Orange-Osceola State Attorney Monique Worrell on Tuesday said her office has been “aggressively” prosecuting accused drug traffickers since she returned to office in January, a comment she made hours after the governor accused her of having a “liberal approach” to combating the opioid epidemic.
At a press conference, Worrell said her prosecutors handled approximately 100 drug trafficking cases so far in 2025 that resulted in prison sentences. Twenty nine of those prosecutions involved accused fentanyl traffickers, six of whom were sentenced to more than 20 years behind bars.
“The Ninth Judicial Circuit,” which covers Orange and Osceola counties, “has prosecuted fentanyl trafficking cases aggressively and effectively,” Worrell said.
Hours earlier, Gov. Ron DeSantis highlighted his administration’s efforts to combat fentanyl, the opioid that led to skyrocketing overdoses in recent years, through Florida’s State Assistance for Fentanyl Eradication grant program. Since its establishment in 2023, the program, which funds drug investigations by local law enforcement, resulted in 2,100 arrests and the seizure of 485 pounds of fentanyl and over 63,000 fentanyl pills, he said.
Speaking with reporters, the governor took a swipe at Worrell, saying he doesn’t think she is treating fentanyl peddlers as harshly as she should. Drug dealers in other parts of Florida are being treated “like the murderers that they are,” he added, while Worrell is “obviously is not gung ho about what needs to be done.”
“Basically, her approach is to not be as strong as we need to be and to have a thumb on the scale in favor of the defendants,” DeSantis said.
In response, Worrell said her office takes a “balanced approach,” pursuing severe penalties for drug traffickers while seeking treatment for users struggling with addiction. She also showed reporters a recording of an Aug. 15 meeting with her prosecutors, where she warned, “If we find that people are waiving minimum mandatories without legally sufficient reasons to do so, there will be discipline.”
The governor’s comments were an insult to the attorneys in her office who are pursuing convictions against drug dealers, she said. “It is a slap in their face to hear the governor of this state say that they’re not doing their jobs,” said Worrell, who noted her office’s staffing shortage and budget concerns had forced attorneys to prioritize the most serious cases, among them drug trafficking.
The barbs traded Tuesday seemed a rerun of 2023, the year DeSantis suspended Worrell for neglect of duty, arguing she failed to prosecute cases she should have. She denied the accusations and was re-elected last year.
At the time, the governor’s order to remove her partly pointed to data from then-Osceola County Sheriff Marcos Lopez purportedly showing the state attorney was inexplicably downgrading drug trafficking charges or abandoning them altogether.
But an Orlando Sentinel analysis of that data, shared by Lopez’s staff at a press conference earlier that year to support his claims, found many of the highlighted cases were still ongoing, while 62% of the cases that were dropped or downgraded were because of investigative issues by the former sheriff’s own deputies.
After Worrell’s suspension, none of the abandoned cases were resumed under Andrew Bain, whom DeSantis appointed to replace her.
Worrell, a progressive Democrat, has taken heat from Republicans in Tallahassee in the months since her return as the region’s top prosecutor. The most public spat was over her effort to reduce the number of cases law enforcement sent for review to her prosecutors involving suspects who had not been immediately arrested.
While a collaboration between her office and Attorney General James Uthmeier has since proven to be fruitful by reducing a massive backlog of nonarrest cases, Worrell remains under the microscope, raising her supporters’ fears that there will be an effort to remove her once again.
When asked Tuesday, however, she said she was not concerned about that possibility.
“I am concerned with doing my job,” Worrell said, “the job that I was elected twice to do and I do it every single day.”
