Joseph A. Boyd, Jr.
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Joseph A. Boyd, Jr. (1916 in Jackson County, Georgia - October 26, 2007 in Tallahassee, Florida) was a politician and a jurist in Florida. He was the 59th Justice of the Florida Supreme Court and later served as its Chief Justice.
Justice Boyd came to Florida in 1939. He served in the U.S. Marines during World War II and later graduated from the University of Miami School of Law in 1948.
He then became the City Attorney for the city of Hialeah. He was elected to the Dade County Commission in 1958 and was re-elected in 1962 and 1965. He served as chairman of the commission and vice mayor of Dade County. Justice Boyd served 18 years on the Florida Supreme Court through 1987. He was chief justice from mid-1984 through mid-1986.
Justice Boyd was reprimanded by his fellow justices in the mid-1970s for accepting a secret draft opinion from utility company lawyers. The Florida House of Representatives also investigated but declined to impeach him in 1975 after he agreed to take a psychiatric exam.
When he retired, Justice Boyd said he would like most to be remembered for his dissents to opinions that later were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
One those cases was when he disagreed with the majority of the justices who had ordered The Miami Herald to give equal access on its editorial pages to a political candidate. The federal justices, though, agreed with Boyd and ruled that would violate the First Amendment's free press guarantees.
He also once used biblical logic in dissenting from a ruling that upheld Florida's vagrancy law. Justice Boyd later said he believed that if Jerusalem had such a law, all the prophets, New and Old Testament, would have been jailed. The U.S. Supreme Court again agreed with him and struck down the vagrancy law.
