Prosecutor takes the stand against Gov. DeSantis in lawsuit challenging suspension

Andrew Warren took the stand in a federal courthouse in Tallahassee on Tuesday to recount the day in August that a top legal aide to Gov. Ron DeSantis arrived, flanked by sheriff’s deputies, to drive him out of his office as state’s attorney for Hillsborough County.

It was Aug. 4, and DeSantis has just signed an executive order suspending Warren, subject to a hearing before the Florida Senate, from the job to which the county’s voters had elected him two times.

“You need to leave your office immediately,” the governor’s man, Larry Keefe, said, according to Warren’s testimony. Then Keefe turned to the deputy responsible for courthouse security and said, “You need to escort him out.”

Warren didn’t even get a chance to collect his personal belongings but complied. “I know better than to argue with law enforcement,” he testified.

Warren had traveled to the main courthouse for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida to ask Judge Robert Hinkle to give him his job back. He sued the governor, he said because “I wanted to be able to do the job that I was elected to do.”

He and his legal team argue that DeSantis’ justification for suspending him — mainly, refusal to prosecute violations of Florida’s new 15-week abortion ban and providers of transgender care (not illegal yet but being targeted by DeSantis administratively) — were pretext.

What Republican governor really wanted, the argument goes, was to take down a leading Democratic officeholder with different ideas from his own about criminal justice reform.

“He was suspended from his elected office because of what he said, what he believes, and because they differ from what the governor believes,” Warren’s lead attorney, J. Cabou of Perkins Coie, argued before Hinkle, repeating the point several times during roughly 40 minutes of opening argument.

George Levesque, of GrayRobinson’s Tallahassee office, took about 20 minutes to defend the governor in Warren v. DeSantis. He insisted that Warren’s suspension was the product of an exacting investigation into Warren’s decision to sign public statements distributed by a progressive prosecutor organization, called Fair and Just Prosecution, opposing prosecution of abortion and transgender care crimes.

‘Neglect of duty’

Warren, Levesque said, displayed an “escalating pattern of defiance” to the law that amounted to “neglect of duty,” justifying suspension.

In signing the statements in his capacity as state’s attorney, Warren acted in his official capacity, Levesque continued.

“His expression that he would never enforce a law” against abortion or transgender care amounted to an “indication of his misunderstanding of his duty,” the defense lawyer added.

“Mr. Warren was not suspended for his views of being proabortion” or in favor of trans care, but because he “pledged by signature not to prosecute” related crimes, Leveque added.

Cabou, though, argued DeSantis’ legal aides never investigated in depth — never even asked Warren to explain himself — but instead acted on rumor and sniping from selected law enforcement officials allied with the governor.

In pretrial briefs, the governor’s defense attorneys argue that any political differences between their client and Warren don’t matter as long as the governor had other, legally sound, reasons to cast him out.

In announcing the suspension back in August, DeSantis summoned a phalanx of local law enforcement heavyweights who complained that, in addition to the abortion and transgender statements, Warren had established a presumption against charging low-impact crimes, including trespass against homeless people sleeping near businesses and nonviolent resisting arrest based on civil stops of people riding bikes or pedestrians.

Warren testified that he and his top aides carefully weighed the nonprosecution policy following consultations with local law enforcement, including the Tampa Police Department and Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister (although Chronister later sent him a letter complaining about the change, according to documents shown in court).

Warren justified the policy on numerous counts: a growing backlog of minor pending charges; evidence that officers were singling out African Americans for “biking while black” detentions; the all-but closure of the criminal courts at the height of the COVID pandemic.

‘Facts and circumstances of each case’

Furthermore, the policy expressly stated that prosecutors could bring charges in the interest of public safety, such as when linked to pending felonies, probation violations, causation of physical harm, or firearm involvement, Warren testified.

What mattered was the “facts and circumstances of each case,” one document outlining the policy stated. “We will review whatever law enforcement sends us.”

As for the abortion and transgender letters, Warren said he signed because “I agreed with the general idea behind it. The letters were never “intended to be a policy statement,” he continued.

“This letter has zero impact on any case in our office,” he said.

In further support of their argument the suspension was purely political, the plaintiffs referred to early versions of the suspension executive order that referred to philanthropist George Soros’ support for criminal justice reform and prosecutors likely to pursue it, and referring to Warren as “a woke ideologue masquerading as a prosecutor.”

Aides later dropped that language, but DeSantis himself referred to Soros — a Holocaust survivor targeted as an enemy by the conservative movement — in announcing the suspension in Tampa that day and that evening during an interview with Fox News’ Carlson Tucker that the plaintiffs’ team played in court.

They also played an interview with Warren that aired on Fox 13 Tampa Bay the day the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in which Warren specified that he would treat any abortion or transgender prosecutions case by case.

And they mentioned Seminole County Sheriff Dennis Lemma, a Republican, who declared in 2020 that he would refuse to enforce a proposed state constitutional amendment banning semiautomatic rifles and shotguns.

“Nothing happened to him,” Cabou noted.