Appointed by DeSantis, Suzy Lopez shores up support in bid for Hillsborough state attorney

TAMPA — Suzy Lopez, clad in red, gripped a microphone and smiled as she gazed at the crowd of law enforcement officials, prominent defense attorneys and government lawyers. They listened intently as she recounted how she got to be Hillsborough County’s state attorney.

She spoke of the 17 years she spent as a prosecutor, and the seven months thereafter that she was a county judge. It was then that Gov. Ron DeSantis made “one of the boldest moves in Florida political history,” she said. The conservative Republican governor suspended her predecessor, the progressive Democrat Andrew Warren, and appointed her to replace him.

From the crowd came a whistle. “Well done!” someone shouted.

This was in late November in a banquet room adjacent to the Hotel Haya in Ybor City. Lopez, 47, was there to officially launch her campaign to be elected to the office she already leads.

She drew significant support for a first-time candidate, who for the last 17 months has endured criticism from some who say she holds the office illegitimately. She spoke with candor and confidence. She spoke as though she anticipated she’d be running against Warren. Yet, as election season gets underway, it remains unclear whether he, or anyone, will challenge her.

DeSantis suspended Warren in August 2022 for statements he signed pledging not to prosecute cases involving abortion or transgender health care, and policies he had that discouraged prosecuting some low-level crimes. A federal judge later opined the suspension was wrong, but concluded he lacked the authority to reinstate Warren.

Warren espoused a criminal justice philosophy of reforming the system to ensure that the guilty are held accountable but treated fairly, to correct practices that burden the poor and to guard against prosecutorial mistakes.

Lopez, instead, brings a more traditional brand of toughness: the pursuit of stiff consequences for criminals, a heightened emphasis on sympathy for victims, an unbridled embrace of law enforcement.

She spoke with pride about how she got where she is.

“I am proud to live in a state where we have a governor who says he will not conduct social experiments in the state attorney’s office,” she said.

Experience and politics

As she campaigns, Lopez has sought to set herself apart while touting her background and firsthand courtroom experience.

There are slogans:

Back to basics.

Safer with Suzy.

There is the emphasis on her local roots, perhaps as a way to contrast herself with Warren, who came to Tampa three years before he ran for state attorney.

Lopez’s grandfather, she said in her campaign speech, came here in 1912 from Spain.

“I was born on Buffalo when it was Buffalo,” she likes to say, referring to the days when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard was known as Buffalo Avenue.

She grew up in South Tampa and attended Tampa Preparatory School and Plant High School. Her only forays elsewhere were to Middlebury College in Vermont, where she studied psychology and political science, and Suffolk University in Boston, where she got her law degree.

She’s comfortable in courtrooms, particularly the ones in the Hillsborough Courthouse Annex, where she has spent the bulk of her career. She pops in almost every morning, wandering from court to court, chatting with fellow prosecutors, meeting with crime victims.

She keeps an eye on cases that get media attention. But she also watches lower-profile trials. And occasionally, she’ll do the work typically reserved for new prosecutors, reading out the case names listed on the morning docket, or handling the first court appearances for the day’s latest arrestees.

She seems less at ease when she has to speak off the cuff. In one-on-one chats with a reporter, she often prefaces her responses to questions with “off the record.” But she seldom responds with much beyond platitudes.

“We follow the law,” is a frequent refrain.

When a reporter queried her office last summer about whether she planned to continue prosecuting drug overdose cases as homicides — a practice that her predecessor embraced — she issued a statement saying only that drug dealers would “be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” (Lopez has subsequently brought multiple new drug-induced homicide cases and has made fentanyl prosecutions a priority.)

She remains a hearty ally to the governor. When DeSantis in March came to Tampa to stage an event dubbed “Exposing the Book Ban Hoax,” Lopez provided the venue in the state attorney’s office auditorium.

After DeSantis in August suspended Monique Worrell, the Democratic state attorney in Orlando, Lopez issued a statement supporting the governor’s “decisive action,” which she said was the “unfortunate result of another prosecutor who wants to create laws instead of enforcing them.”

When a man named Jimmie Gardner was arrested in November on a human trafficking charge involving a 16-year-old girl, Lopez put out a news release the same day. It highlighted the fact that Gardner is the brother-in-law of Democratic Georgia voting rights activist Stacey Abrams. The release also noted that Gardner was exonerated in 2016 after 27 years in prison for a rape he did not commit.

Of course, many politicians do this sort of thing. Warren was no exception. When he was still state attorney, Warren appeared with Sheriff Chad Chronister at a news conference announcing the arrest of an evangelical church pastor, lambasting him for holding services amid the early COVID-19 lockdowns. (Warren later dropped charges against the pastor.)

