Former State Attorney Monique Worrell, 49, is running against Acting State Attorney Andrew Bain, 39, to reclaim the top prosecutor job Gov. Ron DeSantis ousted her from last year — a maneuver critics saw as purely political — in a race that’s made national headlines for accusations of election fraud.

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State attorneys serve a four-year term and earn $212,562.24 annually.

Criminal justice reformer

Worrell, a Democrat, was elected state attorney in 2020 with 66 percent of the vote across Orange and Osceola counties. She ran then, and is running now on a platform to address the systemic injustices that have led to Florida leading the nation in death row exonerations and an over-representation of people of color in jails and prisons, often because they lack the funds to bond out while awaiting trial. A 2023 study of Florida’s corrections system done by the University of Florida’s Race and Crime Center for Justice found that while Black people account for 14 percent of the state population, they are incarcerated at five times the rate of white people and represent 48 percent of the state prison population.

"For a short period of time, I did something about those things,” Worrell said during a Zoom interview with VoxPopuli. “When I filed to run for re-election, it was because I knew that the work that I had started was important, was in its infancy stage and that it would take several terms for me to shift the entire direction that we, as a community, look at prosecution, the way the people who are doing the work of prosecution look at prosecution … that was more solution-focused than punitive-focused.”

Ousted from office

In August 2023, Gov. Ron DeSantis removed Worrell, the only Black female state attorney in Florida, for what he claimed, was “neglecting her duty to faithfully prosecute crime in her jurisdiction.” A July online poll by Change Research of 887 likely voters found that 47 percent believed DeSantis, running for president at the time, did it for political reasons while 26 percent thought it was justified and 27 percent didn’t know.

DeSantis, who also removed a Hillsborough County state attorney for his abortion stance, replaced Worrell with Bain, a one-time Democrat-turned-independent and a member of the Federalist Society, the conservative organization that grooms law students and attorneys for positions in government and the judiciary.

Worrell sued DeSantis to be reinstated, stating in her petition to the Florida Supreme Court that his executive order “vaguely refers to Ms. Worrell’s ‘practices and policies’ throughout but notably fails to identify a single, specific policy or practice … to constitute a neglect of duty” and that her practices fell under prosecutorial discretion. The Florida Supreme Court, with five DeSantis appointees on the bench, denied her petition 6 to 1.

Straightforward philosophy

Worrell was a law professor at University of Florida for 16 years and the founding director of the university’s Criminal Justice Center. She set up the state attorney office’s Conviction Integrity Unit under former State Attorney Aramis Ayala to evaluate wrongful convictions. Her approach to prosecution is straightforward: incarcerate the dangerous career offenders while developing other methods for holding law-breakers accountable when they pose no threat to the community.

One example she points to is the Adult Civil Citation Program, a joint venture she implemented between the state attorney’s office and law enforcement to “shield people from the negative consequences of being arrested” for minor offenses like loitering. “When you’re arrested and you’re fingerprinted and your mugshot is out there, it’s very difficult to ever make it go away,” she explained. “You can be denied housing, you can be denied employment, you can be denied student loans.”

So, instead of arrest, adults can choose community service, educational classes and pay a fine.

“There was accountability, but we spared them the very negative consequences of the criminal justice system,” Worrell said.

Nothing like it had been done in the Ninth Circuit before but Worrell said the idea wasn’t hers. “There is a provision in the statute for state attorneys to create adult civil citation programs,” she said. “I'm pegged as this super liberal person who just wants to open the prison doors and let everyone out,” she said, “but the reality is a lot of the things that I did were provided for in statute already. I just actually implemented them.”

There was also a drug diversion program to help substance abusers get into rehab. And the prostitution diversion program to help people who may be trafficked. There was an under-age drinking diversion program for college kids.

And for those Worrell calls the “most dangerous and prolific offenders in our community,” she developed the Violent Crime Task Force, a multi-agency collaboration in which her office worked together with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and local and federal law enforcement.

“We could build the best cases against them so that they could either go federal with the United States Attorney's Office, or we would keep them in the state with my office, but we would make sure that the law enforcement agencies knew exactly what evidence we needed and how they needed to conduct themselves so that we could make the cases stick. We could work collaboratively to remove those dangerous individuals from our community, and that was something that was created under my administration that my opponent keeps saying never existed.”

Crime dropped during Worrell’s tenure in office. Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) statistics indicate that between 2020 and 2021 the crime rate per 100,000 residents dropped nearly 10 percent within the Ninth Judicial Circuit. The homicide rate dropped 13 percent in the same period. According to the 2023 Orange County Sheriff’s Office Annual Report, homicides dropped 3 percent, sex crimes were down 12 percent and robberies were down 19 percent.

“What I was doing was working,” Worrell said. “The work that I started was helping our community. Because we were seeing crime go down, we also saw mass incarceration go down. And that is what the 497,000 people who voted for me in 2020, that's what they elected me to do.

“We can actually keep our communities safe because we're treating people who are dangerous differently than those people who are not dangerous. And we reduce the disproportionate minority impact on Black and Brown communities. When you implement policies that are humanitarian in nature, Black and Brown people automatically benefit from those policies without you having to implement policies that specifically target them.”

Despite the Republican talking point that Worrell was soft on crime, one of her early priorities in office was establishing a capital case review panel with a rigorous process to determine when her office would seek the death penalty. Unlike her predecessor, Aramis Ayala who refused death penalty cases, Worrell has no qualms when it’s warranted.

“If an attorney wanted to seek death on a case, they needed to write a capital case memo and present to the panel on why they wanted to seek death in a particular case. The panel would review the case and then they would make a recommendation to me. I would then make the final decision. I believe that happened in three or four cases in two and a half years, and that's plenty. We treat death with the gravity that it deserves.”

The last case Worrell filed an intention to seek the death penalty for was Keith Moses, who gunned down a nine-year-old, her mother and two news reporters last year in Pine Hills, killing three and injuring one.

Election interference

Meanwhile, allegations of election tampering were circulating around the Republican primary. One candidate, attorney Thomas Feiter, claimed he was offered judicial positions and help with future legislative runs to drop out of the race and clear the way for Bain, DeSantis’s candidate by people close to the governor. He refused. He lost the primary to GOP-endorsed attorney Seth Hyman, who almost immediately dropped out of the race, saying he saw no way to win. Feiter has since filed a lawsuit against Bain, Hyman, DeSantis and others alleging election interference.

Worrell joined Feiter at the press conference to announce the lawsuit.

“The reason that I put so much stock in what he said was because before everything happened, he was saying that this was gonna happen. It happened exactly how he said it would happen,” she said. “It's really sad the lengths that they have gone to keep me out of office, to keep the voters from having the person that they elected.”

She wants Bain held accountable for whatever role he played in the scheme. “In our League of Women Voters debate, he said the election police should investigate. The election police works for the governor. So what are they going to investigate? This is a travesty of justice. Because what they've done is they have tipped the scale in his favor.”

Polling shows that in every match-up, Worrell beats Bain. But there’s concern that even if she wins again on Nov. 5, DeSantis will find a reason to remove her, again. Worrell acknowledges the possibility.

“This isn't a fight for my job,” she said emphatically. “This is a fight for my values. This is a fight for the voters. This is a fight for the 60 percent of Black and Brown people who are incarcerated that could be free. This is a fight for freedom. So, yes, I am pouring my life into running for a seat that I could very well be removed from immediately after winning. Because justice matters. Because democracy matters. Because the people, 497, 000 people who voted to make me their state attorney, their voices matter.”