He all but urged Mr. DeSantis to reinstate Mr. Warren himself, calling his reasons to justify it “false” and his administration’s efforts to properly support 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 replaced 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 treated and how the DeSantis administration had acted. At the same time, though, he questioned whether all the reasons Mr. DeSantis cited for the suspension rose to a violation of Mr. Warren’s First Amendment rights.
One of Mr. Warren’s lawyers, David Andrew O’Neil, argued at trial that the governor’s staff should at least have asked the prosecutor to clarify his positions before deciding to suspend him.
Under Florida law, a governor can suspend state officials for wrongdoing that includes neglect of duty, incompetence, malfeasance, drunkenness or commission of a felony. Lawyers for Mr. DeSantis argued that the governor acted within his power in suspending Mr. Warren, who was in his second term as the state attorney for the 13th Judicial Circuit, because Mr. Warren had issued “blanket” policies against prosecuting minor crimes. Mr. Warren, who testified in the trial on Nov. 29, said his policies were not blanket refusals but rather were meant to give prosecutors discretion over which cases to pursue.
Judge Hinkle found that Mr. Warren had not imposed blanket 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 also argued in the case that his suspension, without pay, was politically motivated. The prosecutor had publicly disagreed with Mr. DeSantis in the past, and had signed an earlier pledge not to criminalize transgender people and gender-affirming health care.
