Your State Attorney: Man of God, Man of Law

[janneke]

June 24, 2007

Florida

Your State Attorney: Man of God, Man of Law

A sometimes controversial crusader, John Tanner has never been afraid to put
his beliefs or reputation on the line

By DEREK CATRON, News-Journal

Long before God spoke to him, decades before he met the devil and battled a
monster, the boy learned right from wrong.

Meet John Tanner

Future State Attorney John Tanner, center, is shown in this undated photo
taken in Hawaii with a couple of surfing buddies - Ben Peacock, left, and
Dan Tomlinson, now Tanner's son-in-law. Tanner graduated from Seabreeze High
School at 17 and worked summers as a lifeguard to put himself through school
at the University of Florida.
AGE: 67.

FAMILY: He and wife, Marsha, married in 1969 and have two daughters. Carmel
Tomlinson, 35, is a Navy J.A.G. officer based in Hawaii. Lisa Tanner, 31, is
a pre-law student. Tanner has a daughter and two grown grandsons from a
previous marriage.

RESUME: Tanner has 20 years experience as a private attorney and is serving
his fourth term as state attorney. He oversees about 200 employees,
including 75 attorneys. State attorneys are paid $151,000 annually.

PARTY AFFILIATION: Republican

LOCAL TIES: Tanner was born in Daytona Beach, graduated from Seabreeze High
School (1957) and got his bachelor's and law degrees from the University of
Florida.

MILITARY: Enlisted in the Army's airborne infantry in 1960, became a Green
Beret and left the service as a lieutenant.

HOBBIES: Surfing, hunting, jogging


He was walking not far from the Daytona Beach pier with his new dog, a black
mutt named Princess, when a bigger boy snatched the leash from his hands.
Crying, the little boy ran to his mother and told her what happened.

"Well," she said, "if you want your dog, you'd better go get it."

John Tanner got his dog.

The life of John Tanner, the state attorney for the 7th Judicial Circuit
that includes Volusia and Flagler counties, reads like an American frontier
tale. Think Davy Crockett with a surfboard or Johnny Appleseed with a law
degree.

Indicted for a man's death at 25, Tanner later would win death sentences for
nine killers. The prosecutor who braved threats to pray on death row with
Ted Bundy showed no mercy in sending Aileen Wuornos to die. The brash state
attorney who lost his office after publicly crusading against pornography
returned humbled to win back the job, taking the last two elections without
opposition.

Much more recently, Tanner stood against four sheriffs as part of an
investigation into alleged abuses at the Flagler County jail -- an ordeal
that started after a videotape showed five deputies strapping his grown
daughter into a restraint chair.

Tanner's penchant for headlines might make you think the born-again
Christian who says his office motto is "Do the right thing" is more sinner
than saint.

His wife of 38 years, Marsha -- whom Tanner calls his "greatest supporter
and strongest critic" -- describes him as a lightning rod for controversy.

Friend and fellow attorney Jon Kaney says Tanner lacks the "political
antennae" that shield other elected officials from repeated bad publicity.

Former law partner Michael Lambert says Tanner reminds him of the lone man
standing out from a crowd to be heard in Norman Rockwell's "Freedom of
Speech" painting.

It's an image worthy of a folk tale, but real life is never so simple.

. . .

John Tanner was born prematurely at Daytona Beach's Halifax Medical Center
in 1939, so small he could fit in an average coffee pot, the family tale
goes. His parents divorced when he was very young, and Tanner lived for a
time with his mom in a place with no electricity or indoor plumbing.

After graduating from Seabreeze High School at 17, Tanner was on his own. He
worked summers as a lifeguard and put himself through school at the
University of Florida by taking construction jobs, waiting tables and
selling vacuum cleaners and cemetery lots.

He interrupted school to join the U.S. Army and became a paratrooper, like
his stepfather and uncle. Later, he qualified for the Army's special forces.
He volunteered for a mission to Cambodia but was left behind when he refused
to enlist for another three years.

He'd already set his mind on law school. The courtroom would be his
battlefield.

