawmakers, from the ballot - as well as when he refused to strike voter-proposed amendments that attempted to strip politics from Florida's redistricting process.

Lewis lived to see Gov. Ron DeSantis unravel much of what he'd accomplished in defending voters' rights. Just a month before the justice's death came a shocking declaration that Florida's Fair Districts amendment had been deemed unconstitutional - not by any court of law, but by DeSantis and his attorney. And it's not hard to imagine Lewis making coleslaw of an amendment lawmakers have approved for the 2026 ballot that could create a massive power shift away from local communities, and toward bureaucrats in Tallahassee.

Then on June 2, Volusia County lost a man whose career rarely hewed to the profitable tedium of his father's large, profitable real-estate law firm in DeLand. Instead, Richard S. "Dick" Graham ran the gamut of public service, serving as a state legislator, School Board attorney and eventually circuit judge. For most of his career, Graham was probably best known as the upstart Republican who, in 1988, challenged Daytona Beach Democratic state Rep. Sam Bell for his seat. Bell was seen as unbeatable: described by the Sentinel as "a wily, powerful insider," he was chair of the House Appropriations Committee and on deck to become House speaker in 1990. Instead, Graham sent him to the locker room, beating Bell with a 55% majority. In retrospect, Bell's defeat (along with the fall of three other powerful lawmakers, including the late Sen. Dempsey Barron) was seen as a casualty of Florida's short-lived services tax, which Bell supported.

In the Legislature, Graham proved tough to nail down. Our 1990 endorsement of him for re-election described him as "refreshingly independent" with a focus on environmental protection and fiscal responsibility. After he lost his seat in 1992, he spent more than a decade as attorney for the Volusia School Board before being named to the circuit court, where he presided over several high-profile cases. One significant ruling undid a merger between Advent Health and Bert Fish Medical Center, after Graham found that the public board that owned Bert Fish violated the state open-meetings laws by meeting 21 times in secret to hammer out the details of the deal.

But Graham's greatest contribution to Florida was only revealed a few years before his death in Ormond Beach at the age of 84. That story that formed the basis of "Under a Ruthless Sun," the second in a meticulously researched series of best-selling books by Gilbert King, a Pulitzer-Prize winning writer who has developed a specialty of unraveling long-buried stories of injustice and civil rights abuses in Central Florida.

The book gives Graham a great deal of the credit for seeing justice done. As a young lawyer looking for experience outside the comfortable confines of his father's law firm, he agreed to take on the case of Jesse Daniels, a developmentally disabled Lake County man accused in December 1957 of sexually assaulting a woman in her home. There was never any proof of this presented - the victim initially told police her attacker was Black - but there never needed to be, because Daniels was packed off to the state hospital in Chattahoochee, where he was held for 14 years without a trial or any attempt to determine his guilt or innocence. Even after Daniels had spent years locked up, no Lake County attorney would take the case: It meant angering the powerful (and on one side, powerfully corrupt) partnership of Sheriff Willis McCall and State Attorney Gordon Oldham.

Graham was recruited to the case around 1969, after Mabel Norris Reese, a legendary journalist who was convinced that Daniels was innocent, sent Daniels' mother to Daytona Beach to plead for help. It took two years and a trip to the U.S. Supreme Court, but Daniels was finally set free in 1971.

Graham's success brought him to the attention of state Rep. Maxine Baker, a South Florida Democrat with a passion for the rights of people with mental illness. In 1972, she recruited him to help her write the act that would be named for her, and which spells out the rights that must be protected whenever the state involuntarily commits someone to mental-health treatment facilities. It was so solidly written that its most of its original provisions are still intact. Unsung and unrecognized before King's book was released, Graham helped construct major civil-rights legislation that is still protecting Floridians today,

And his accomplishments on behalf of people with mental illness were surprisingly bookended by Lewis, who was one of the first to recognize the extent to which Florida's correctional systems had become the treatment option of last resort for people struggling with mental illness. He convened a task force whose report led to a 2007 all-courts summit. Sadly, many of its recommendations have yet to be adopted, but they should be reviewed - because many of the problems that task force predicted have since manifested.

We can't find any evidence that Graham and Lewis ever worked closely together. But they shared a passion for defending the defenseless - a dedication that overlapped at the critical juncture of mental health and the criminal justice system. That alone could win them a seat at the table of Florida's lost lions, and for each man, it's only one facet of a career spent serving the cause of justice in Florida.

The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Krys Fluker, Executive Editor Roger Simmons and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. Use insight@orlandosentinel.com to contact us.

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This story was originally published June 18, 2026 at 10:37 AM.