Florida Circuit Judge Lee Marsh Disqualified From Redistricting Challenge After State Officials' Motion

On May 7, 2026, Leon County Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh granted his own disqualification from Equal Ground Education Fund, Inc., et al. v. Cord Byrd, et al., Case No. 2026-CA-000914 (Leon County Circuit Court, 2nd Judicial Circuit) — a state-court challenge to Florida’s newly redrawn congressional map — after Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, a defendant, moved to have him removed. The underlying suit, filed by 18 Florida voters and Equal Ground Education Fund and represented by the Elias Law Group, challenges Gov. Ron DeSantis’s post-Callais congressional map under the Florida Constitution’s explicit bans on partisan gerrymandering and non-compactness.

Grounds, from the order itself (¶3): at a May 6, 2026 case-management conference, the court “disclosed to the parties that counsel for Secretary Byrd and a law partner of counsel for the Florida Senate are on the campaign committee for the undersigned judge’s ongoing contested re-election campaign.” Secretary Byrd’s Verified Motion (filed May 6, 2026) specifies the conflict further: his lead counsel, Mohammad O. Jazil, “serves on Judge Marsh’s current re-election committee,” contributed to the campaign, and “co-hosted a fundraiser with one other person for the campaign on March 24, 2026.” The motion invoked Fla. R. Gen. Prac. & Jud. Admin. 2.330(e) (“the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned”). The court’s order (¶8) grants disqualification on legal sufficiency alone, under Fla. R. Gen. Prac. & Jud. Admin. 2.330(h) — a procedural grant, not a finding of actual bias. Plaintiffs opposed the motion (Response in Opposition, May 7, 2026), calling it “otherwise-inexplicable” and citing Florida Supreme Court precedent (Brown v. St. George Island) on disqualification rules being “vulnerable to the possibility of judge-shopping” — the source of the “judge shopping” framing later echoed, uncredited, in a Tallahassee Democrat op-ed. This resolves the gap the prior version of this entry left open (Judge Marsh’s stated grounds were previously sourced only to a Center Square headline fragment).

This is a state-court disqualification under Florida procedure, not a federal 28 U.S.C. § 2284 three-judge-panel recusal — worth distinguishing from the federal-panel composition question surveyed in 2026-redistricting-panel-composition-and-recusal-survey. Reassignment unconfirmed: press summaries suggest the case was reassigned, but which judge specifically inherited 2026-CA-000914 was not confirmed against a primary document as of 2026-09-17; do not cite a replacement judge’s name without pulling the reassignment order. New Florida maps are part of the same post-Callais redistricting wave documented at 2026-08-15–six-republican-states-schedule-august-special-sessions-post-vra-redistricting, though Florida is not among the six states named in that entry — this is a seventh state’s map fight, decided in state rather than federal court.