"I knew I had an aggressive, combative nature," Tanner says now, in an
office decorated like a hunting lodge with a giant elk head and a couple of
deer mounted on one wall. "If you're fighting over people's lives, what
could be more significant? It was just another form of combat."

. . .

On a bright, cool morning nine years ago, John Tanner stepped between two
trees into a clearing in the Wyoming mountains and stopped short. A large
grizzly bear had roused itself from its grassy bed and was looking directly
at him.

Perhaps because they could have been his last, the next five seconds played
out in Tanner's mind like the slow-motion replay of a televised football
game.

Tanner had time to ponder the bear's actions -- no cubs, no obvious threat
from Tanner; the bear didn't have to charge. And he had time to regret some
of his own. With the handgun his wife had insisted he bring in his backpack,
he may as well have left it at home.

He calculated the distance between the bear, himself and the trees that
offered the only protection.

Tanner miscalculated.

The bear charged. Tanner stepped back behind a tree. But the bear
anticipated the move, and when Tanner stepped around the tree, the bear rose
before him, his open maw so close Tanner could feel its breath.

Reflexively, Tanner rammed his hunting bow into the bear's mouth. It roared
with rage -- then turned and fled.

. . .

Tanner fights the same way in the courtroom. He was notorious for his
attacking style even as a defense attorney. He was jailed once and
threatened with jail a second time by judges whose patience wore out.

It's the one-on-one combat Tanner relishes most, like the time in 1992 he
savaged on cross-examination the testimony of Aileen Wuornos, America's
first female serial killer whose life was dramatized in the Academy
Award-winning film, "Monster."

"That's his favorite time," Marsha said of her husband's big-trial
preparation. "That's like recreation for him."

Tanner has thrived on the adrenaline rush of fear, whether it's hunting solo
with his bow, leaping out of an airplane or riding one of the big waves that
could break his lean frame against a sandbar.

Without fear, there can be no courage, and Tanner wasn't the type to be
nagged by fear or doubts about how his actions might be perceived.

That style has made a target of Tanner many times. Opponents to his
pornography crusade likened him to Adolf Hitler. Police union
representatives labeled him a "mad dad" out to avenge his daughter's arrest
during his investigation of the Flagler jail. Some doubted the sincerity of
Tanner's conversion to a religious life. Later, the Florida Supreme Court
criticized his use of biblical verses in seeking the death penalty for
Anthony Farina, one of two brothers convicted for the 1992 murder of a
17-year-old Taco Bell employee.

While many have questioned Tanner's motives over the years, it's hard to
find someone who disparages the man -- not even Bryan Shorstein, the former
prosecutor whose father, 4th Circuit State Attorney Harry Shorstein, led the
investigation of Tanner after the Flagler jail controversy.

"I loved working for him," said Shorstein, who worked in Tanner's St. Johns
County office from 1996 to 2003.

Former State Attorney Dan Warren, the man who indicted Tanner for a fellow
lifeguard's death more than 40 years ago and whose son once ran against
Tanner for the job, talks now of Tanner's desire to do the "the honorable
thing."

"I'm very impressed with the man he's become," Warren said.

It was Marsha's idea that they seek a meeting with Ted Bundy as part of a
prison ministry. The Tanners met with the country's most notorious serial
killer more than 50 times before his 1989 execution. They came away
convinced that he had found God and that his soul would be saved -- but
never doubted that he deserved to die.

Tanner, who was in his first term as state attorney, lobbied for a stay of
execution. He said he wanted investigators to have time to meet with Bundy,
close more unsolved murders and give solace to the families of those
victims. But he was labeled a friend of Bundy by those who felt the killer
was a devil incarnate.

Tanner came away from his meetings with Bundy convinced that hard-core
pornography was a public safety threat.

Bundy didn't "blame" pornography for his killings, Tanner said, "but it's
kind of like the fuel you put on a fire. The fire's there. The fuel just
intensifies it."

Tanner tried to snuff the fire.

