“I was kind of numb,” Lindsey told Bolts. “I still couldn’t believe that I was convicted and facing death.”

At the time, a death sentence only required a recommendation from a majority of jurors. When the foreman read out the jury’s vote on Lindsey’s fate, it was 8–4. The judge then sentenced him to death. 

Three years later, in 2009, the Florida Supreme Court unanimously concluded that the evidence was “insufficient to support Lindsey’s conviction” and was “equally consistent with a reasonable hypothesis of innocence,” vacating his conviction. He was exonerated and freed from death row. 

Though Linsdey now travels the country speaking about his experiences with the death penalty, he still feels the lingering effects of death row and prefers to spend his time at home alone in his room, away from friends and family. “It was traumatizing,” said Lindsey, who is now the executive director of Witness to Innocence, an organization that advocates for ending the death penalty and is led by death row exonerees. 

After Lindsey’s exoneration, Florida revamped its sentencing scheme to require that jurors unanimously vote for capital punishment in order for judges to impose death sentences. But after a jury voted 9–3 to spare Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz’s life in 2022, some legislators responded by introducing a bill that removed mandatory unanimity. Instead, only an 8–4 majority would be required for death. 

Last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law, creating the lowest standard among the 24 states that allow the death penalty. “Once a defendant in a capital case is found guilty by a unanimous jury, one juror should not be able to veto a capital sentence,” DeSantis said in a statement. “I’m proud to sign legislation that will prevent families from having to endure what the Parkland families have and ensure proper justice will be served in the state of Florida.”

Opponents, however, say that the legislation will contribute to more wrongful death sentences in the state. Florida’s death sentences are the most unreliable in the country: It is the state with the highest number of death row exonerations, with 30 people since 1973, the majority of whom were sentenced to death by non-unanimous juries. 

“It makes Florida the extreme death penalty state in this country,” said Maria DeLiberato, a capital litigation attorney and executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “We know that non-unanimity leads with less deliberation, less thoughtfulness, is rooted in racism and is designed to silence Black and Brown voices on a jury.”

In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Florida’s capital sentencing scheme violated the Constitution. In that case, Hurst v. Florida, the court ruled 8–1 that the way the state decided whether to sentence someone to death violated the Sixth Amendment, the constitutional right to a jury trial, because the judge, not the jury, was responsible for considering the facts necessary for the imposition of a death sentence. 

Following Hurst, the Florida Supreme Court found that the jury must unanimously agree to impose a death sentence. Lawmakers moved to amend the statute, enacting a jury unanimity requirement in 2017. The change brought Florida in line with the sentencing standards of all other death penalty states, where juries must unanimously agree on a death sentence, with the exception of Alabama, which calls for a 10–2 majority.

As part of the overhaul, approximately 200 of 400 Florida prisoners who were sentenced to death under the old scheme became eligible for resentencing. One study found that the jury had failed to unanimously agree on a death sentence in roughly two-thirds of those cases. As of 2020, 34 prisoners were resentenced to life in prison, four were resentenced to death, and two were exonerated. 

Then in 2020, the Florida Supreme Court reversed course. Three of the seven justices reached retirement age and DeSantis filled those seats with conservative judges from the Federalist Society who pushed the court further to the right. As a result, it concluded in the case State v. Poole that juries didn’t have to unanimously agree on a death sentence after all, and the previous court “got it wrong.” While the decision didn’t change Florida’s capital sentencing law, it signaled to the legislature that if they were to pass a law dismantling jury unanimity, the court wouldn’t get in its way. 

After the jury in Cruz’s case reached a verdict of life without parole, DeSantis urged tougher sentencing. 

“We need to do some reforms to be better serving victims of crimes and the families of victims of crimes and not always bend over backwards to do everything we need to for the perpetrators of crimes,” he said at the time, according to the Associated Press. 

The case led state Representative Berny Jacques, a Republican from Pinellas County, to sponsor a bill permitting the death penalty without all jurors agreeing. Under the recently signed law, the jury must unanimously find at least one aggravating factor from a list of 16—such as the crime being “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel”—in order to consider the death penalty. 

If fewer than eight of the 12 jury members vote for the death penalty, the person will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, according to the bill. If at least eight jurors choose death, the judge still has the authority to override their recommendation and hand down a life sentence—and then must explain their decision in writing. 

In pushing the legislation, Jacques, who did not return requests for comment for this story, also pointed to the case of a man convicted of killing a police officer in his county who was spared the death penalty after two jurors voted for a life sentence. “This law will correct a wrong in our statutes, a statute that was based on a flawed Supreme Court ruling that was overturned three years ago,” Jacques told a Florida TV station. He cheered the governor’s signing of the legislation last week in an update to constituents that he posted on social media, saying, “No more in the state of Florida will a small handful of jurors be able to stop the most heinous of criminals from receiving the death penalty.” 

Robert Dunham, former executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center and an adjunct professor of death penalty law at the Temple University Beasley School of Law, cautioned that Florida’s new law will impact people wrongfully facing death more than mass shooters. 

“The effect…will be that people like Herman Lindsey are going to be sentenced to death,” he told Bolts.  “The effect is going to be most pronounced not in the tiny number of mass shooting cases that actually ever make it to trial. The effect will be in the large number of marginal death penalty cases.”

The imposition of non-unanimous jury decisions can be traced back to the Jim Crow era, when laws were created to ensure that white jurors, who reliably made up the majority of jurors in courtrooms across the South throughout the first half of the 20th century, won their desired verdict. In Florida, researchers have found that juries today are still disproportionately made up of white people. A 2021 study conducted by the ACLU of capital cases in Duval County, which is home to Jacksonville, found that Black people were excluded from serving on the jury at rates more than twice of white jurors. A 2010 report by the Equal Justice Initiative found the courts have invalidated more than 33 criminal convictions throughout the state because prosecutors unlawfully struck jurors because of their race. 

“That means that, the jury that is ultimately empaneled in Florida will on average have fewer jurors of color than one-third of the jury,” said Dunham. “And that means that in a jury non-unanimity system, in which you need more than one-third of the jury to ensure a life sentence, that you’ve just disenfranchised the minority community. The other jurors don’t have to listen to them because they don’t have to reach a unanimous verdict.”

