TAMPA – Gov. Ron DeSantis criticized Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren’s “woke” politics in his stunning announcement last week suspending the twice-elected official.
But, it was precisely progressive politics that drove Warren’s own major announcement Thursday, which she had been planning for days before she was escorted from her office this morning by armed sheriff’s deputies.
Prosecutors have secured a grand jury indictment for two men who authorities say raped and killed Barbara Grams and Linda Lansen in 1983. In Grams’ case, Tampa police detectives have nabbed the wrong man, who went on to spend 37 years in prison. Lansen’s case has not been solved by Hillsborough detectives since July 1983, when his body was found at the end of a freeway west of downtown Tampa.
“This is a day I never thought would come,” Lansen’s niece said Thursday through tears, standing next to Warren before reporters.
The breakthrough is a product of Warren’s conviction review unit, which investigates claims of innocence believed to be overturning wrongful convictions. There are six such units in Florida, all but one in the state attorney’s office run by Democrats, and about 100 nationwide, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
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Warren’s program has shepherded some success. By the end of his first term, he helped exonerate Robert Duboise, the man who was wrongfully convicted in Grams’ murder. Last year, it helped reverse the life sentence for Tony Hopps, who was found guilty of an armed robbery based on evidence that would likely have been suppressed today. A number of other convictions are empty because they are tied to discredited Tampa police officers.
Prosecutors have tremendous power in the criminal justice system, deciding which cases to pursue and which to dismiss, whether to seek the death penalty, and whether to punish children as adults.
But in the last decade, a new generation of prosecutors has begun to use that power to also address systemic problems, said Miriam Krinsky, executive director of Fair and Equitable Prosecutions.
They include reducing mass incarceration through arrest diversion programs, exposing police corruption by denying testimony from officers who have previously been caught lying, and removing wrongful convictions through conviction reviews or integrity units. Warren became a key member of the new generation after he was elected in 2016, running on a reform platform that managed to unseat the long-time Republican incumbent.
“If the governor wants to call it awake,” Krinsky said, “my hope is that every prosecutor in the state will meet that standard of wokeness.”
‘Value statements’ or defying the law?
DeSantis did not cite the trust review among his reasons for removing Warren. Read also : U.S. Attorney’s Office Releases Second Quarter Immigration Enforcement Statistics for 2022. But the unprecedented suspension underscored a conservative backlash for progressive prosecutors seen as soft on crime that prompted some to recall campaigns for district attorneys in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
In his announcement, DeSantis cited both as places where “individual prosecutors take it upon themselves to determine which laws they like and will enforce and which laws they don’t like and don’t enforce.”
“It undermines public safety. It has really hurt this community. It is very bad for the rule of law,” said DeSantis.
The governor’s executive order laying out the case for Warren’s suspension cited two joint statements she signed that were issued by a network of progressive prosecutors overseen by Krinsky.
It also referenced a policy in which Warren told assistant prosecutors not to pursue low-level, nonviolent charges such as disorderly conduct and trespassing at a business location.
A joint statement signed by Warren cited laws governing access to abortion and gender-affirming health care for transgender people and pledged to deprioritize cases that violate such laws. Florida has no laws on the books dealing with transgender health care, and no abortion cases have passed through Warren’s office, he said.
“The governor’s order is based on pure conjecture and lies about what he thinks I’m going to do and a case that hasn’t come before me,” Warren said last week.
Among the signatories to the transgender health statement is another Florida prosecutor: Monique Worrell, state attorney for Orange and Osceola counties. A spokesman for DeSantis declined to say whether the governor would take action against him. Worrell’s office did not return a request for comment.
Worrell’s predecessor was the last state attorney to face interference from Tallahassee. After winning the 2016 election, Aramis Ayala announced that he would not kill the death penalty in any case, saying that data showed the punishment was expensive, slow and did not deter crime. Still, then-Gov. Rick Scott didn’t throw him out of office. Instead, he reassigned her death penalty case to another prosecutor.
The Florida Senate will ultimately decide Warren’s fate, and Senate President Wilton Simpson began that process Tuesday. But lawyers representing the ousted prosecutor said they were looking at several legal avenues to challenge the suspension in court.
One of those ways is through a court called quo warranto in which parties ask the court to examine someone’s power to hold office, said Warren’s lawyer Jean-Jacques Cabou. There are also possible state and federal constitutional rights at stake, including the right to free speech, he said.
“This is a statement of values,” Warren told MSNBC’s Alicia Menendez over the weekend. “As an elected official, I believe it’s important for me to speak on issues that are important to what I do. And I’m not a foaming partisan who speaks on every issue. People in my community know that.”
‘Beginning to closure’
On Aug. 5, the morning DeSantis ordered Warren removed from office, Tampa prosecutors prepared to indict two men in two murders that spanned nearly 40 years. Read also : U.S. Attorney for South Dakota selects leadership team.
Towards the end of Warren’s tumultuous day, he stood next to Linda Sheffield as she spoke to reporters at a downtown Tampa law firm.
“I know you want to talk about the political theater of the governor …” he started.
Then, he opened on how the office he’d been escorted out that morning cracked the murders of 19-year-old Grams and 41-year-old Lansen, Sheffield’s aunt.
After the conviction review unit exonerated Duboise, prosecutors continued to dig. Samples from Grams’ rape kit contained DNA from two men who were not Duboise, Warren said.
Using a DNA database for convicted felons, they were connected to the August 1983 murder and rape of Amos Robinson, 59, and Abron Scott, 57. Both men were serving life sentences in Florida prisons for another Tampa Bay murder committed in October 1983.
Belief review supervisors then contacted the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office and asked them to open a cold case investigation into the murder of Lansen in July 1983. Their investigation, too, pointed to Robinson and Scott.
“We are now finally able to deliver answers to Linda’s family,” he said, “and peace for her soul.”
Robinson and another man were suspected in the killing of another woman in September 1983, but the case never went to trial because of a lack of evidence, Warren said. He added that Robinson went on to kill two fellow inmates while in prison.
Then, Sheffield spoke to reporters. Lansen was her name, she said, and her role model taught her to count to 100 and wear makeup. He is warm and determined, a talented artist and photographer. He left behind a 7-year-old girl who would ask again and again after Lansen died, “Is that my mother’s car? Where is my mother?”
“What Andrew has done here is necessary, not only for myself, but for so many families,” said Sheffield, 67. “This will not go away.”
He declined to comment on DeSantis’ decision to suspend Warren that morning. But Sheffield, of Manatee County, said she hopes Warren can continue to cover up for family members who aren’t victims of cold cases.
“There’s nothing worse than living with it for 40 years. It’s incomprehensible,” he said. “This is the beginning to close.”
DeSantis appointed Hillsborough County Judge Susan Lopez to replace Warren. In the video clip, Lopez said he grew up in Tampa and worked for 17 years in the District Attorney’s Office, where he prosecuted murder, robbery and drug-trafficking cases. DeSantis appointed him to the judge himself in December.
On Tuesday, he reversed a decision Warren had made not to seek the death penalty against a man accused of killing a third-grade teacher. He also rescinded a blanket policy of not prosecuting certain misdemeanor crimes, telling employees in an office memo that it was “the intent to bring this agency back to basics.”
But he has no plans, the spokesman said, to change the conviction review unit.
Kathryn Varn is a statewide corporate reporter for Gannett/USA Today Network – Florida. You can reach her at kvarn@gannett.com or (727) 238-5315.