He didn't simply prosecute and take to trial video store owners who sold or
rented pornographic material. That would have meant relying on a jury to
establish that the material was obscene -- a dicey proposition.

Instead, Tanner used grand juries -- which heard evidence only from the
prosecution -- to establish obscenity. Then he used these findings to bully
merchants into pulling the material from their stores.

Tanner had experience with the vagaries of a grand jury. As president of a
lifeguard association in 1964, Tanner was indicted for manslaughter along
with two others after the death of a lifeguard candidate during an
initiation exercise.

A judge ultimately threw out the charges, but the experience left Tanner
with empathy for the accused that serves him even as a prosecutor.

He tells young attorneys: "You're going to prosecute some innocent people.
Try to find them before you put them in prison."

Yet that didn't stop Tanner from using the grand jury system against
pornography.

Tanner still sees hard-core pornography as a threat to public safety, but he
acknowledges that he was wrong in the way he went after it. It was a
miscalculation, for instance, to accept invitations to speak on the issue at
churches. That only reinforced the perception that Tanner's crusade was
about morality, not public safety.

It was a fight that cost him his re-election bid in 1992 and left him
looking ridiculous at times, as he attempted to draw links between sexual
assaults and explicit movies or rap recordings -- links that social
scientists and, ultimately, the courts did not see.

Robyn Blumner, then the director of the American Civil Liberties Union in
Florida, teased him during a public debate in 1990 as she prepared a slide
show on the differences between art and porn.

"Those people should leave the room who, upon seeing pictures of naked
people, are irresistibly overcome with the need to commit a sexual assault,"
Blumner said, pausing for effect before turning to Tanner. "John?"

Blumner, now a columnist and member of the editorial board for the St.
Petersburg Times, didn't see Tanner's reaction. A television crew later told
her that Tanner flipped her off. She was unfazed, assuring the reporter that
if Tanner were prosecuted for the obscene gesture, the ACLU would represent
him.

. . .

Tanner was 40 when he found God -- or, as he tells the story, God found him.

At the time, he was a "walking, talking ego" in the words of his wife. He
was going through what his law partner described as "one of the worst
midlife crises" he'd ever seen.

"His self was being broken down and rebuilt," Lambert said of his friend's
rebirth. "He emerged much stronger than he'd been before."

While colleagues say Tanner doesn't impose his fundamentalist Christian
views on others, he doesn't shy away from speaking about his conversion --
even though he worries about how it could look in print.

"I know you'll think I'm a whack job," he says.

In his story, worn smooth from the retelling, Tanner was kneeling beside his
daughter Lisa, helping her with the bedtime prayer he'd said as a boy.

"Now I lay me down to sleep . . ."

As Tanner rose, he was struck blind and felt the "spirit of God" envelop
him.

Tanner was not a religious man. He believed in God but didn't have time for
religion. Sunday morning was better spent surfing or relaxing in bed with
the comics.

Then he felt God.

"There's no other way to describe it," Tanner said. "He totally covered me
up.

"He spoke to me. I'll never forget the words: 'You feed them. You clothe
them. You educate them, and you see to their medical needs. And you are a
total failure as a father because you are not teaching them spiritual
things.' "

With that, the spirit of God left him. His vision returned. Lisa, oblivious
to what her father had just experienced, looked up and smiled.

Tanner stumbled out of the room. He fell against the wall in the hallway and
looked to the ceiling, unsure of how to even address the power that had just
spoken to him, offering only a vague promise to go to church so his
daughters would know God was important to him.

Every Sunday he was in church -- and he hated it.

"I either had a hangover or wished I was surfing or I wished I was doing
anything but sitting there in that church listening to the preacher either
put me to sleep or make me mad, telling me I was going to hell."

After six months, Marsha announced one Saturday morning that she knew why
her husband hadn't taken the final step of being born again.

"If you wait until you're perfect, you're never coming," she said.

A week later, on Easter, John Tanner was reborn.

. . .