In capital cases, the racial makeup of the jury can significantly impact case outcomes. One study published in 2004 found that white jurors were four times more likely to recommend the death penalty during sentencing compared to Black jurors. Jury unanimity has also been shown to impact the integrity of convictions: a 2020 Death Penalty Information Center study found that in the three states that had allowed death sentences by non-unanimous juries—Florida, Alabama, and Delaware (which abandoned the death penalty in 2016)—at least one juror had voted for life without parole in 93 percent of exonerations. 

In Ralph “Ron” Wright’s case, for example, five jurors voted to spare his life. An Air Force veteran and former police officer, he was exonerated in 2017 after spending three years on Florida’s death row. Like Lindsey, there was no evidence linking him to the crime. Wright remembered looking through his window to watch hearses rolling away with prisoners’ bodies on execution days. “You’re thinking ‘Is that day going to come for me?’”

Wright denounced the new law, telling Bolts, “It just makes it easier for someone to be sentenced to death.” 

Clemente Aguirre-Jarquin spent a decade on Florida’s death row even though not all of his jurors voted for life without parole. He was exonerated in 2018 after DNA evidence cleared him and someone else confessed to the crime. 

“It is taking the power from the people. Your vote should be respected. I guarantee you that there will be many, many more wrongful convictions,” he told Bolts.

Ed Brodsky, a state attorney and president of the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association, defended the law, telling Bolts that under the previous unanimity requirement, weighing whether to seek the death penalty was a “much more onerous process.”

“So from 2017 to today, we were following this unanimous jury verdict procedure, which I think made it much more difficult, and I think certainly heightened our requirements, and our feelings that certain defendants would be out—you know, would we be able to satisfy that very high burden?” he said. 

Under the new law, jurors would still be required to unanimously convict, and the emergence of new technology and forensics such as DNA testing should safeguard against wrongful convictions, Brodsky said. “We’re talking about such a wealth of information that is now available to be presented to a jury so that when we go forward with one of these cases, and a jury makes a determination of life or death, I really feel that they are being given such an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence, forensic evidence, witness testimony.”

After DeSantis signed the bill last week, the law became effective immediately. DeLiberato of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty said that the sudden enactment leaves many questions about how it will be applied to past, current, and future cases, or how it will affect the approximately 60 prisoners awaiting resentencing under the Hurst decision. Decisions about the application of the law will play out in courts across Florida. For her part, DeLiberato said she will argue that jury unanimity is required and the latest amendment is unconstitutional. 

“While the Parkland tragedy was unimaginable and horrific, we cannot and should not make important legislative decisions based on one case,” she said. 

For Lindsey, 17 years have passed since he was sentenced to death. He said that instead of enacting laws that eviscerate protections for capital defendants, legislators should focus on passing reforms to ensure more people aren’t wrongfully sent to death row.  

“Passing this bill, yes it will create more innocent people going to death row,” he told lawmakers when testifying against it at a legislative hearing in March. “My vote count was 8-4, and we don’t even understand how the jury reached the verdict of guilty, but the jury got it wrong.” 

“When the jury got it wrong in my case, and the Florida Supreme Court ruled unanimously that I shouldn’t have been convicted, there was no bill on this desk to compensate me or get me my rights back,” Lindsey added. “The jury got it wrong then, and I don’t think it’s fair that we change the law now. I think what we need to do is find a way to fix our system, not to continue to break it.” 

The post Exonerees Sound the Alarm on New Florida Law Allowing Death Sentences by Split Juries appeared first on Bolts.

But a host of more routine decisions made by Florida officials may be undermining the health of the state’s elections as well, even when they don’t seem directly related to voting rights.

To replace Warren as state attorney of Hillsborough County (home to Tampa), DeSantis appointed Susan Lopez, a member of the conservative Federalist Society. One of Lopez’s first decisions was to rescind a policy implemented by Warren to not prosecute bicyclists and pedestrians for certain traffic charges. A 2015 Tampa Bay Times report exposed the Tampa police department’s relentless ticketing of Black cyclists for things like having inadequate lighting, or riding on handlebars, a dynamic local organizers have labeled “bicycling while Black.” The report catalyzed a Justice Department investigation which ultimately confirmed the disproportionate enforcement.

New research shows how such low-level interactions with the police can undercut our democracy by reducing the number of people who participate in elections. A study I co-authored with fellow researcher Kevin Morris, published in December in the American Political Science Review, finds that traffic stops by police stops in Hillsborough County reduced voter turnout in 2014, 2016, and 2018 federal elections. 

Our study compared the voter turnout of Hillsborough motorists who were stopped by police shortly before and after each election. Drawing on information about each person’s turnout in past cycles, we found that these stops reduced the likelihood that a stopped individual turned out to vote by 1.8 percentage points on average. The effect held when accounting  for characteristics like race, gender, party affiliation, past turnout, and prior traffic stops to improve our comparisons. The discouraging effect of stops was slightly higher in 2014 and 2018. 

These results make clear that the collateral consequences of policing—including worsening outcomes for economic security, educational attainment, and health—also extend to political participation. If the communities who are most frequently subjected to policing are also discouraged from voting as a result, it could create a vicious feedback loop of political withdrawal. 

Why would traffic stops make people less likely to show up to the polls? Past research has already established that the most disruptive forms of criminal legal contact, like arrest and incarceration, discourage people from voting. Our study shows that low-level police contact matters in the same way. If a traffic stop makes a motorist fear that the government will harm them, it can prompt a withdrawal from civic life that political scientists call “strategic retreat.” Motorists might worry that a routine traffic stop could escalate into police violence, a more common outcome for Black people in particular. Beyond justified fears of violent victimization, voters might also bristle at the perception of being targeted to raise revenue through excessive ticketing. Accordingly, if incarceration ‘teaches’ would-be voters that their government is an alienating and harmful force in their lives, traffic stops could catalyze a similar form of ‘learning.’  

