A group of House Democrats are demanding a hearing to probe Florida’s “anti-democratic abuses” after Governor DeSantis suspended another progressive prosecutor for dereliction of duty because of her record of downgrading and dropping charges in serious criminal cases.
In a letter, House Committee on Oversight and Accountability ranking member Jamie Raskin and Democratic representatives Maxwell Frost and Dan Goldman urged committee chairman James Comer to conduct a hearing to “examine ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the State of Florida.”
The request, the lawmakers said, was a renewal of one already submitted in May to investigate “the shocking trends of anti-democratic abuses of power in the state.” They accused DeSantis of suspending Monique Worrell, Democratic state attorney for the Ninth Judicial Circuit of Florida, on Wednesday in order to install a political ally as her replacement.
Via executive order, DeSantis removed her from her post, citing her record of implementing practices and policies that “systematically permitted” violent offenders, drug traffickers, serious juvenile offenders, and pedophiles to evade prison time. 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.
The executive order alleged that Worrell skewed her charging decisions in order to ensure that offenders would avoid mandatory minimum sentences for drug-trafficking and gun crimes, allowed juvenile offenders to avoid serious charges or incarceration altogether, and limited 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.
Worrell’s removal, the House Democrats said, “flies in the face of the courts and the Constitution in what appears to be a scheme to undermine the will of the electorate where the courts cannot provide a legal remedy for the Constitutional violation.”
Florida’s constitution gives the governor the explicit power to suspend a state attorney. Permitted grounds for doing so include “neglect of duty,” and the Florida supreme court has upheld that the governor needs only to announce legitimate grounds for suspension. The state senate, currently Republican-dominated, rather than the state’s courts has “the exclusive responsibility to sit in judgment of the merits of a suspension.” After its review, the senate may then either remove from office or reinstate the suspended official.