Tanner struggled with the idea of surrendering himself to God's will. In his
public life, it's clear the sin he wrestles foremost with is pride. So it's
something of a surprise to watch him lead a Bible study at his church,
Community Baptist in Korona, where everyone in the class makes a point of
describing him as "down to earth."

As Tanner stands before the class listening to a man tell a story about
forgiveness involving his wife and a long wait at a department store, you
almost forget that Tanner prayed with Bundy.

"When you see God's judgment fall upon someone, it doesn't bring a good
feeling." He could be describing a child caught up in her first lie. No one
seems reminded that Tanner witnessed Wuornos' execution.

After his conversion, Tanner wondered if mission work or the seminary would
be more consistent with his new religious views.

Then one afternoon jogging on the beach, Tanner passed a man in a wheelchair
who reached out, slapped hands and said, "Run for me."

Later, back at his office, Tanner heard God's voice.

"Go tell him I love him."

Tanner knew immediately whom the voice meant. He hoped the man in the
wheelchair would be gone by the time he returned. Nervous, more than a
little embarrassed, Tanner walked up and blurted,
"Godtoldmetotellyouhelovesyou."

"No he doesn't."

"I'm telling you, he does."

"You don't understand," the man said. "I'm Catholic, and I stole some stuff
a few years ago. That's why God put me in this wheelchair."

Never one to lose an argument, Tanner talked of God's forgiveness. After a
few minutes of give and take, a change came over the man. "I'm free," he
shouted suddenly. "I'm free."

As he drove back to the office, he heard the voice of God again.

"See, I have you where I want you to serve me."

Tanner kept trying cases.

That lesson of surrendering to God's will was reinforced last year as
Tanner's investigation into the Flagler jail devolved into an investigation
of his office.

He had tried to stay out of it. Tanner had asked the governor to appoint
special prosecutors to look into his daughter's arrest and her treatment at
the jail. A prosecutor from Polk County came back with indictments on two of
the guards. Flagler County Sheriff Don Fleming asked Tanner for an
investigation of the jail.

Tanner took the job, not like a politician but like a soldier. The sheriff
and deputies accused him of overstepping his bounds.

Originally appeared on News-Journal Online at
http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJ ... 062407.htm

2-
June 24, 2007 -Your State Attorney: Man of God, Man of Law

.... Tanner took the job, not like a politician but like a soldier. The sheriff and deputies accused him of overstepping his bounds. Harry Shorstein convened a grand jury to look into Tanner's investigation.

Doing what he believed to be the right thing hadn't always protected Tanner, and he knew how grand juries could favor a prosecutor. He couldn't sleep, wondering, "Am I going to be indicted? Am I going to be removed from office?"

This wasn't the adrenaline-producing fear he knew in the courtroom, riding the giant waves or trekking through the wilderness. This fear ate at him like a cancer.

"For two weeks, we were both almost frozen with fear," Marsha recalled, "until we realized it was abnormal and began to pray against it."

It wasn't the prosecutors, sheriffs or police unions who assailed him, Tanner believed. It was the spirit of fear -- and God has a response for that.

Once they viewed their fear in spiritual terms, the Tanners could surrender to God's will. It was no surprise to them, then, that instead of another indictment or more public controversy, a judge cleared Tanner of any wrongdoing. The case remains under appeal, but Tanner says his only regret now is that the accusations of injustice at the jail haven't been fully investigated.

Speaking to the Sunday Bible class, Tanner sounds like both warrior and supplicant on the subject of using prayer to rejoice in troubled times, as God asks.

"It's not just waiting for God to change the circumstances. It's our opportunity to counterattack the enemy of our souls."

Marsha Tanner once accused her husband of wanting to see himself as a warrior in God's throne room, riding a white horse with a sword raised in his hand. If God chose David as his king, he would have John Tanner as his state attorney.

But God doesn't want to be served by a knight, Marsha told him. He wants a penitent man who can't be saved by himself.

It's a lesson Tanner may always wrestle with, even though he's learned it takes more than courage to do the right thing. It takes faith to trust that your actions are true.

derek.catron@news-jrnl.com