Referred to as a “Judge’s Judge”, Chief Judge Belvin Perry, Jr., of the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court, is the pudgy judge, the mumbling, droopy-eyed Deputy Dawg presiding over the highly publicized Casey Anthony (TOT MOM!!), murder trial.
As a little boy in the segregated shithole of Orlando, Belvin wasn’t allowed to sit at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, and his dad – one of Orlando’s first black police officers – couldn’t carry a gun or arrest white people. Perry later made it all the way through law school without ever sitting in a classroom with a white student. The Perry parent’s doctrine of hard work, formality and decorum to overcome the burden of inequality, clearly paid off: Judge Perry’s sister is an attorney, his brother an orthopedic surgeon. After receiving his Juris Doctor from Thurgood Marshall School of Law, Perry showed up at his interview with then Orange-Osceola State Attorney Robert Eagan with a full-on afro, goatee, and tinted shades. Afros aside, Eagan hired Perry as an assistant state attorney and Perry reported to work with short hair, a coat and tie and would go on to become one of Eagan’s toughest prosecutors.
Before his days on the bench, Perry prosecuted the Black Widow Trail, in which lunatic Judy Buenoano was sentenced to death by electric chair for the 1971 arsenic murder of her husband (Judy was also convicted of the murder of her disabled son, whom she took out on a canoe and drowned, the autopsy revealing that the boy’s disability had been caused by arsenic poisoning; the attempted murder of her fiancé in 1983; and the 1978 death of her boyfriend). Buenoano was the first woman to be executed in Florida since 1848, when a slave girl was hanged for killing her master. It was a watershed case for Perry, who went on to become the first African-American to be elected judge by a white majority in Orlando. Judge Perry took over the Casey Anthony trial after the original judge was accused of bias and stepped down, an unfortunate turn for “tot mom”, as despite Perry’s folksy style and teddy bear form, he is the personification of a “hangin’ judge”.
Remember that showboating O.J. trial Judge, Lance Ito, with his affectedly low key/high drama and feigned gravitas? I HATED his lust for the stage and the sound of his own voice. Judge Perry is running the Casey Anthony trial – with it’s own cast of liars and loons, half-deaf coots and crackpot meter readers, family melodrama and accusations of incest and illicit affairs in gated condos and courtroom theatrics – with a quiet, nearly (he seems to have restless leg syndrome), unflappable efficiency. He doesn’t want to hear a bunch of superfluous words! Judge Perry was known to once cut off a wordy lawyer in court during a trial by busting in with, ‘Don’t give me the whole bushel of oysters, just give me the pearls.”
“Five foot five and broad in the beam”, with soft, slow speech, a low chuckle and a mellow manner, Perry’s droopy eyelids give him the appearance of being snoozey. But he isn’t snoozey at all! His right eye is a prosthesis, it’s glass. At 6 years old, playing Robin Hood with a pal who made the decision to use a butcher knife as a sword, Perry zigged when he should have zagged, and the “sword” was plunged into his right eye. “Junior” – as he is known around the family barbecue – is said to have been a real “egghead” as a child, a pudgy bespeckled boy who enjoyed chess and who – I love this – started carrying a briefcase in the 6th grade.