Miami-Dade County Court Judge Betty Capote's trip to the bench was comparatively easy — no glad-handing at countless campaign stops or repeat applications to the Judicial Nominating Commission.
She applied for the job last September after 11 years as an assistant state attorney and was appointed in November.
"It's very rare to get out of the JNC on the first time and be approved on the first time," Ramon Abadin, a partner at Sedgwick in Miami, said at Capote's investiture Friday.
Holland & Knight attorney Anna Marie Hernandez, treasurer of the Cuban American Bar Association and a childhood friend, said Capote cut short a vacation in Japan for her JNC interview last fall.
"I often wondered if she'd be a lifer at the state attorney's office because she loved it so much," Hernandez said.
Capote remembered running around her house as a young girl banging a wooden mallet and yelling, "Objection overruled, objection overruled."
She thanked her grandfather for sending her father, then 8, from Havana to Miami in Operation Pedro Pan in the early 1960s and her father for working long hours to make it all happen.
"These are stories that are not unique to us here in Miami, but they have to be repeated," she said.