“I think that people see police as a part of the government,” Bernice Lauredan, director of voter engagement at Dream Defenders, an organization that champions voting rights in Florida, told Bolts. “I don’t believe any interaction with police is safe for people of color–having any interactions with police gives them a negative image of the government. And it may give them a negative idea of voting.” 

And while millions of white Americans have also been swept up in municipal ticketing efforts, the fines and fees in Florida as elsewhere disproportionately affect Black communities.

On average, we found that the deterrent effect was smaller for Black drivers: It reduced their likelihood to vote by 1 percentage point, compared to 1.8 for the overall population. We went further and looked at when voters had been stopped. If they had been stopped in the six months before the election, stops discouraged Black people from voting more than non-Black people. But as the time between a stop and the election increased, the effect weakened. That averaged out to a comparatively smaller effect over the whole two-year period. 

We think that this counterintuitive result might be a mix of two things: on one hand, Black Americans probably have less to “learn” about government from a traffic stop, considering that Black Americans are more likely to have a family member in jail than other Americans. On the other hand, Black Americans probably know that a traffic stop is more likely to turn deadly for them compared to white drivers, which could cause “anticipatory stress” that reduces willingness to vote in the short term. 

“Black folks and other people of color are criminalized in Tampa,” Lauredan says. 

While Florida Republicans have dialed up the use of criminalization to maintain political power, deep-blue urban dwellers also face the political ramifications of policing in their own backyards. 

In New York City, for example, Mayor Eric Adams has dramatically increased police presence and encouraged police to be more proactive in punishing behaviors ranging from public drinking and dice games to carrying unlicensed firearms. New York Governor Kathy Hochul has also announced plans to beef up a “hot spots” policing initiative that focuses on gun violence—quite similar to the Memphis police squad (“SCORPION”) that killed Tyre Nichols in January. Gun control policing efforts in New York could be driving a dynamic similar to the “strategic retreat” that our research demonstrated in Tampa—another study found that NYPD stop and frisk practices, which expanded significantly under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, may have reduced voter turnout in the 2006 and 2010 midterm elections.

New York City is no outlier with respect to increased police contact. In Chicago, for example, the yearly tally of traffic stops ballooned from 86,000 to 378,000 between 2015 and 2021. In addition to boosting city revenues through regressive taxation, these traffic stops also function as a pipeline for gun possession arrests (which have been steadily increasing over time, despite criticisms from local prosecutor Kim Foxx). 

The civic consequences of criminalization don’t stop at voting, either. Research also shows that Americans who have been stopped by police, arrested, or incarcerated become less likely to engage with a range of public institutions that they perceive as surveilling them. Sociologist Sarah Brayne calls this phenomenon “system avoidance,” and argues that the record-keeping practices of institutions like hospitals, schools, and banks—and the ability of state actors to surveil data from these institutions— justify why criminalized people withdraw from them. It’s an ugly realization—harsh punishments and increased carceral surveillance are causing lasting damage to the social fabric of criminalized communities. 

“The more communities are abused by the system, the more natural it is for them to feel alienated from it,” said Yannick Wood, director of the criminal justice reform program at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, an organization that advocates reducing the interactions between the criminal legal system and democracy in New Jersey. “They don’t feel like the system serves them, and they don’t feel like their voices are represented, or even respected.”

This is the most important takeaway from our research: American communities most likely to oppose “tough on crime” policy (thanks to their personal experience) are being pushed away from politics and from opportunities to steer policy change. 

In Tampa, ticketing practices work in tandem with an extremely harsh regime of felony disenfranchisement that drives Floridians away from politics more explicitly. Almost one-quarter of the 4.6 million Americans barred from voting due to felony convictions live in Florida. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) led the successful 2018 campaign to pass a state constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to Floridians with felony convictions, though their victory was diminished by subsequent state legislation requiring fines and fees payments before voting rights were restored, leaving more than 1 million people without access to the ballot. Traffic stops affect an even larger share of Florida residents.

“Criminalizing any kind of behavior can have unintended consequences,” FRRC deputy director Neil Volz told Bolts. “Voting is a reflection of our belief that we’re part of the system, that our voice matters, that we can take that past pain and turn it into something productive.”

The post A Police Stop Is Enough to Make Someone Less Likely to Vote appeared first on Bolts.

The 51-year-old has a felony on his record, like all of the people DeSantis had arrested. He wondered if the governor would come after him next, because he had just voted in the August primary.

Johnson was convicted of drug trafficking and released in 2002 after serving 22 months in prison. For years after his release, he was barred from voting due to Florida’s draconian rules. In 2018, voters passed Amendment 4, a landmark ballot initiative that overrode the 19th century policy barring anyone with a felony conviction from voting for life. Amendment 4 allowed people convicted of most felonies to vote once they complete their sentence.

Johnson’s first time voting was in 2020 and he’s been engaged with electoral politics ever since. 

But a series of arrests this year have rocked the reform’s promise. Earlier this year, county prosecutors charged people for voting despite owing court debt, due to a law signed by DeSantis in 2019 that rolled back Amendment 4 by imposing financial payments. The people who were then charged in August had been convicted of murder and sexual assault, offenses carved out by Amendment 4. But several said that they thought the amendment allowed them to legally vote, especially because they had been provided with voter IDs by local election officials—with the approval of the DeSantis administration. 

Now, leading up to the November 8 general election, Johnson is wondering what legal stunt DeSantis might pull next. 

 “It makes you think twice before going to vote,” he said.

A new report by the Sentencing Project estimates that over 1.1 million Floridians are barred from voting this fall due to a past felony conviction in Florida. Others may have regained their right to vote but shy away from the polls over the uncertainty caused by the recent events. And given the vast racial disparities in Florida’s criminal legal system, the predicament disproportionately affects African Americans.

More than one in five Black adults in the state were disenfranchised in 2016. Amendment 4 cut down that number, but 13 percent of Black adults are still barred from voting in the state, which compares to 7 percent of the rest of state’s population.

Of the 19 people whose August arrests for voter fraud were reviewed by The Palm Beach Post, 15 are Black.

“DeSantis’ arrests have built upon a culture of fear that already existed around voting, but he has added new consequences, especially for Black people in particular,” said Kevin Anderson, a defense attorney who represents Leo Grant Jr., one of the people who were arrested in August.

