A spokesperson for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis defended the governor’s suspension of State Attorney Andrew Warren after oral arguments began in federal court this week.
“Governor DeSantis has a duty to hold Florida’s elected officials to the standards of their oath of office,” press secretary Bryan Griffin said in a statement issued on Monday. “Accordingly, Governor DeSantis suspended State Attorney Andrew Warren of the 13th Judicial Circuit due to his neglect of duty and incompetence. We maintain that the governor has the authority to suspend a state officer under Article IV, Section 7 of the Constitution of the State of Florida.”
Warren was in court on Tuesday for the start of his civil case against DeSantis, arguing that his removal from office violated his freedom of speech rights.
According to the complaint (
pdf) filed Aug. 17 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, Warren
argues that the First Amendment requires that elected officials “be given the widest latitude to express their views on issues of policy.” He further contends that the U.S. Supreme Court recently explained that the First Amendment “prohibits government officials from subjecting individuals to ’retaliatory actions’ after the fact for having engaged in protected speech.”Article IV, Section 7 of the Florida State Constitution states, “the governor may suspend from office any state officer not subject to impeachment ... for malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, or commission of a felony, and may fill the office by appointment for the period of suspension.”
Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Warren signed a joint statement on June 24, 2022, (
pdf) with 90 other elected state prosecutors vowing to “decline to use [their] offices’ resources to criminalize reproductive health decisions and commit to exercise our well-settled discretion and refrain from prosecuting those who seek, provide, or support abortions.”
Florida criminal law prohibits partial-birth abortions, which are classified as second-degree felonies.
Florida law also prohibits physicians from performing abortions during the third trimester.
Warren Signs Joint Statements
In June 2021, Warren signed a Joint Statement (
pdf) with 73 other elected prosecutors, vowing not to uphold state laws but rather to use their “own discretion and not promote the criminalization of gender-affirming healthcare or transgender people.”
Although
DeSantis said in June that he would sign legislation that would ban transgender surgical procedures for minors, Florida has yet to enact such criminal laws.
According to his Aug. 4 Executive Order (
pdf), DeSantis dismissed Warren due to “incompetence and willful defiance of his duties as state attorney.” DeSantis further admonished that the statements signed by Warren prove that he “thinks he has the authority to defy the Florida Legislature and nullify in his jurisdiction criminal laws with which he disagrees.”
Still, the lawsuit alleges that the governor’s executive order “did not identify any actual conduct by Warren related to his official duties involving alleged criminal activity for seeking gender-affirming healthcare or abortion.”
Warren
spoke to reporters outside the courthouse on Tuesday.
“It’s been 117 days since the governor suspended democracy and we are excited to finally have our day in court,“ he said. ”A trial is a search for truth and in this building, the truth matters.”
