By a 6-1 decision, the Florida Supreme Court upheld Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) suspension of State Attorney Monique Worrell.
DeSantis suspended Worrell, who worked in the 9th Judicial Circuit representing Orange and Osceola counties, on Aug. 9, 2023, for “neglecting her duty to faithfully prosecute crime in her jurisdiction.”
DeSantis said Worrell had prevented attorneys in her office from seeking “minimum mandatory sentences” for both drug trafficking offenses and gun offenses, allowing for “violent criminals to escape the full consequences of their criminal conduct.”
In his executive order, DeSantis noted that the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office referred 58 nonhomicide robberies with a firearm to prosecutors in 2021 and 2022, but only one of those cases resulted in a minimum mandatory sentence of 10 years.
A month after her suspension, Worrell filed a petition arguing DeSantis did not cite specific behavior that would give him the authority under state law to suspend her.
“The Executive Order is invalid because it fails to allege any specific conduct of Ms. Worrell that, if true, would constitute a basis for suspension on the ground of neglect of duty or incompetence,” the petition reads. “Instead, the Order wrongly attempts to infer her ‘practices and policies’ from inapposite data, but even if such practices and policies existed, they would not constitute a ground for suspension.”
However the court found Worrell’s claim that the allegations in the executive order were vague to be false.
“We have said that a suspension order does not infringe on a state attorney’s lawful exercise of prosecutorial discretion where it alleges that such discretion is, in fact, not being exercised in individual cases but, rather, that generalized policies have resulted in categorical enforcement practices,” the majority opinion reads.
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While Worrell remains barred from her duties as state attorney, she is still qualified to run for reelection and is the only Democratic candidate on the ballot.