Backed by law enforcement from his Election Crimes and Security Office at a press conference on Aug.18, DeSantis said the voters had committed fraud, which would require that they had knowingly and willfully violated the law so they could cast their votes.

“The state of Florida has charged and is in the process of arresting 20 individuals across the state for voter fraud,” DeSantis said to a round of cheering and applause. “They did not go through any process. They did not get their rights restored, and yet they went ahead and voted anyways. That is against the law, and now they’re going to pay the price for it.”

At another press conference 12 days later, DeSantis then put the blame on local voting jurisdictions. “Some local jurisdictions don’t care about election laws. We do, and we think it’s important. If you’re not able to run an election right, we want to hold people accountable,” DeSantis said.

But DeSantis’ claims have since come under scrutiny. He failed to mention during his press conferences that government officials had told the people who were arrested that they were allowed to vote. And DeSantis’ own election investigation chief had sent an email to local jurisdictions telling them that they did nothing wrong when the returning citizens voted in August.

Last week, one of the arrests was thrown out by a South Florida judge, who said that the state did not have jurisdiction to charge Robert Lee Wood. The DeSantis administration said that it intends to appeal that decision.

“The DeSantis story about the arrests after the primary has already started to fall apart, but who knows what he’s capable of next,” Johnson said.

DeSantis created a new police force to investigate election crimes in April, spending an estimated $3.7 million in startup costs. It employs agents tasked with investigating election-related crimes, which are very uncommon in Florida. 

The DeSantis administration has not responded to multiple requests for comment on this story.

Some of those who were arrested have come forward to explain that they thought their rights had been restored when Amendment 4 passed, and that the state had given them every indication that they were eligible to vote.

Leo Grant Jr. had thought he was just fulfilling his civic duty, until law enforcement arrived at his door in August. His defense attorney, Anderson, says that the DeSantis administration used people’s lives to advance his political agenda and create an environment for rumors to spread in Florida about rampant voter fraud.

“This process was weaponized to make it appear that you have all of these people out in the community casting votes that they ought not cast, when really what has happened is that they’ve been lured,” Anderson said. “So it’s like a game that’s being played with their lives.”

Anderson—who has 20 years of experience and has handled hundreds of state and federal criminal and police liability cases—said that DeSantis has created “an environment of intimidation,” which will affect potential voters who may now be worried about going to cast their vote after the arrests. 

“Intimidation is one tactic that has been used in the past against Black people for voting, and it is being used now,” he said.

Fear tactics have been wielded to mute Black people’s voices and suppress their votes throughout American history. The Ku Klux Klan did this, often through violence, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This year, in Florida and in other states, intimidation and election-related threats of violence have made securing polling locations more difficult leading up to elections.  

But legislation has also functioned as a means of voter suppression. Prior to Amendment 4 being passed, Florida’s constitution had disenfranchised all citizens who had been convicted of any felony offense dating back to Florida’s first constitution in 1838. It said, “all persons convicted of bribery, perjury, forgery, or other high crime, or misdemeanor” should be barred from voting. This was amended in 1868 to remove the language about misdemeanors. In 1968, the language was amended again, to name felonies as the specific reason that people should not be able to vote.

In an analysis of Florida’s disenfranchisement rules in 2015, Allison Riggs wrote in The Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development about the “enormous burden that these rules place on people of color seeking to participate in the political process.”  Even after passage of Amendment 4 in 2018, many Floridians are barred from voting, including if they are in prison, on probation, and on parole—outcomes that are far likelier to affect Black Floridians.

Shortly after Amendment 4 was adopted, DeSantis signed Senate Bill 7066 into law, which prohibited returning citizens from voting unless they paid off legal fines and fees imposed by a court pursu­ant to a felony convic­tion.

This caused anger and confusion among those who had struggled for the right to vote, and civil rights groups filed a lawsuit accusing the governor of creating a “pay-to-vote” system. The chaos created by this rule, in addition to the more recent voter arrests, led several civil rights groups to create a legal guide for returning citizens who wish to vote.

This month, body camera footage of one of the arrests was published by The Tampa Bay Times. It showed Tony Patterson, another of the voters charged, in a state of shock that he was being arrested. 

“What is wrong with this state, man?” Patterson asked the police as they arrested him. “Voter fraud? Y’all said anybody with a felony could vote, man.” 

This isn’t DeSantis’ first attempt at influencing voting procedures in Florida with an aim of impacting outcomes. Earlier this year, his administration pushed a redistricting plan before the legislature, which a Florida circuit court judge found to be unconstitutional for its attempt to dilute the Black vote. The legislature approved the plan, and now the DeSantis administration is refusing to release documents related to its creation, after the League of Women Voters and individual voters filed a lawsuit against the redistricting in April. 

Neither has DeSantis shied away from overruling the will of voters once they’ve already spoken. In August he removed a democratically-elected state attorney from office based on the prosecutor’s statements that he would not charge cases dealing with abortion or anti-transgender legislation, and claims to have “reviewed” several more. It’s created uncertainty among candidates that they could be plucked from their positions even after winning. 

“In the end, he just wants to win,” said Robin Lockett, regional director of the non-profit activist group Florida Rising. “He’ll use any tactic he can, no matter how undemocratic, to try to get his way.”

Lockett works to register voters in Florida, along with fighting for racial and social justice causes. She doesn’t have a felony conviction, but talks to people who do regularly through her work. She says that DeSantis has reached a new level of electoral desperation.

“You don’t see him out there arresting people who are most likely going to vote for him,” Lockett said. “He’s targeting people who he wants to suppress. He wants returning citizens, and especially Black people, to go back to the shed, to go underground.”

Rodney Johnson says that even though DeSantis’s actions make him think twice about voting, he’ll still be heading to the ballot box in November. 

“When you make the effort to turn your life around, you want to be able to have your voice heard, just like any other citizen.”

He won’t let a political agenda based in fear stop him from moving forward, he says, although he’s unsure if that will be the case with everyone who has been convicted of a felony. 

