The Florida supreme court on Thursday upheld Governor Ron DeSantis’s decision last year to suspend progressive state attorney Monique Worrell, who claims she was unjustly fired for political reasons.
The court’s justices voted 6-1 to keep the suspended attorney out of a job. Worrell, who is running for office in November to regain her Orlando-area position, argued that the DeSantis’s justification for suspending her was too vague and that the decision infringed on her prosecutorial discretion. Most members of the court, five of whom were appointed by DeSantis, disagreed.
“We cannot agree with Worrell that the allegations in the Executive Order are impermissibly vague, nor that they address conduct that falls within the lawful exercise of prosecutorial discretion,” the majority opinion reads.
The court’s sole dissenting opinion, written by Justice Jorge Labarga, states that Florida’s 20 state attorneys need prosecutorial discretion to address the challenges in their respective jurisdictions since Florida is such a large state with “varying geographic and cultural influences.”
Without discretion, any time state attorneys choose which cases to prosecute, they “may also face suspension and replacement despite having been overwhelmingly elected by the voters of the circuit,” Labarga wrote.
DeSantis suspended Worrell last August through an executive order on grounds of neglect of duty and incompetence for failing to prosecute crimes. Worrell has a long history of reducing or dropping charges against violent offenders, drug traffickers, serious juvenile offenders, and pedophiles, as National Review previously reported.
Florida’s constitution gives the governor explicit power to suspend a state officer for “malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, or commission of a felony, and may fill the office by appointment for the period of suspension.” At any time prior to removal, the governor may reinstate the suspended officer.
The Republican-dominated Florida senate, which has the authority to judge the merits of a suspension, ultimately removed Worrell from her post.
The governor appointed Andrew Bain to replace her. Bain will face off against the suspended state attorney in November.
Worrell marked the second Democratic prosecutor that DeSantis removed from office. Hillsborough County state attorney Andrew Warren, whose jurisdiction included Tampa, was suspended in August 2022 after he publicly pledged to not enforce the state’s six-week abortion ban. In April, Warren announced he will run for re-election as well.