ORLANDO, Fla. – Three days after Monique Worrell won back her job at the ballot box, a federal judge Friday rejected a lawsuit over Gov. Ron DeSantis’ controversial 2023 decision to suspend her as state attorney in Orange and Osceola counties.
U.S. District Judge Julie Sneed issued a 20-page ruling that dismissed a lawsuit in which two Worrell supporters and the group Florida Rising alleged the suspension violated voters’ due process and First Amendment rights.
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The ruling did not mention Tuesday’s election, when Worrell, a Democrat, easily defeated Andrew Bain to regain the state attorney’s job in the 9th Judicial Circuit.
DeSantis in August 2023 issued an executive order suspending Worrell, who was first elected in 2020, and appointed Bain to replace her. Among other things, the executive order alleged that Worrell’s policies prevented or discouraged assistant state attorneys from seeking minimum mandatory sentences for gun crimes and drug trafficking offenses.
Voters David Caicedo and Rajib Chowdhury and Florida Rising filed the legal challenge in November 2023. After Sneed dismissed an initial version of the lawsuit in May, attorneys for the plaintiffs filed a revised version and alleged Worrell’s suspension disenfranchised voters.
“Governor DeSantis abrogated plaintiffs’ associational and expressional First Amendment rights when he abused the suspension authority accorded to him under Florida law,” the revised lawsuit said.
But in granting DeSantis’ motion to dismiss the case Friday, Sneed ruled, in part, that Caicedo and Chowdhury did not have legal standing to challenge the suspension. She wrote that the voters and Florida Rising’s members “have failed to allege an invasion of a legally protected interest in defendant’s (DeSantis’) removal of Ms. Worrell from her position pursuant to the Florida Constitution.”
“Their injury is derivative of Ms. Worrell’s own injury in being removed, and as voters who cast successful ballots for her, they do not establish that they had any legally protectable interest in her remaining in office through her term. … Further, Mr. Caicedo, Mr. Chowdhury, and Florida Rising’s members have failed to allege a particularized injury aside from being among the 400,000 individuals who voted for Ms. Worrell,” wrote Sneed, who was nominated to the federal bench by President Joe Biden.
Sneed said Florida Rising established standing on the basis that it alleged it had to divert resources in response to Worrell’s suspension. But she ruled against the voting rights and organizing group on the underlying constitutional issues.
“Plaintiffs frame defendant’s conduct as a Fourteenth Amendment violation of the ‘fundamental right to an effective vote,’ arguing that the votes cast for Ms. Worrell were rendered ineffective when defendant removed her from office before the end of her term,” Sneed wrote. “However, the votes cast for Ms. Worrell were effective because Ms. Worrell assumed office after being elected.”
Worrell and her supporters disputed DeSantis’ reasons for suspending her. The lawsuit, for example, said that in “following through on her campaign promises to reform the criminal legal system, Ms. Worrell was doing nothing other than meeting her professional and ethical obligations and exercising her prosecutorial discretion.”
Worrell received about 57.5% of the vote Tuesday in defeating Bain, a former Orange County judge who ran without party affiliation.
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