Miami trial lawyer. Twenty years in HD 108. Running because the seat needs a fighter who's done the fighting.
Working-class roots.
Peter Walsh grew up one of seven kids in a Boston housing project in Hyde Park, MA. His father was a custodian in the Boston Public Schools; his mother stayed home to raise the family, then went to work as a professional secretary at the Boston VA Hospital. It was, in Peter's words, "a busy house and a happy house."
He earned a place at Boston Latin School — the oldest public school in America — and went on to Providence College on his own steam, graduating Magna Cum Laude after a junior year abroad at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He earned a master's in Soviet and East European Studies on scholarship at Carleton University in Ottawa, studied Russian briefly in Moscow, and graduated from George Washington University Law School.
A busy house and a happy house. Seven kids. A custodian's wages and a secretary's second income. They taught him what it costs to raise a family on the wrong end of an unfair economy.
A career in the courtroom.
Peter was recruited to Miami after law school by Janet Reno's State Attorney's Office. He spent four years as an Assistant State Attorney — the best law job he ever had. He was the sole prosecutor selected to launch the office's domestic violence unit, also handling mental health and Baker Act Court. He was picked for the career-criminal unit. He was the only ASA chosen to design and teach the law course at the Miami-Dade Police Academy.
After leaving the State Attorney's Office, Peter took a turn at criminal defense — and his most memorable trial, State v. Calabro, was on that side: he won an acquittal for a man who said he was wrongfully charged with murder, after getting one of two confessions suppressed. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed on appeal. Since then, Peter has spent his career in civil practice, the last several years as a plaintiffs' lawyer for injured workers and families.
He won approximately $1 million for the parents of a drowned 7-year-old by finding insurance coverage everyone said wasn't there. He won approximately $750,000 for a critically injured truck driver by piercing workers'-compensation immunity — by his own description, "near impossible." And he partnered with the ACLU to sue then-Governor Rick Scott over the unconstitutional drug-testing of every Florida state employee — a case Peter wrote and developed himself. The State of Florida ultimately had to pay for it.
The best law job I ever had.
Twenty years in the neighborhood.
Peter has lived in Miami Shores for more than two decades. He has coached youth baseball, basketball, and soccer for ten of those years — the way his own father, a coach, taught him to do it: by making every kid feel special.
He spent five years as Santa Claus at Miami Shores Elementary, a majority-Black school, and again at the Miami Shores Winter Camp. He read to the kids dressed as the Cat in the Hat. As Peter puts it: "Doing that did more for me than it did for the kids."
In Miami Shores. Peter has lived in HD 108 for more than twenty years.
Peter is running for the open Florida House District 108 because he doesn't believe the alternatives in this race will fight for HD 108 the way our community needs to be fought for. When he's asked what he wants voters to remember about him on election day, he doesn't reach for a slogan. He says: "He cares about me and mine."
He cares about me and mine.
Want Peter to come speak to your group, your block, your church, your union?
