Michmutters

Gov. Ron DeSantis shocked Tampa Bay on Thursday when he removed Andrew Warren from his office as state attorney for Hillsborough County.

DeSantis said Warren, a Democrat and rising star in progressive law enforcement circles, had put himself “above the law” by promising not to enforce laws limiting abortion or the ability of children to seek certain gender dysphoria treatments. DeSantis used a suspension clause in the Florida Constitution that means Warren essentially has been fired.

Let’s take a closer look at Warren’s record, examining where he came from and how we got to Thursday’s decision.

1. Warren scored the most upset in 2016.

Andrew Warren was a relatively anonymous Democratic attorney until election night 2016, when he unseated Mark Ober, the Republican incumbent, in the race for Hillsborough County prosecutor. At the time, the Times called Warren’s victory a “stunning election-night upset.”

Warren, a former federal prosecutor, ran an aggressive campaign attacking his opponent for alleged absenteeism and a lack of sensitivity toward crime victims. (At the time, Ober said both characterizations were misleading.) Warren also pledged to rehabilitate those convicted of crimes, and enact policies that would stop criminals from becoming repeat offenders.

2. His office helped exonerate a wrongfully convicted man imprisoned for nearly four decades.

In 2018, Warren established a conviction review unit in the Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office. Not long after, evidence submitted to the unit by the Innocence Project led a judge to throw out the conviction of Robert DuBoise, a man who had been wrongfully imprisoned for 37 years. DuBoise was convicted in the 1980s of murdering Barbara Grams.

The unit was one of many progressive initiatives by Warren. He has seldom sought the death penalty in capital murder cases. And he had steered his office away from charging people for driving with a suspended license if the suspension was due to a financial obligation, like an unpaid speeding ticket.

3. Warren has been a thorn on the side of conservatives.

Perhaps the highest profile flap of Warren’s tenure as prosecutor came during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic. In April 2020, the prosecutor supported the arrest of a megachurch pastor who had held church services in person. Then DeSantis signed an executive order allowing the in-person services to continue.

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In response, Warren called DeSantis’ move “weak” and “spineless.” The charges against the pastor were later dropped.

Warren also criticized some of DeSantis’ legislative priorities. He said 2021′s HB 1, the so-called “anti-riot” bill, was tantamount to “criminalizing peaceful protests.”

He declined to prosecute 67 people arrested during the 2020 summer of protests over police brutality, enraging some conservatives.

And following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the abortion precedent set by Roe v. Wade, Warren said he would not press charges against abortion patients. In a tweetI reasoned that Florida’s Constitution has a clause protecting the right to privacy.

That proclamation was one of DeSantis’ justifications for suspending the prosecutor.

4. Warren has been accused of being funded by liberal out-of-state billionaires.

On Thursday, in response to a question about whether it was appropriate to remove an elected official, DeSantis alluded to Warren’s campaign support from wealthy progressives hoping to remake the criminal justice system.

“We can go back and look at some of these elections and all the money that’s coming in from people that do not live in Florida and are really trying to push an agenda on the people of Florida,” DeSantis said. (The governor has received tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from out-of-state billionaires.)

Rumors of support for Warren from financiers such as George Soros date back to 2016.

According to a profile of Warren the Times published in 2020, Soros likely did help Warren’s campaign.

“We understand that he gave money to the state (Democratic) party,” Warren said then. “And the state party money… went to support different candidates. And I have very little insight into the amount of money he gave, who it went to, etc.”

5. Tampa has seen more murders in recent years.

Tampa’s violent crime rate has spiked in recent years, with the city in 2021 recording the most murders it had seen since 1994, according to statistics from the Tampa Police Department compiled by the Times editorial board.

Although such crimes are up around the state and around the country, Tampa has seen somewhat more killings than most other cities in Florida, the editorial board said in April.

In the midst of cross-examination, a lawyer for the parents, Mark Bankston, sprung a surprise: Twelve days earlier, lawyers for Mr. Jones had sent data from his iPhone, including two years’ worth of text messages, to the plaintiffs.