“A lot of us have been through so much here in Florida, rents are going up and we’re just trying to survive,” Rodney said. “People have kids and families to think about. There are plenty of voters who might not take the risk, in case DeSantis decides to pull something shady again. But I have to do what I know is right.”

The post Arrests Over Voting Escalate a “Culture of Fear” in Florida appeared first on Bolts.

Allison Miller, a public defender seeking to become the next chief prosecutor of Pinellas and Pasco counties in central Florida, may face one of the strangest conundrums of any candidate for political office in the United States. She has said she would not prosecute people for seeking or providing abortions, in a state whose governor recently removed from office a sitting, democratically elected prosecutor—in Tampa, just across the bay from Pinellas County (St. Petersburg)—for saying the same thing.

The repeal of Roe v. Wade in June vested enormous control over women’s reproductive decisions in local officials. There has been plenty of talk since about the resulting geographic injustices: people seeking now-illegal abortions in blue localities may at least be shielded from prosecution, the thinking goes, while their counterparts in redder areas may face criminal punishment for the same acts. But in August, after Hillsborough County (Tampa) State Attorney Andrew Warren signaled he would decline to pursue abortion cases should Florida’s 15-week ban go into effect, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis suspended and replaced him with a member of the conservative Federalist Society. (Warren has sued to get his job back; a judge has said the case should be decided at trial, but hasn’t set a date.) 

The governor’s move, part of his broader push to undermine voting rights and override democratic results to install conservatives in local offices, summons an existential question for the shape of democracy in Florida. In the face of a governor willing to overturn an election to achieve his own ends, the familiar playbook of fighting for social change at the ballot box—organizing the grassroots, galvanizing young people and people of color, elevating candidates who will fight for reproductive justice—is under siege.

The threat of further undemocratic moves by DeSantis now hangs over Miller’s race—and by extension, any election in the state. What does it even mean to run for office when the governor’s political whims could turn a win into a loss? Miller compared running in DeSantis’s Florida to the myth of Sisyphus: the boulder rolls back down the hill every time, but he pushes it up again anyway. 

“We have a governor who if you disagree with him politically, he just removes you from office,” she told Bolts. “Sometimes it feels like a set up—or it’s all just theater.”

But this sense that the game has long been rigged was part of the reason Miller decided to run in the first place. As a public defender, she says, she has represented people facing the death penalty, and she has seen over and over again how much pressure there was to obtain a capital conviction. “The way the system is set up in Florida is that the prosecution, the state, truly does hold all of the cards,” she said. And yet she has kept fighting, first as a public defender and now as an outsider running on criminal justice reform. Miller’s decision to challenge Republican State Attorney Bruce Bartlett, a DeSantis appointee, has made 2022 the first time in 30 years that Pinellas and Pasco have experienced a contested prosecutor’s race. Bartlett and DeSantis did not respond to requests for comment for this piece.

In DeSantis’s Florida, many are now haunted by similar questions about how best to approach local campaigns. DeSantis is running for re-election himself this fall against Democrat Charlie Crist, and holds a narrow lead in public polling.

Progressive advocates vow to not get discouraged by the climate of uncertainty that has accompanied Warren’s suspension. “This is a first, right?” said Sara Tabatabaie, the chief political and communications officer for Vote Pro Choice, which aims to elect candidates who will defend abortion rights across the country. “But the response is we do it again,” she added. “And the reason is because we’re not going to be intimidated by somebody like Ron DeSantis. If DeSantis wants to show everyone that he doesn’t care that the majority of Floridians are pro-choice, then let him.”

In stripping federal protections for abortion access, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision transformed down-ballot offices and races into a terrain of high-pitched political struggle. “This is the real battleground for the next decades—a real opportunity area,” said Paul Kim Bradfield, the Southern Regional Director for Run for Something, a national candidate incubator supporting Miller. “Republicans have been playing this playbook for decades… we’re kind of late to the game.”

Bradfield said over 1,300 Floridians filed a form on Run for Something’s website expressing an interest in running for local office since early May, when the Supreme Court’s decision leaked. That’s nearly three times as many as had registered interest between the beginning of 2020 and the leak.

“People are worried about what’s going on with their lives, what this means for them,” said Gretchen Johnson, the president of the St. Petersburg League of Women Voters (LWV), a nonpartisan group that promotes voter education. 

Johnson referenced the Tampa judge who ruled that a 17-year-old girl was too immature to get an abortion because her grades were poor. In August, he was ousted by voters. Historically, “most judges are retained,” Johnson said. Now, though, she added, people are realizing, “‘This is affecting my life—or someone’s life, and that matters—so we do need to pay attention.’”

But now that energy and outrage is running up against DeSantis’s strategy for bulldozing over the authority of locally-elected officials. 

“The governor has shown that …  targeting different candidates and different issues is not off the table for him,” said Bradfield. “There’s a great irony,” he added: “the Republican side has for a long time been the vocal advocates of home rule, like, ‘local government should decide this, this and this.’” Now that the left is testing those waters, though, there’s a broad move from the right to shut it down—whether via DeSantis’s suspensions or bills like the Florida legislature’s attempt to preclude Democratic municipalities from reducing their police budgets, a top priority for DeSantis after the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020. 

“It can feel almost discouraging—you put all that effort and action into things and have this person unilaterally make decisions against it,” said Bradfield. But he wasn’t willing to sink into existential doubts about the purpose of voting if the governor may remove the victor. Bradfield emphasized that candidates and voters alike seemed more motivated than disheartened. 

“Being in his crosshairs…is certainly a risk that she faces,” he said of Miller, “but I think it can also be an opportunity.”

“It’s galvanizing,” Johnson said of Florida’s landscape in the aftermath of Dobbs and of Warren’s suspension. She believes that people’s attention to local races has never been higher.

Still, DeSantis is also cracking down on voting through other means. He inspired the creation of a state police force meant to investigate elections, which local advocates warn carries the risk of intimidating voters. Suppressive efforts typically affect the people who are already the most marginalized, further limiting their political power.

