Judging Ana

The jury did recommend the ultimate punishment, and Judge Gardiner followed suit, sending Loureiro to Death Row.

When told of Alu's description of the conversation between Gardiner and Scheinberg at Timpano, attorney Grant seemed stunned.

"If that's true, if they had that conversation during the trial, that is in utter contravention of the rules of law and our judicial system," says the lawyer, who stresses that he believed Gardiner was an excellent judge. "If that's the case, then the decision should be reversed immediately."

The revelation about the judge's apparent ex parte communication might be a defendant's worst fear come true. If one's fortune, freedom, or life is on the line, the idea that the judge is partying with the opposing attorney and talking about the case is mortifying. No matter what the nature of the relationship.

"You live in a town with a million people, find somebody else to socialize with," says Broward Public Defender Howard Finkelstein, who has heard the rumors about Gardiner but says he has found no evidence they are true and has seen her to be a dedicated judge. "It looks wrong. It looks bad. And I don't think any defendant ever will believe it doesn't affect their decisions."

Scheinberg didn't respond to numerous phone messages and refused to answer e-mail questions. He released only a brief statement through State Attorney's Office spokesman Ron Ishoy: "I've been prosecuting homicide cases for 11 years," he wrote. "During that time, I have never discussed a pending case outside of the court with a presiding judge, including this case with Judge Gardiner."

If Gardiner was swayed by her social relationship with Scheinberg to allow the prosecutor to show the gruesome photographs at trial, it may cost Loureiro his life.

Not that Loureiro, a former ice cream truck driver, is a particularly sympathetic figure. After killing Lentry in 2001, he fled to Nicaragua, where he was jailed for shooting a woman during a scuffle on the street. But the father of two young daughters certainly deserved an impartial judge who didn't talk about his case with the prosecutor whose goal was to have him executed by the state.

The ruling that attorney Grant says had the most profound impact on the jury was the exhibition of post mortem photographs of the 57-year-old Lentry.

Scheinberg described Lentry's injuries in court records, writing that he was "stabbed in his mouth and neck as well as a tortuous linear wound down the entire side of the face...

"While James Lentry was disabled but conscious," Scheinberg continued, "the defendant began to saw through the base of Mr. Lentry's neck [leaving him] virtually decapitated."

It's not surprising that a juror fainted at the sight of the photographs.

As the case wound its way through the court system, Loureiro occasionally wrote letters to Gardiner in a neat hand. One written on August 1, 2006, referred to his belief that Scheinberg had wronged him in court by referring to his deportation when in fact he was never officially deported.

"Dear Judge Gardiner," he began the letter, " ...Mr. Howard Scheinberg mislead [sic] this Honorable Court that defendant was 'deported' to the United States from Nicaragua."

After his conviction, Loureiro's daughters, 14-year-old Lillian and 12-year-old Jessica, wrote Gardiner letters asking her to send their father home.

"I will miss my daddy very much and I love him with all my heart," Jessica wrote the judge this past June 10.

They had no way to know that the judge had a personal relationship with the prosecutor and that the pair discussed the case at a bar during the trial.

Alu says that she even told the prosecutor later on the night of the ex parte discussion that she was appalled he would talk about an active case with the judge.

"He told me that if I had a problem with it that it was my obligation to go to the Florida Bar with the complaint," she said.

Alu wasn't a lawyer yet, so she had no such obligation. And she knew how vindictive the power gaggle at the courthouse — of which Gardiner is firmly a part — could be.

For months, she did nothing. But the commissioner says it has bothered her ever since. She only went on record about it with New Times recently, and then only very reluctantly.

"I still believe in the process and the right to a fair trial," she says. "The defendant has a right to know, and the public has a right to know."

Judge Gardiner's career in Broward politics blossomed in part thanks to her close ties to a titan in the county's justice system: State Attorney Michael Satz.

Satz is a longtime friend of Gardiner's dating back to the days when she was married to William Gardiner, with whom she had a Fort Lauderdale law practice in the early 1990s.

When a slot came open on the highly political North Broward Hospital District in 1993, Satz wrote a recommendation letter on Gardiner's behalf to then-Gov. Lawton Chiles, who appointed her to the post, jump-starting her career in public office.

While serving on that board, Gardiner formed a political alliance with since-disgraced Broward Sheriff Ken Jenne, then a state senator and chief counsel for the public health system.