He all but urged Mr. DeSantis to reinstate Mr. Warren himself, calling his causes to justify it “false” and his administration’s efforts to correctly assist them paltry.
“If the facts matter, the governor can simply rescind the suspension,” he wrote. “If he does not do so, it will be doubly clear that the alleged nonprosecution policies were not the real motivation for the suspension.”
Mr. DeSantis changed Mr. Warren with Judge Susan Lopez of Hillsborough County, whom the governor had appointed to the bench in 2021.
During the trial in November, Judge Hinkle sounded dissatisfied with how Mr. Warren had been handled and the way the DeSantis administration had acted. At the identical time, although, he questioned whether or not all the explanations Mr. DeSantis cited for the suspension rose to a violation of Mr. Warren’s First Amendment rights.
One of Mr. Warren’s attorneys, David Andrew O’Neil, argued at trial that the governor’s employees ought to at the least have requested the prosecutor to make clear his positions earlier than deciding to droop him.
Under Florida regulation, a governor can droop state officers for wrongdoing that features neglect of obligation, incompetence, malfeasance, drunkenness or fee of a felony. Lawyers for Mr. DeSantis argued that the governor acted inside his energy in suspending Mr. Warren, who was in his second time period because the state lawyer for the thirteenth Judicial Circuit, as a result of Mr. Warren had issued “blanket” insurance policies towards prosecuting minor crimes. Mr. Warren, who testified within the trial on Nov. 29, mentioned his insurance policies weren’t blanket refusals but reasonably had been meant to offer prosecutors discretion over which circumstances to pursue.
Judge Hinkle discovered that Mr. Warren had not imposed blanket insurance policies: “Mr. Warren’s well-established policy, followed in every case by every prosecutor in the office, was to exercise prosecutorial discretion at every stage of every case. Any reasonable investigation would have confirmed this.”
Mr. Warren additionally argued within the case that his suspension, with out pay, was politically motivated. The prosecutor had publicly disagreed with Mr. DeSantis up to now, and had signed an earlier pledge to not criminalize transgender folks and gender-affirming well being care.