In August, DeSantis announced that this newly created office was pressing felony charges against 20 people who had voted despite not being eligible because of past convictions; this built on cases filed by local prosecutors this year against residents who voted despite owing court debt. There is no indication that any of these people did so intentionally or maliciously, The Guardian reported. The charges came after Florida Republicans adopted a law that deeply obfuscated the process for regaining voting rights in 2019, during DeSantis’s first year as governor; observers warned at the time that the new regulations were bound to confuse voters, and Warren vowed to help local residents. 

That law was a direct response to a constitutional amendment approved by voters in November 2018 to expand rights restoration. The amendment had passed overwhelmingly, 65 to 35 percent. DeSantis won on the same day by under 0.5 percentage points.

“Ours is supposed to be a government of laws, not a government of individual men,” DeSantis trumpeted at his press conference announcing Warren’s suspension. But laws have to be interpreted—DeSantis himself unearthed an obscure 1936 gambling precedent in order to justify removing a state’s attorney. And the governor plainly wants the individual people interpreting those laws to be his men, so to speak.

DeSantis’s excuse for suspending Warren was a statement the prosecutor signed, along with more than 80 counterparts across the country, which vowed not to bring cases against people for seeking or providing abortion care. Florida’s new 15-week abortion ban is not yet on the books—at the moment, Florida’s state constitution protects some access to abortion. Currently the ban that Republican lawmakers passed is tied up in court, but the state supreme court has swung right under DeSantis, who has appointed four of its seven members, and may well overturn that precedent. 

Still, DeSantis maintained that Warren’s signature was tantamount to professing intent to subvert the law. The governor also cited another statement Warren had signed that condemned the criminalization of trans people and gender-affirming healthcare; though anti-trans rhetoric has been a cornerstone of the DeSantis administration, there is no specific law that criminalizes trans people or healthcare in Florida.

DeSantis has turned Warren’s firing into an opportunity to force his political preferences onto an area of the state that has repeatedly rejected them. 

In the 2016 and 2020 elections, voters in blue-leaning Hillsborough County embraced Warren, a proponent of criminal justice reform. In office, the prosecutor exercised  his discretion to lower the number of people in jail and reduce racial bias in arrests and prosecution. His ouster has sparked a rapid shift toward the tough-on-crime policies DeSantis prefers. DeSantis’s choice to replace Warren, Susan Lopez, has already overturned a number of Warren’s initiatives, including his policies against prosecuting low-level misdemeanors and arrests stemming from the Tampa police’s wildly controversial bike-stop policy.  According to a U.S. Department of Justice inquiry, that policy targeted Black people, who make up only 26 percent of Tampa’s population,  in 73 percent of stops. Lopez has also announced her intent to seek the death penalty in a case where Warren previously declined to pursue capital punishment.

Meanwhile, DeSantis has also recently replaced four Democratic members of the Broward County school board with Republicans. The members were recommended for suspension by a grand jury for failures related to school safety, but the opportunity to install more ideologically aligned successors was not wasted on the governor. “To take out four women who are Democrats and replace them with four men who are Republicans—that’s certainly not representative of the demographics of Broward County,” said Miller. Now the chair of the Florida Board of Education, who is himself a DeSantis appointee, has suggested that the Broward County school superintendent—who didn’t even join the district until well after the grand jury had finished its deliberations—should be suspended, too. 

There are five other Democratic state attorneys in Florida, and DeSantis claimed to have “reviewed” all of them during his press conference announcing Warren’s suspension. Though one signed the anti-trans criminalization statement, and several issued statements condemning the repeal of Roe v. Wade, none besides Warren clearly stated their refusal to prosecute abortion cases. And none have spoken up loudly in support of Warren since his dismissal, perhaps a tacit admission of fear that DeSantis could do the same thing again. “If DeSantis can arbitrarily suspend an elected official without one shred of evidence they have done anything wrong, how far will he go to punish anyone else who disagrees with him?” Warren wrote in a recent editorial.

Miller said she sympathized with the dilemma. “I can certainly appreciate kind of keeping your head down and doing the work and standing by the message, but maybe not publicly making yourself a target,” she said. “I know most of them and I think they all are there because they want to help people—and you don’t have the ability to do that if you’re not in office.” After all, she added, “It’s not like the governor stopped with Andrew Warren.” 

Still, Miller herself has made a different choice. “For better or worse, I speak my mind,” she said. The stakes felt too high—and too personal—not to: she is a survivor of violent crime and sexual assault. “I was held at gunpoint when I was 14, and I was raped in college,” Miller told Bolts. “And so the idea of prosecuting a rapist, I would do with enthusiasm, but the idea of prosecuting a woman who aborts the product of that rape—somebody convince me how that possibly makes our community safer.”

The post All the Governor’s Men appeared first on Bolts.

Smith, an appointee of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, lost his re-election bid on Tuesday in Hillsborough County (Tampa). This blue-tilting region, long viewed as a national bellwether, was just stripped of its prosecutor by DeSantis over his defense of abortion.

After a campaign dominated by his decision in the January abortion case, Smith was ousted by Nancy Jacobs, a local attorney in private practice. Although the election was nonpartisan, vote breakdowns suggest that Smith drew support from GOP voters while Jacobs was backed by Democrats. 

The campaign broke the mold of Florida’s judicial elections, where the local establishment typically rallies to easily carry incumbents across the finish line. The editorial board of the Tampa Bay Times, which backed Joe Biden in 2020, endorsed Smith as well as the other sitting circuit court judge on the ballot this week, lauding Smith for the “respect he shows litigants in his court” even as it acknowledged issues in the abortion decision. (The other incumbent judge easily won.) Even the county’s elected chief public defender, Democrat Julianne Holt, endorsed Smith, though she ultimately pulled her support as the race became contentious in the final stretch.

Further south, in Miami-Dade County, James Bush, the only Democratic lawmaker who voted for Florida’s 15-week abortion ban, was ousted in a primary by challenger Ashley Gantt. Bush, who frequently sided with Republicans, was also the only Democrat who supported the recent law against discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in Florida classrooms.

