State Attorney Kirk Zuelch, who masterminded the eight-month-long persecution of Nick and Carrie Nowatney on false child abuse charges, is now scrambling to control election-year damage after Judge Mark Jones threw the case out of court earlier this month.
Zuelch must now accept almost all of the responsibility for the now-documented outrage perpetrated upon the Nowatneys— because he is the one man who, at any time, could have ordered that the charges be dropped. But he didn't do that.
Assuming that the buck stops at the top in the State Attorney's Office, Zuelch must also accept responsibility for the hasty and ill-advised decision to snatch the Nowatneys' two little children (including a baby still breastfeeding) from the family home last September and hold them hostage in foster homes for 200 days— simply because the parents refused to plead guilty to something they didn't do!
Officials at the State Dept. of Children & Families (DCF) have said that the Nowatneys could have gotten their children back almost immediately— if they had just admitted some guilt.
"But we couldn't do that," said Nick Nowatney. "We didn't do anything wrong."
So Zuelch and the DCF punished them by not only refusing to return their children for six months, but also by putting them through an expensive and draining trial. But so what? It didn't cost Zuelch or the DCF officials anything. They were using taxpayer dollars. But the Nowatneys were exhausting their savings and going into debt.
Even as a mountain of evidence was being compiled that did not support the allegations of child abuse, the state continued to hold the children. And Zuelch refused to drop the charges.
So, now, in light of Judge Jones' ruling that the state's case was insufficient, Zuelch now has a lot of explaining to do.
As part of his damage control operation, he is telling everyone who will listen that there is another "side" to the Nowatney story— but, because the trial was closed and the records are sealed, he is saying that he is prohibited from talking about it.
What does he want us all to believe? That he has some important piece of evidence that he "forgot" to present in court?
But, apparently, the evidence that Zuelch's people did present in court was so unpersuasive that Jones ruled for the parents without even hearing all of their evidence.
"I don't need to hear any more!" Jones said on May 10. "Case dismissed!"
Also, you may not be amazed to learn that Zuelch and/or his apologists are now spreading the story that Key West The Newspaper violated a court-imposed gag order in reporting this story during the trial and the pre-trial hearings. US 1 Radio newsman Bill Becker said that's what he was told. He didn't reveal his source, but he did say he had talked to Zuelch.
There was no gag order. And Zuelch and his cronies know that.
Zuelch's public cop-out that the "law" won't allow him to talk about the Nowatney case is curious. It's curious because that never stopped him before.
Back in 1996, Zuelch seemingly played a part in a campaign to smear the two Mosquito Control Board commissioners who dared to "unfix" a job that had reportedly been fixed by a previous board for then Key West Mayor Dennis Wardlow.
After Zuelch had convened a Grand Jury to investigate the two commissioners, he leaked information about the "secret" Grand Jury deliberations to the press. We know he did that because he leaked the information to us. And leaking Grand Jury information is against the law, isn't it?
So, boys and girls, rest assured that if Kirk Zuelch had any information that would save any part of his egg-covered face, he would leak it to the Zuelch-friendly press in a heartbeat.
Zuelch surely now knows that putting Nick and Carrie Nowatney on trial when he had no real case was a major screw-up. Maybe even a career ender. But, apparently, he thought he could bull it through. And he may have thought that he had Judge Jones in his pocket.
Surprise!
NOTE: Zuelch's efforts to drive the Nowatneys into the ground has financially exhausted them. If you want to help, see the full-page ad on page 6.