The progressive state attorney who was suspended on Wednesday by Florida governor Ron DeSantis has a history of downgrading or dropping charges in serious criminal cases, resulting in multiple incidents of offenders committing more egregious crimes upon their release.
Monique Worrell, Democratic state attorney for the Ninth Judicial Circuit of Florida, which covers the Orlando area, was suspended on grounds of neglect of duty and incompetence. According to DeSantis’s executive order, Worrell implemented practices and policies that “systematically permitted” violent offenders, drug traffickers, serious juvenile offenders, and pedophiles to evade prison time.
Elected in 2020, Worrell ran on a progressive platform with endorsements from Vice President Kamala Harris and Senator Bernie Sanders. An advocate of radical criminal-justice reform, she previously served as the chief legal officer at the nonprofit REFORM Alliance, which aims to “transform probation and parole by changing laws, systems and culture to create real pathways to work and wellbeing” according to its website. Her suspension comes one year after DeSantis, a 2024 presidential hopeful, suspended Hillsborough County state attorney Andrew Warren for publicly pledging not to enforce the state’s six-week abortion ban.
Worrell is accused of skewing her charging decisions in order to ensure that offenders would avoid mandatory minimum sentences for drug-trafficking and gun crimes, allowing juvenile offenders to avoid serious charges or incarceration altogether, and limiting charges for child pornography. In three cases cited in the executive order, Worrell’s charging decisions and the resulting sentences allowed criminals who might otherwise have been behind bars to inflict more harm on the community.
One case cited in the executive order involves Daton Viel, who shot and wounded two police officers during a standoff at an Orlando hotel over the weekend. Viel, who was killed in the standoff, had been arrested at least six times since 2016 on felony charges including assault, burglary, and trespassing, according to Florida Department of Law Enforcement data. Most recently, Viel was arrested for sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl whom he picked up outside of school. He pleaded not guilty and was released on $125,500 bond in June. Addressing the case during a news conference earlier this week, Worrell argued that the decision to release Viel on bond rested with the presiding judge in the case. Pressed on why her office didn’t appeal to the judge to ask that Viel be kept behind bars, Worrell said that she didn’t want to engage in “finger-pointing” and “blaming.”
Florida Department of Corrections data suggest that Worrell was less zealous in prosecuting drug dealers than her counterparts elsewhere in the state were, choosing either not to prosecute certain cases or charging lesser violations that allowed perpetrators to avoid lengthy mandatory minimum sentences that correspond to the type and quantity of the drug they’re found in possession of. For example, in 2021, the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office referred 32 drug-trafficking cases to Worrell’s office. But, as of March 2023, only three cases received a minimum mandatory sentence. None of the 64 drug-trafficking cases referred to her office in 2022 received a minimum mandatory sentence. Between January 1, 2022, and March 31, 2023, Worrell’s circuit ranked last among all circuits, on a per capita basis, in the number of people imprisoned for drug-trafficking crimes. Her circuit sent 39 residents per million to prison for the crime of drug-trafficking over the last two years, while the state average was 114.3.
Worrell also effectively inhibited or discouraged her assistant state attorneys from obtaining meritorious minimum mandatory sentences for gun crimes, the executive order alleges. Mandatory minimum sentences for use of a firearm during a violent felony range from ten to 25 years under Florida law. Any individual who was previously convicted of a felony and is merely found to possess a gun also gets an automatic three years.
Under Worrell’s leadership, the Ninth Circuit in 2021 and 2022 did not secure mandatory minimum sentences for 57 out of 58 cases of non-homicide robbery with a firearm that were referred by the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office. In those two years, only one out of eleven referrals for cases of non-homicide carjacking with a firearm to the Ninth Circuit resulted in the mandatory minimum sentence of ten years.
The Ninth Circuit also received 14 non-homicide cases involving home-invasion robbery with a firearm from the sheriff’s office, yet none of those arrests resulted in the mandatory minimum sentences. Lastly, only five of the 130 cases involving possession of a firearm by a convicted felon referred to the Ninth Circuit in 2021 and 2022 resulted in the mandatory minimum sentence of five years.
Prison admission data from January 1, 2022, to March 31, 2023, further back up DeSantis’s claims that armed crimes were not appropriately prosecuted by Worrell’s office. In that year, the Ninth Circuit, on a per capita basis, had among the lowest prison-admission rates relative to the other circuits for robbery with a weapon, armed burglary, and weapons possession.
Worrell also presided over a “variety of techniques” that allowed serious minor offenders to evade incarceration, the executive order argues. For example, the Ninth Circuit was last of all 20 circuits in Florida in the percentage of juvenile-felony cases brought during Worrell’s tenure, according to Florida Department of Juvenile Justice data. Additionally, the Ninth Circuit consistently was first among all circuits in the percentage of juvenile-felony cases dropped, the executive order notes. DeSantis also accused Worrell’s office of purposefully delaying juvenile-case processing, helping minor offenders back on the streets and out of prison.
Worrell’s negligence was apparent, DeSantis argues, in the case of Keith Moses, who already had a juvenile criminal record when he was arrested during a traffic stop in 2021 for marijuana possession. Prosecutors dropped the 2021 case because the marijuana was never tested. A few years earlier, when he was 14 to 15 years old, Moses was arrested on four felony charges, including breaking into and stealing from unoccupied vehicles, being a passenger in a stolen vehicle, and robbery and battery, according to a WESH 2 News review of arrest reports.
Moses went on to kill a reporter and a nine-year-old girl in February 2023. After facing scrutiny from DeSantis over dropping the drug charge at the time, Worrell defended that the sheriff’s office was also partially responsible for failing to escalate Moses’s case. During the 2021 traffic incident, a gun was thrown from the side of the car. The sheriff’s office, however, did not perform a DNA test to determine whether Moses owned it — evidence that Worrell claims could have prevented him from roaming free and perpetrating the 2023 murders.
In May 2022, 17-year-old Lorenzo Larry was arrested for carrying a concealed firearm, possession of a firearm on school property, and criminal possession of a firearm by a minor. The year before, Larry was involved in a homicide investigation after a 23-year-old was found dead in a car, Orange County Sheriff’s Deputy John Mina told Fox 35 Orlando. Larry was released after all these arrests, the executive order said. At 17-years-old, he went on to commit the murder of his 16-year-old, 20-weeks-pregnant girlfriend, De’Shayla Ferguson. He was charged with second-degree murder and the killing of an unborn child by injury to the mother. If convicted, he faces a life sentence.