(Headline USA) A former Florida state attorney ousted for his refusal to enforce the state’s laws filed a lawsuit against Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis this week, alleging the governor violated his First Amendment rights.
DeSantis fired Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren this month because of statements Warren had made in which he vowed not to enforce Florida’s pro-life and transgender restrictions.
“State Attorneys have a duty to prosecute crimes as defined in Florida law, not to pick and choose which laws to enforce based on his personal agenda,” DeSantis said at the time.
Prosecutors have a duty to enforce the law, not pick and choose which laws they agree with.
The State Attorney for the 13th Judicial Circuit, Andrew Warren, has instituted nonenforcement policies and has declared that he will refuse to enforce laws he doesn’t like. pic.twitter.com/EbSbCRrLHa
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) August 4, 2022
In his lawsuit filed Wednesday, Warren accused DeSantis of violating his right to free speech and his right to prosecutorial discretion. He also claimed DeSantis did not identify sufficient reasoning to justify a suspension.
“Florida’s current 15-week abortion ban was found to violate the Florida Constitution by the first court to review it. And Florida has no criminal law at all regarding medical treatments of gender-affirming care. His allegations of ‘neglect of duty’ and ‘incompetence’ are based not on what I have done but on what he predicts I will do,” Warren wrote in a recent op-ed for the Washington Post.
At a press conference this week, Warren continued, “There’s so much more at stake here than my job … The governor’s authority is not unlimited.”
Warren also claimed that, by firing him, DeSantis was “overturning a fair election and throwing out the votes of hundreds of thousands of Floridians.”
He is asking the state to reinstate him as state attorney, a decision that would ultimately fall to Florida’s Republican-led Senate if the lawsuit is upheld.