Later that summer, Warren staged a news conference to announce he wouldn’t prosecute a group of Black Lives Matter protesters who’d been arrested for unlawful assembly in downtown Tampa, an act that drew criticism from the city’s police chief.

And, more than once, Warren lobbed public criticisms at DeSantis.

Such actions made him more than a few enemies and likely contributed to his ouster.

The same office, a new vision

Since she took over, Lopez has made few personnel changes at the top.

Gary Weisman, who joined the office as Warren’s chief of staff and policy adviser in 2017, serves in the same role with Lopez. Weisman was a civil attorney and a familiar face in Tampa’s legal community before joining the state attorney’s office. A Republican, he helped keep the office working amid the uncertainty that followed Warren’s ouster. He’s close with Sheriff Chronister. Judges and lawyers greet Weisman warmly when he appears in their courtrooms.

He’s the second-highest-paid employee at the state attorney’s office. He makes only slightly less than Lopez herself, who draws the $212,562 annual salary common to all state attorneys and public defenders.

Rounding out the office’s top leadership are Kimberly Hindman and Renee Muratti. They serve as the chief assistants managing the day-to-day workings of the office’s felony divisions and misdemeanor and juvenile sections. Both served in the same jobs when Warren was there. Both are registered Democrats, but also longtime prosecutors in the office.

Lopez brought back Jay Pruner, the widely respected longtime homicide prosecutor who retired in 2021. After a year away, Pruner returned to the office as the felony bureau chief. Another high-level holdover is Justin Diaz, the senior felony administrative chief, who prosecutes some of the office’s highest-profile and complex criminal cases.

The most visible changes Lopez has made are geared toward prosecutorial policy and communication with the public.

She has increased the office’s pursuit of capital punishment. As of December, the office had filed notice of intent to seek the death penalty in at least 10 ongoing cases involving 12 defendants. Five death penalty prosecutions were pending when Warren left office.

She reversed policies Warren enacted that advised prosecutors to avoid pursuing cases for low-level, nonviolent crimes — like trespassing or prostitution — except in specified circumstances.

“The reason we focus on low-level crimes is to ensure that low-level criminals don’t become experts on how to commit more crime,” Lopez said at her campaign kickoff.

With the same rationale, she has taken a harsher posture toward juvenile defendants accused of violent crimes. Before she took office, the trend had been to move away from bringing adult charges against juveniles.

“I wish we didn’t have to,” Lopez, at her campaign event, said of prosecuting juveniles as adults. “Those are the toughest decisions that we make in our office. But the truth is that wishing is not a prosecutorial strategy. Some kids must face adult consequences when they victimize our community.”

She stood with Tampa police Chief Lee Bercaw at a November news conference to announce a murder charge against 14-year-old Kadyn Abney, who is accused of shooting a bystander amid an early-morning Ybor City gunfight in which two people were killed and more than a dozen injured.

“He is no stranger to the juvenile justice system, but he will no longer be treated as a juvenile,” Lopez said. “When you shoot and kill an innocent person, your age does not matter.”

Will voters have a choice?

Although Warren filed candidate paperwork, he has yet to say officially whether he will run to be reelected as state attorney. If he does, he will have a tough fight against Lopez.

Her initial campaign contributions topped $100,000. Her supporters include Sheriff Chronister, former Tampa police chief Brian Dugan, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, former State Attorney Mark Ober, and numerous retired judges, Republican lawmakers and prominent defense attorneys.

Chronister introduced her at her campaign kickoff, crediting her with restoring law enforcement’s faith in the justice system.

Although rumors have circulated about other potential candidates entering the race, no one has said publicly that they will. If no challenger emerges by the April qualifying deadline, Lopez will automatically secure a four-year term.

Until then, she continues to make herself a familiar face to the public. A day after her campaign kickoff, she spoke at a Café con Tampa event at the Portico coffee shop in downtown Tampa. About 60 people listened as she spoke about her background, her work, her support for law enforcement and her efforts to get to know community organizations.

Toward the end, someone asked a question: Was Warren’s suspension and her appointment good for democracy?

Lopez spoke carefully and sternly. If people don’t like how she got into office, she said, she would tell them to look at what she has accomplished.

“We’ve rebuilt our relationships with law enforcement that were not in existence,” she said. “We’ve given a voice to victims and we’ve held offenders accountable. So that’s what we’ve done. What is good for democracy — we have a governor who made a very bold move. Our Constitution not only allows him to do what he did, but gives him the duty to do that.”