Dean Cannon Calls for Massive Changes in State Superme Court

Talking to the media on Monday, House Speaker Dean Cannon, R-Winter Park, unveiled a number of reforms that will be pushed out of the Judiciary Committee tackling immigration and the courts.

Cannon said the proposal would mandate every private company in Florida with more than 100 employees to use E-Verify to check the immigration status of every potential employee starting in 2013.

But Cannon raised the most eyebrows when he called for a drastic reformation of the state Supreme Court, changing the current seven-judge body into two separate five-judge bodies. Cannon called for one state Supreme Court that would examine civil affairs and another one focusing on just criminal ones.

I thinkall of this would take a constitutional amendment, said Cannon, who has been very critical of the judicial branch rejecting proposed amendments that emerged from the Legislature last year.

The speaker offered few details on how it could be done, saying that could be left for committees to hash out. He maintained that his proposal would improve the judicial branchs efficiency, arguing that criminal cases, which were 12 percent of the Supreme Courts docket, consumed 50 percent of its time.