Brief: Seminole County judicial candidates answer questions about Supreme Court cases

If you’ve found it hard to get information about those running for judge on your ballot, that’s by design. The Florida Supreme Court’s Canon 7 limits what a judicial candidate can talk about when running for office. So retired judge Fred Schott told a judicial candidate forum in Seminole County last week that his questions were designed to get past that veil. 

“So you can’t ask them who they want to vote for for governor, how they feel about Amendment 3, how they feel about the death penalty,” Schott said. “Judges can’t answer those kinds of things. They’re very limited.”

Check here to see Oviedo Community News’ 2026 Primary Voting Guide, which has responses from every judge running on the 2026 ballot in Seminole County. See below for snippets from the forum. 

Sitting judge Culver’s suspension looms in race

There are three candidates running for Seminole County Judge Group 6.

There’s incumbent Judge Wayne Culver, and two challengers: Alena Chaban and Erik Swenk.

“You want to be a judge in county court, it’s 90% people skills and it’s 10% legal skills,” Culver said. “But what you want out of a judge is a person who can show up on a Saturday morning at first appearances on a holiday.”

While it didn’t come up directly in the forum, Culver’s headlines loomed in the forum. Culver was suspended without pay for 60 days by the Florida Supreme Court in 2024 for “engaging in abusive and intemperate conduct during two separate court proceedings.”  

That was from hearings in two cases: One where he summarily sentenced a man to the maximum penalty of about six months in jail for violating probation, and cut the man off when he later asked to address the court; that man was released on appeal a month later. 

In the second instance the following day, Culver used profanity in the courtroom, telling someone who entered the courtroom during a proceeding to “shut up and sit down.” When the man replied that he was trying to find a seat, Culver asked if he wanted to be held in contempt.

“That’s not shutting up. You want to be held in contempt and go to jail? I asked you a [expletive deleted] question, [expletive deleted].”

On his campaign website, Culver addressed the issue indirectly. 

“His service has not been without challenges, but every day he strives to be better, knowing that we all need second chances in life sometimes,” the site reads. “He knows that we are the sum of all of our actions not just one bad event.”

While she didn’t address the 2024 Culver incident directly, Chaban said her campaign and judicial philosophy focus on “committed, consistent, calm.”

“‘Calm’ meaning the temperament that a judge needs, especially when you’re in county court and people who are pro se (self represented) that are confused and overwhelmed by the process,” Chaban said. 

The third candidate in the race is Swenk, who graduated from police academy, but ultimately couldn’t become a law enforcement officer because of prior run-ins with law enforcement. 

“In my personal experiences, I faced some life challenges as a juvenile, got involved in the wrong crowd and was fortunate enough to get on a straight path,” Swenk said. “But unfortunately, that kept me from getting into law enforcement.”

Favorite Supreme Court cases hint at differing philosophies

There are two candidates for Seminole County Judge Group 3. 

Sylvia Grunor is the incumbent, and she is facing challenger Nathan Skop.

During the forum, the candidates were asked who was their favorite U.S. Supreme Court justice and favorite case. Grunor said her favorite U.S. Supreme Court case was Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that ended legal segregation in schools. 

“And when I went to school in Alabama … we were just getting away from segregation, and my parents were – they absolutely wanted us to get away from segregation,” Grunor said. “So that’s my favorite right there.”

Grunor’s opponent Nathan Skop said he “wasn’t shy.” The most important decision in the last 50 years was Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case overturning Roe v. Wade. 

“The Dobbs decision held there was no federal constitutional right to an abortion, and then returned that authority to the individual states, and that was overturning 50 years of well-established precedent that represented a landmark shift in jurisprudence,” Skop said. “Everything I learned in law school went out the window.”

Skop said his favorite Supreme Court justice was John Marshall, who presided over Marbury vs. Madison, which established judicial review of other branches of government. But, he added:

“There’s a lot of dissents, a lot of good justices out there,” Skop said. “Scalia-Thomas dissents – you want to read something, you know, usually it’s pretty powerful on those.”

Abe Aboraya is a Report for America corps member