These twin results speak to the shockwaves felt both within Democratic politics and the general electorate ever since the Supreme Court overturned federal protections for abortion in June. Also on Tuesday, Democrats unexpectedly held a congressional seat in an upstate New York district that Joe Biden narrowly carried two years ago, adding to a streak of overperformances for the party since Dobbs; some Democrats also pointed to abortion as a factor in their win over the district attorney of Tennessee’s Shelby County earlier this month. 

John Fox, a Tampa-based Democratic operative who runs a PAC called Progressive Youth that campaigned against Smith, said the results in Florida show abortion rights is motivating voters.

“Abortion is a huge issue,” Fox told Bolts. “Voters are seeking out information on it, and anytime you can link that to voters’ minds in a genuine way, I think it’s going to be a winning issue.”

But Fox also stressed that those links are often obscure when it comes to the role of local officials, despite the mountain of races where abortion is on the line this year. Fox said he first made the connection to Smith’s race when he read about the judge’s January decision, but said it was hard for him to convince people to pay attention to such a downballot race. “These races are just so low information,” he told Bolts. “The chance that your life is going to be affected by a bad judge is significantly higher risk than a bad state House member or state Senator, and nobody really kind of knows what’s going on.”

Progessive Youth sent mailers to voters that hit Smith for ruling “based on his religious beliefs—not the law.” Another mailer sent by the same organization was specific to the Jane Doe case, stating, “Judge Jared Smith thinks women are too dumb to make their own bodily choices.”

Smith sought to save his job by rallying religious conservatives. “I’m a believer, I’m a judge and I’m a Christian,” he declared while campaigning in a church. Smith is also associated with a group that attacked Jacobs for having a “woke” agenda, Creative Loafing Tampa Bay reported earlier this month. 

“I think the only religion that belongs in the courtroom is the rule of law,” Jacobs told Bolts on Wednesday when asked about Smith’s comments.

But Smith’s record also testifies to the vast authority local officials already wielded over people’s access to abortion before Dobbs, let alone now. 

Smith’s decision in the January case was overturned by an appeals court that ruled he had abused his discretion in holding that “Jane Doe” was too immature to be granted a waiver from parental notification laws. But the very fact that he heard the teenager’s plea stems from restrictions Florida adopted that empower local judges to arbitrarily bestow reproductive rights upon specific teenagers, in a process known as “judicial bypass.” An investigation published by Mother Jones in 2014 documented how conservative laws combine with local anti-abortion judges in Florida to close the door for hundreds of minors every year. 

Jacobs would not comment to Bolts on Smith’s decision in January beyond pointing to the appeals court ruling that faulted his reasoning. She also stressed that she would apply Florida’s laws on abortion regardless of what they may be. 

Florida has not banned abortion at the moment, and for now a state supreme court precedent bars such a ban, but the state is currently implementing a 15-week ban, and the conservative supreme court could revisit its precedent. The state also has plenty of restrictions like a parental notification mandate that led to Smith’s decision in January.

Smith’s defeat also comes just weeks after DeSantis suspended the Democratic prosecutor Hillsborough County voters elected in 2016 and 2020, Andrew Warren, and replaced him with a conservative ally, Susan Lopez, who has promptly rolled back reforms put in place by her predecessor. In justifying his decision, which Warren is now challenging in court, DeSantis pointed to Warren’s public statement that he would not prosecute abortion cases. 

In ousting Smith, whom DeSantis appointed to his circuit court seat in 2019, Hillsborough voters signaled their distaste for the anti-abortion policies that the governor is only escalating. 

But DeSantis was more successful in other primaries on Tuesday in his quest to  reshape the state to his liking. DeSantis pushed to move local school boards to the right, endorsing and campaigning for candidates who express alarm about discussions of racism and the rights of LGBTQ students. Most of the candidates he endorsed across the state prevailing on Tuesday, including two in Miami-Dade, the state’s most populous county. Two of three school board candidates he endorsed in Hillsborough County also won.

A rare DeSantis failure in those school board races occurred in Alachua County (Gainesville), where  the governor had also ousted an elected official out under controversial circumstances. Diyonne McGraw, a former school board member who was removed from her position by the governor over objections to her residency in 2021 (those objections are no longer operative, according to The Alligator), won her old seat back, beating the conservative school board member the governor had appointed to replace her. 

In November, DeSantis will face Charlie Crist, a former Republican governor turned Democratic member of Congress. Crist, who supports abortion rights, cinched the Democratic nomination for governor on Tuesday. November will also decide control of the state legislature, an attorney general race that pits a Republican incumbent against  a former Democratic prosecutor who was herself targeted by a GOP governor over her reform stance, as well as the retention of five of the seven justices on Florida’s conservative Supreme Court.

Hundreds of thousands of Floridians will be barred from voting in those elections as a result of Florida’s extremely harsh felony disenfranchisement rules, including if they are too poor to pay off their court debt. DeSantis announced last week that a new elections police force set up this year was indicting people who erroneously registered to vote local Republicans in the state have already been prosecuting people for months for registering when they owed court debt, even though the state does not provide information to voters regarding their eligibility. 

Still, Fox is urging Floridians to pay attention and engage with local elections, like races for judge. “One of the lessons that people learned ever since 2016 is sometimes you just gotta—nobody is coming to the rescue,” he said. “If you see something and it bothers you, sometimes you just got to do it.”

The post Voters Oust Florida Judge Who Denied Teenager’s Abortion Request Because of Bad Grades appeared first on Bolts.

The suspension of this Democratic official, announced by the Republican governor at a news conference where he was flanked by Hillsborough County’s Republican sheriff and other local officials, is the latest chapter in the GOP’s sustained attacks on reproductive rights and transgender rights in Florida, as well as broader criminal justice reform efforts. 

DeSantis based the suspension on Warren’s statements that his office would not prosecute abortion-related cases and cases involving anti-transgender laws. DeSantis also mentioned Warren’s policies establishing a presumption against prosecuting certain behaviors.

DeSantis claimed that with those statements and policies Warren “neglected” his duties and “display[ed] a lack of competence” to carry out his duties. 

DeSantis replaced Warren with Susan Lopez, a local judge who is a member of the conservative legal organization the Federalist Society. His decision effectively kicked the Democratic Party out of an office it won in both 2016 and 2020, in a county that DeSantis himself lost by nine percentage points in 2018.

