Florida Supreme Court made right call on Andrew Warren case | Opinion

On June 22, the Supreme Court of Florida rejected suspended Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren’s request to be reinstated because, the court found, he waited too long to ask. The decision has come under harsh criticism, including from the editorial board of this paper. The board has kindly allowed me to offer this defense of the decision.

To start, I do believe that Gov. Ron DeSantis abused his constitutional authority when he suspended Warren. But the issues before the Florida Supreme Court were narrower than whether the governor was right or wrong.

Warren filed a petition for writ of quo warranto. In medieval England, a writ was a short written command issued by the king, and quo warranto (“by what authority”), a means to challenge a person’s right to hold a certain office.

Our state constitution gives state supreme court the authority to issue writs of quo warranto against state officers like the governor. Over time, quo warranto has also become a way to challenge an officer’s allegedly improper exercise of power. Like other writs, quo warranto is called an “extraordinary writ”: It should rarely be issued. No one has a right to the writ; the court has the discretion to issue it or not.

Here, Warren asked the court to find that the governor’s suspension of him was an improper exercise of the governor’s suspension power. In this context, quo warranto is narrower still. When asked to review an executive order of suspension, the court’s review is limited to “determining whether the executive order, on its face, sets forth allegations of fact relating to one of the constitutionally enumerated grounds of suspension” (Israel v. DeSantis (Fla. 2019)). A canny governor can write a suspension order that takes advantage of this narrow review.

We can see just how difficult it should be for Warren to succeed. He asked for an extraordinary, discretionary writ in a context affording great deference to the governor. It should not be surprising Warren was unsuccessful.

And the specific reason Warren failed did not surprise me. When the governor filed his response to Warren’s petition, I stopped reading at the obviously correct argument that the petition was untimely, an argument the court agreed with. The court found that Warren simply waited too long — over six months after he was suspended, and only after a federal judge ruled he lacked the authority to reinstate Warren. (In a clear case of forum shopping.)

Six months may not seem like a long time, but it is in the eyes of the law — especially for quo warranto, as shown by earlier decisions of the court that it cited in the Warren opinion.

The basic point is that, if Warren believed the governor exceeded his constitutional authority to suspend him from the office his constituents elected him to, he should have acted with urgency. He didn’t. The Supreme Court’s refusal to indulge Warren wasn’t a decision grounded on a technicality. It was the application of the common sense idea that the courts aren’t here to rescue parties from the consequences of their (in)actions.

If the Florida Supreme Court got it wrong in the Warren case, I would say so. But the court acted well within the bounds of its discretion to refuse to a tardy petitioner an extraordinary remedy that should rarely be granted. Criticize Warren, not the court.

Adam Richardson is an appellate lawyer. He lives in Lake Worth Beach.