The revelation prompted Mr. Bankston to suggest Mr. Jones had committed perjury in previous depositions. It also raised questions about how, exactly, the phone data had been shared.

Here is what legal experts thought of the moment when Mr. Jones was confronted with his phone data.

Alex Jones did seem surprised, but was this actually unusual?

And it is.

“It’s wild,” said Ellen Yaroshefsky, a distinguished professor in legal ethics at Hofstra University. “It’s really wild. It’s a wild situation in a wild case with a wild person.”

The exchange was eye-opening for several reasons. Information pertinent to such litigation is typically handed over before trial, in a process called discovery.

Bruce Green, a law professor at Fordham, where he directs a center for law and ethics, said that Mr. Bankston, as part of that process, had almost certainly requested texts and emails Mr. Jones had sent pertaining to Sandy Hook.

Even if Mr. Jones’s lawyers wanted to withhold certain of his communications as privileged, they would have had to supply a list of those documents to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, who could then have tried to gain access to the documents by appealing to the judge.

Steven Goode, a professor at the University of Texas law school who specializes in trial and appellate law, said in an interview that if what Mr. Bankston said on Wednesday was accurate and that Mr. Jones’s lawyers had failed to take action after they learned what they had done, “I would find that stunning.”

Why should we believe what the parents’ lawyer said?

Mr. Green said Mr. Bankston was almost certainly telling the truth about how he had come into possession of the phone records, for two reasons. First, lawyers for Mr. Jones did not contest his presentation of him in court, which allowed the records to be admitted as evidence. Second, it would be a disciplinary violation for Mr. Bankston to lie to the judge.

In most states, ethics rules require plaintiffs’ lawyers to notify their defense counterparts of inadvertent disclosure. Texas, however, does not have such a rule. Still, Mr. Bankston said in court on Wednesday that he had informed Mr. Jones’s team of the disclosure, saying, that “when informed,” the lawyers “did not take any steps to identify it as privileged or protect it in any way. ”

Professor Goode said that if Mr. Bankston’s description was accurate, he had given a lawyer for Mr. Jones the opportunity to assert privilege over the material in a more generous way than was required.

On Thursday, a lawyer for Mr. Jones, F. Andino Reynal, filed an emergency motion requesting that a judge order Mr. Bankston to return all hard copies of the documents produced from the cellphone records, to seal those already entered into evidence and to give his team a chance to provide replacement copies of relevant evidence.

At a hearing on the motion, Mr. Reynal also called for a mistrial, based on Mr. Bankston’s use of the cellphone records. He said that after the documents had been inadvertently turned over, he had asked Mr. Bankston to disregard the link he had been sent and had expected the request to be honored.

Mr. Bankston, in response, said that the words “please disregard” had created “no legal duty on me whatsoever,” adding that he had been under no obligation not to look at the documents. He called the motion “frivolous.” (He also clarified that the link to the records had been sent by Mr. Reynal’s legal assistant.)

The judge, Maya Guerra Gamble, denied the mistrial request and the motion.

Did Mr. Jones commit perjury? If so, is he likely to face consequences?

Experts said it was unclear whether Mr. Jones would face perjury charges. Under Texas law, a person can be charged with perjury, a misdemeanor, if he makes a false statement under oath, or if, while under oath, he swears to the truth of a statement previously made, with a clear understanding of the statement and the attempt to deceive. The person can be charged with aggravated perjury, a felony, if the false statement is made in connection with an official proceeding and could have affected the outcome of the case.

If investigators with the Travis County district attorney’s office investigate the case and find that Mr. Jones committed perjury, he could be charged with a crime. The office did not respond to a request for comment.

“At one point the judge actually said to Jones, you believe anything that comes out of your mouth at the time you say it,” Professor Goode said. “I don’t know what he believes or doesn’t believe, so I have no idea whether the Travis County prosecutors would be in any way interested in prosecuting or whether or not they’d actually be able to make out a case.”