Florida Representative Anna Eskamani, a Democrat and fierce critic of DeSantis, called the governor’s move “a fascist approach to governing, if you can even call it governing.”

“It’s not about law and order. It’s about control,” Eskamani told Bolts. “He’s not only stripping away our personal liberties, but he is removing those who have the guts to stand up to him.” 

The move comes as Florida, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, implements its 15-week abortion ban and considers more extreme bans. It also comes as the state fights challenges in court to the law known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, as well as a law banning trans girls and women from girls and women’s sports. In a particularly extreme step, the DeSantis administration also has filed a complaint against a restaurant in Miami because of its drag brunch, attempting to take away the business’s liquor license.

Warren had also pledged to not prosecute any ban on gender-affirming care for minors, though Florida does not have such a ban right now.

Warren’s statement on Thursday suggested he would be fighting back, although Warren himself declined to comment to Bolts and an adviser did not respond to a question asking if Warren planned to challenge the suspension.

“Today’s political stunt is an illegal overreach that continues a dangerous pattern by Ron DeSantis of using his office to further his own political ambition,” Warren said in the statement. “It spits in the face of the voters of Hillsborough County who have twice elected me to serve them, not Ron DeSantis.”

The move from DeSantis represents the most aggressive action yet from opponents of criminal legal reform efforts to derail the ambitions of local prosecutors elected on promises to reform the system and reduce incarceration. 

“We don’t elect people in one part of the state to have veto power over what the entire state decides on these important issues,” DeSantis said at the press conference. 

“Andrew Warren has put himself, publicly, above the law,” he added, citing concerns about “individual prosecutors nullify[ing] laws that were enacted by the people’s representatives.” He compared Warren to reform-minded prosecutors elected in California. “We are not going to allow this pathogen that’s been around the country of ignoring the law, we are not going to let that get a foothold here in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said.

But Aramis Ayala, a former state attorney who has faced her own attacks from DeSantis, called the governor’s move “the latest assault on Floridians’ fundamental rights and freedoms.”

“The rapid slide towards autocracy when it suits their political agenda is dangerous, appalling, and incredibly concerning,” Ayala, a Democrat who is now running for attorney general, said in a statement she shared with Bolts. 

Ayala announced shortly after becoming the chief prosecutor in the district that includes Orlando in 2016 that she would not bring capital prosecutions and declined to do so in a specific case. Republican Governor Rick Scott countered by reassigning the prosecution to another state attorney. Although Ayala challenged the move, the state’s Supreme Court eventually upheld the governor’s authority to reassign death-eligible cases under her jurisdiction in a 5-2 decision in 2017. 

On Thursday, DeSantis went much further, immediately suspending Warren from his office. 

Ayala on Thursday denounced the new move as antidemocratic. Warren “was elected and entrusted by the people—not once but twice—and it is the job of the elected state attorney to exercise prosecutorial discretion in the community they serve,” she said. “The suggestion that there was malfeasance or a dereliction of duty by the Hillsborough State Attorney Office is a dictatorial response and attack on the constitutionally protected right of free speech.”

Republicans elsewhere in the country have mounted parallel efforts to sideline prosecutors who promote criminal justice reform, though none has yet to go as far as DeSantis’s move on Thursday. Many governors do not have the power to unilaterally suspend local officials.

Pennsylvania Republicans have sought impeachment proceedings against Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a progressive who easily won re-election last year; one Republican this year even ran for governor on a platform of ending DA elections in Philadelphia and nowhere else in the state. Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor in New York, is promising to take action against Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who has like Warren set presumptions of not prosecuting some lower-level crimes. 

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is likely to dramatically increase these clashes between the anti-abortion Republican politicians who run the state government in red states and Democratic officials who often govern urban areas in those states. Dozens of prosecutors in states like Arizona, Michigan, Texas, and Wisconsin, have said they will not enforce abortion bans, and some Republicans have signaled that they are looking for workarounds specific to their state like having the attorney general step in. 

In Florida, DeSantis’s executive order asserted that he has the authority to suspend Warren under Article 4, Section 7, of the state’s constitution, which sets out the governor’s authority for suspensions over issues like “neglect of duty.” DeSantis also used the provision in 2019 to suspend the Broward County sheriff from office, using the same claims of neglect of duty and incompetence. There, however, DeSantis acted shortly after a report was issued on the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where 17 students were killed. DeSantis’s decision to suspend the sheriff was based on that report’s conclusions about the training and preparation of law enforcement under the sheriff’s command, and it was upheld by the Florida Supreme Court.

But the broad move by DeSantis against Warren included no such report underlying it. It also made no mention of any cases that DeSantis objects to. The governor’s executive order instituting the suspension only mentions the prosecutor’s “public proclamations of non-enforcement.” These issues are certain to come up in any challenge to the suspension.

DeSantis’s claim that the announcement of a declination policy constitutes a failure of duty that fits under the state constitution rules may also come under scrutiny. 

Earlier this year, a conservative state Senator in Florida championed a bill this year that would have authorized the governor to suspend a local prosecutor who announces a blanket policy of not declining certain cases. The bill provided “that a state attorney adopting certain blanket policies constitutes a failure to execute his or her duty.” That bill did not pass the legislature, dying in the state Senate. Still, DeSantis interpreted Warren’s blanket policies as a neglect of duty in his announcement today.

Eskamani highlighted the hypocrisy of DeSantis suspending Warren because of steps he’s taken not to enforce certain laws, saying, ”this is the same governor who’s told school districts to ignore federal Title IX guidelines, especially on LGBTQ+ care and discrimination.”

Miriam Krinsky, executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, the organization behind nationwide prosecutors’ joint statements on transgender rights and abortion rights that DeSantis cited in his order, pointed out that many prosecutors, including some conservatives, choose to not charge certain misdemeanors, a practice DeSantis assailed today. “There’s a potential for a legal challenge over the erosion of voter choice,” she told Bolts.

Ayala echoed that point in her statement. “Since when does the governor have veto power over the people’s choice?”

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