FORT PIERCE -- A St. Lucie County Circuit Court judge said he would not allow a traffic division clerk to return to work -- even on a temporary basis -- until he heard more evidence on what led to her firing amid a ticket-fixing debate.

Debra Noble, 39, was fired from her job in July after a Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation revealed traffic tickets were being mishandled in the Clerk of Courts Office.

Noble was a supervisor in the office, although the criminal investigation found that she did nothing wrong.

The letter she received from Clerk of Court JoAnne Holman said she was fired "because of your failure to abide by the Clerk's Office's policies and procedures."

But Noble and her supporters said she was fired for complying with the FDLE investigation, which resulted in the arrest of two traffic division clerks who are now awaiting trial. Those two clerks were fired too.

Noble believes the FDLE investigation shows she did nothing wrong, and has sued to get her job back. She was in court Tuesday hoping Circuit Judge Ben L. Bryan would let her come back to work on a temporary basis, until her case could go to trial.

Noble's attorney, Frederick Ford, said she wants to go back to work as soon as possible, and making her wait until after the trial would be a financial hardship.

The next hearing in the matter has not yet been set.

Holman and her attorney left the courtroom Tuesday without comment. The call for an investigation at the clerk's office began in May when County Court Judge Thomas Walsh was notified by Port St. Lucie police that a man who had racked up numerous traffic tickets was still driving legally.

Walsh wrote in a letter that at least 10 percent of the St. Lucie County traffic tickets filed since 1999 have not reached the Department of Motor Vehicles because of "case reporting problems" in the clerk's office.

The FDLE began an official investigation after receiving a June 12 letter from the governor.

In court documents filed Friday, Holman said, among other things, that Noble was fired because she was a supervisor in the department who should have discovered, and reported, that traffic information was not reaching the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles; and that Noble herself admitted accepting a gift certificate and a new set of tires in exchange for helping people fix traffic tickets.

But Noble said in a previous hearing in the human resources office that she never said those things, that the gifts were from old friends -- people she had known since high school -- who were helping her out in one way or another. She said she paid her friend back for the tires, and the gift certificate was for helping her friend bus tables at her restaurant.

And as far as traffic information reaching DMV, that has been blamed on a computer glitch from 1999, when the Clerk of Courts Office hired a contractor to write a new computer program that would be Y2K compatible. That contractor apparently didn't include in the program a way for the information to be transmitted to Tallahassee.

But according to previous interviews with members of the Clerk of Courts Office, no one knew of that until the FDLE investigation, and everyone assumed the information was being sent.

Walsh told Chief Judge Cynthia Angelos, in a letter dated Aug. 12, that Noble was an exemplary employee who "was terminated because she answered my inquiries and subsequently cooperated with a criminal investigation. It is, I believe a wrongful termination that reflects an attempt to influence a witness by a constitutional officer."

In her lawsuit, Noble claims she told investigators that Holman knew about the ticket problem since at least August 2000, when Noble was assigned to work on the backlog of ticket information.

Palm Beach Post

From the Y2K Archives

Y2K bug back to haunt St. Lucie traffic offenders

-- Anonymous, November 19, 2003