Senate budget chief Jack Latvala, who is mulling a run for governor, went further.
“I think she ought to be thrown out of office,” the Clearwater Republican told reporters Thursday.
Bondi, whose office represents the state in death-penalty cases before the Florida Supreme Court, also criticized the local prosecutor.
Ayala’s decision “sends a dangerous message” to residents and visitors to the Orlando area and “is a blatant neglect of duty and a shameful failure to follow the law as a constitutionally elected officer,” Bondi said in a prepared statement.
But Jacksonville criminal-defense lawyer Bill Sheppard, who has represented defendants in capital cases for nearly five decades, disagreed.
Ayala’s position is more in line with a growing national trend by courts, along with some governors and legislatures, that takes a harsher view of the death penalty, Sheppard said in a telephone interview Thursday.
“This prosecutor is reflecting the current American national values relating to the death penalty,” he said. “And anybody that’s saying she is not upholding the law is not familiar with the law. Prosecutors have prosecutorial discretion, and they exercise it every day. … So what is different about this other than she is going against their values but she is reflecting the current American values.”
