Hilliard Moldof

Fifty years in the courtroom

Hilliard earned his law degree from Suffolk University Law School and was admitted to The Florida Bar on June 25, 1976. He built his practice in Fort Lauderdale and has appeared in the criminal courts of the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit for five decades, handling felony trials and the appeals that follow them.

Much of that work has been capital defense. He was trying death penalty cases in Broward County when they were at their most common, and he has been appointed by the courts to handle capital matters other lawyers could not take on, including service as special counsel and as a special public defender.

Picking a jury is a craft, and after fifty years of trials Hilliard has developed a style entirely his own. It is sought after well beyond his own cases: civil firms bring him in to conduct voir dire in their trials, the questioning that decides who ends up in the jury box.

His cases have produced reported decisions in the Florida district courts of appeal, the Florida Supreme Court, and the United States Courts of Appeals for the Second, Seventh, and Eleventh Circuits.

The Florida Bar has recognized him as a 50-year member at its 50-Year Members and Senior Counselors Awards. That length of experience is the reason he is of counsel to this firm: when a matter calls for someone who has tried the case before, Moldof Law can bring in an attorney who has spent fifty years doing exactly that.

Hilliard sees clients at the firm’s Fort Lauderdale office, by appointment.

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A case that defined a career

The Seth Penalver acquittal

Seth Penalver spent eighteen years in custody, thirteen of them on death row, for a 1994 triple murder at a Miramar home. After the Florida Supreme Court reversed his original conviction, Hilliard tried the case to a Broward County jury. On December 21, 2012, that jury found Penalver not guilty on every count, and he walked out of the courthouse a free man.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center (opens in a new tab), Penalver was the 142nd person exonerated and freed from death row in the United States since 1973, and the 24th in Florida, which has had more death row exonerations than any other state.

“Good, hard work, and a good jury system, is America at its best.”

The case was later the subject of “Death, Lies and Videotape,” an episode of CNN’s Death Row Stories that first aired in August 2015 and featured Hilliard’s work on it.

Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Every case is different, and the outcome of any particular matter depends on its specific facts and circumstances.

Probate and estate planning

A successful result in a contested probate case brought more of that work his way, and probate has been part of his practice ever since. He takes both contested and uncontested matters, anywhere in Florida.

Estate planning arrived less deliberately. Friends started asking him to help with their own plans: what they owned, what they wanted to leave behind, and who would be responsible for carrying it out. Enough of them asked that he made it a formal part of his practice.

Both draw on the same fifty years. A lawyer who has spent a career in contested litigation knows where an estate plan is most likely to be challenged, and that perspective shapes how he approaches the work.

Probate at Moldof Law → Estate planning at Moldof Law →