Former Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren has become a cause celebre for liberals since being dismissed from his job by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The Republican governor in August suspended Warren for announcing that he would not prosecute people for criminal violations under Florida’s new abortion law.
Warren has sued to try to get his job back.
But this week, Florida’s county sheriffs demonstrated they are firmly in the governor’s corner.
The Florida Sheriffs Association filed a brief in the case that supports DeSantis.
The document “argues that the governor was right to remove Warren from office for what the governor characterized as Warren’s refusal to enforce certain laws,” the Times noted.
The court filing was endorsed by 48 current and former law enforcement officials, including 11 of Florida’s current 20 state attorneys. Other signers included former Attorneys General Pam Bondi and Bill McCollum.
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Robert Wayne Evans, a lawyer for the Sheriff’s Association, argued in court records that Warren “was not removed for exercising his prosecutorial discretion. Rather he established policies indicating that his office would not prosecute certain classes of crime or that there would be a presumption of non-prosecution for a variety of offenses, including charges arising from pedestrian and bicycle stops. These proclamations detrimentally impact a sheriff’s ability to effectively safeguard the public.”
Moreover, Evens noted, Warren, through such policies, “encourages lawlessness.” He also “incentivizes criminals to explore methods that will escape the attention of law enforcement officers because the state attorney has announced that these cases will never be charged.”
Warren then lashed out on Tuesday in a press release framing multiple Sheriffs as hypocrites including Hillsborough and Pinellas county Sheriffs Chad Chronister and Bob Gualtieri, respectively.
Warren argued that Chronister opted not to enforce eviction orders in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, while ripping Gualtieri for saying his agency would not issue citations to scofflaws who rejected Pinellas County’s mask mandate.
“These examples highlight the hypocrisy of the Florida Sheriffs Association making the purely political move of joining with DeSantis on his anti-democratic effort to suspend Warren,” the prosecutor’s release stated.
The press release noted Seminole County Sheriff Dennis Lemma pledged in 2020 that even if Florida passed a law requiring owners of assault rifles to register their weapons, he would not enforce it.
“It’s not only that I wouldn’t, the majority of sheriffs across the state would not do it,” Lemma said at the time, adding, “It’s up to the sheriffs what they are willing to enforce.”
Also noted was Orange County Sheriff John Mina for stopping evictions indefinitely when the COVID pandemic began in March 2020.
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In that case, a spokesperson for the neighboring Osceola County Sheriff’s Office indicated that suspending evictions would require them to ignore court orders, explaining that the office will “proceed as required by the court and court order should we receive such order from the court.”
However, blasting sheriffs for keeping people in their homes after the government shut down their jobs, and refusing to force people to mask up when the efficacy of masks is debatable, are pretty weak accusations – especially when stacked up against an announcement that the law will not be enforced against doctors who, for example, abort babies in the third trimester.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Free Press.
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