The middle district judge also works as an adjunct professor at the University of Florida. In one of his classes is a very vocal white supremacist who has expounded hate toward Jewish people and other classes of people. This judge/professor gave this student an award for writing a white supremacist paper.
Since that time, this judge has been labeled as “The White Supremacist Judge.”
Not surprisingly, he denied the Certificate of Appealability for Costello.
The CoA was denied despite the judge ignoring the merits of the motion, the fact that the motion was not time barred, and skipped over most of the grounds of the motion, not addressing them at all.