ORLANDO, Fla. – As a representative of the Florida Attorney General’s office met with Orange-Osceola State Attorney Monique Worrell Tuesday to discuss ways of helping Worrell’s office whittle down a backlog of unprosecuted cases, questions persisted about how the backlog occurred.
Worrell said her office is trying to review more than 13,000 non-arrest cases. Those are cases in which law enforcement investigates crimes but does not establish enough probable cause to make arrests or issue notices to appear in court.
Worrell and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier held dueling news conferences in Orlando Monday to address the issue.
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Uthmeier, who offered to temporarily loan Worrell some of his prosecutors, criticized Worrell’s recent policy that requires law enforcement to make arrests in most cases before sending them to her office for possible prosecution.
“Just last week alone she turned down 90 cases from the sheriff’s office here,” Uthmeier said Monday. “That’s not acceptable and we’re going to be watching.”
Hours later, Worrell suggested law enforcement agencies were to blame for sending cases to her office that lacked probable cause, a much lower legal standard than what prosecutors must prove to a jury to win convictions.
“If law enforcement cannot arrest them, then neither can I,” Worrell said Monday.
During her news conference, Worrell displayed a graph that suggested the Orange County Sheriff’s Office sent more than three times as many non-arrest cases to her office as the Orlando Police Department last year.
Worrell did not mention that the Orange County Sheriff’s Office is a larger agency than the Orlando Police Department, with more officers serving a larger citizen population.
Instead, Worrell attributed differences in the agencies’ arrest policies for the larger number of non-arrest cases originating from the sheriff’s office.
“This math isn’t mathing,” a spokesperson for Florida’s Attorney General later posted on X in response to Worrell’s slide presentation. “Adjusting for population, the sheriff’s office sent fewer non-arrest cases over the timeframe she displayed.”
Although Uthmeier’s staff used questionable population data to calculate the specific numbers of non-arrest cases the two agencies generated per capita, the social media post highlighted questions about Worrell’s presentation.
To better compare how the two law enforcement agencies forward non-arrest cases to prosecutors, News 6 submitted a public record request to the state attorney’s office Tuesday seeking additional data.
Those records, which could support or refute Worrell’s contention that the agencies’ differing arrest policies play a role in the backlog of non-arrest cases, had not yet been compiled and released at the time of this publication.
