NAPLES, Fla. - Come to court for speeding, you could go home without your license. That's what one Miami attorney says he's seen in Collier County.

Collier County judges started hearing traffic cases in April, after the state cut funding to the hearing officer program. Hearing officers were attorneys trained and paid to adjudicate traffic cases. In some Florida counties, the county has picked up the tap to keep paying for attorneys to hear the cases. In Collier County, the cases ended up on the desk of Collier County Judges.

After judges started hearing cases in Collier County, Miami Attorney Mark Gold noticed a change.

"That's when we started seeing these, what we felt, were egregious sentences. So we looked into it further," Gold told CALL FOR ACTION.

Under Florida's open records laws, Gold asked to see all emails between Collier County judges.

Gold found this one sent by Judge Vince Murphy suggesting sentencing standards like those going a "triple digit speed--suspend--length of suspension based on record" and "teens or young 20's,short suspension if record isn't bad."

Gold told CALL FOR ACTION "I believe in my opinion the suspensions are not proper, unless there are egregious circumstances where someone was killed, injured. And that's what the statute sets forth."

The email also says "Remember if we ever let the inmates run the asylum a la Dade county, we'll have to go through hell to get it back."

"There's a point system in place to suspend people's licenses. If you get too many tickets or points, your license will get suspended . In my opinion that's the way it'll work. It's not for the court to come in and suspend solely because you're traveling at a high rate of speed," Gold told WINK NEWS.

So CALL FOR ACTION sat though traffic court in Collier County. We sat in on Judge Murphy's courtroom to see if he was suspending licenses. We didn't see him suspend any license on the day we were in court. We also didn't see anyone successful in getting points withheld from their record if they were found guilty of repeated excessive speeding.

One man asked the judge if he plead guilty, if he would withhold adjudication which means the points wouldn't go on the driver's record. Judge Murphy told the man, "I do think is appropriate to adjudicate you guilty because 27 miles over the posted speed limit is too fast."

CALL FOR ACTION sat down with Judge Murphy asked him about how he determines a sentence.

"when someone is driving a motorcycle 118 mile per hour, if someone is driving a Bentley 110 miles per hour--that's something where you say this person is driving dangerous," Murphy told WINK.

He told WINK he reviews the nature of the offense if it was putting anyone's life at risk. He told us he asks himself --in his words"Is this event-- if proven--is this event part of a pattern of bad driving where the person simply has not gotten the message by simply receiving a fine of 3 to 400 dollars each time it happens?"

He told us he considers whether this is behavior the community would tolerate and how the sentence would help the person rehabilitate his or her behavior.

As for that email, Judge Murphy says it "was a poor choice of words." He says he meant to tell his colleagues what he was seeing in traffic court--not tell them how to judge.

"I really regret any implication that might have arisen that we don't treat traffic court seriously. I can assure everybody that traffic court is something we treat very seriously," says Murphy.

Murphy says if judges don't assign points to people's records--drivers who excessively speed will have the same driving records and insurance rates as those who obey the law. We've posted part of the interview where he told us about one case where he's seen that happen.