In the late 2010s, the GOP-controlled Florida Legislature attempted to move toward criminal justice reforms that had already been taking place in red and blue states across the country.
That movement slowed down significantly nationally following the social unrest that broke out in 2020 following the death of George Floyd.
Now, in the last weeks before the midterm elections, Gov. Ron DeSantis is using one of those Florida proposals against Democratic attorney general candidate José Javier Rodríguez.
Speaking in Miami Wednesday while hosting a roundtable on Amendment 3, DeSantis called Rodríguez a “huge, huge, dirtbag.” He had just begun to look at the candidate’s legislative record, he explained, and noted that Rodríguez had sponsored legislation in 2018 (SB 1882) that would have made it easier for arrested individuals to be released while awaiting trial, in some cases without paying bail.
“I know they tried to do that in Miami-Dade at one time,” DeSantis said. “I stopped it, and we’ve not allowed that to happen in the state of Florida. You want the inmates running the asylum? This is the type of guy who, if he gets elected, that’s exactly what will happen.”
Rodríguez responded Thursday.
“That was a bipartisan effort where a number of legislators were looking at how we could make our criminal justice more efficient and more fair. And more data-driven,” he said during a virtual press conference.
“I think that one of the things that we all know, and especially those who cover Tallahassee, is that there’s a lot of spin. It’s taken them at this point almost a year and a half to come up with some argument against my campaign, and they have to dig up one bill from a long time [ago], misconstrue it.
“Again, this was a bipartisan effort. The conservative movement was actually driving change more than Democrats on these issues, and so it’s more than a little rich for alleged conservatives to say that they disagree with making our criminal justice system more fair and effective. This is just a smokescreen, and behind that smokescreen is the massive corruption of my opponent and his friends.”
Although Rodríguez was the sole sponsor of the cash bail bill in 2018, several Florida Republicans championed criminal justice amendments during the late 2010s. One of those was Rep. Byron Donalds, now the GOP’s candidate for governor.
In 2018, Donalds pushed for legislation to raise the state’s felony theft threshold from $300 to $1,000. (A different bill passed that year raised the threshold to $750).
“We have not raised our threshold since 1986,” Donalds said at the time. “You could make the argument that when the Legislature went from $100 to $300 back then, they raised it threefold, so we’re just doing the same thing here.”
Donalds also sponsored the Florida First Step Act in 2019. It would have allowed judges to depart from mandatory minimums for drug trafficking charges. The bill called for a series of changes to the prison system, including allowing inmates to earn more time off their sentences if they earned a high school diploma or participated in a prison entrepreneurship program. It did not get through the Legislature.
In 2016, then incoming Senate President Joe Negron discussed how he wanted to eliminate punitive juvenile-justice laws.
“We cannot and should not tolerate serious wrongdoing by young people,” Negron told lawmakers as they convened for their organizational session following the 2016 elections. “But at the same time, let’s not criminalize adolescence.”
Cash bail legislation from the late 2010s
The movement to allow cashless bail started in the 2010s and was a bipartisan effort in some states.
Cash bail is a guarantee to show up to court — a defendant pays money and is allowed to go home. At the end of the case, they may get the money back. A judge or magistrate may set the amount based on the severity of the charge and whether the defendant is considered a flight or safety risk.
But someone unable to pay the bail, even after being charged with a low-level misdemeanor, can remain in jail for days, weeks, or months.
In 2017, New Jersey virtually eliminated cash bail in favor of a risk-assessment approach that was supported by Republican then-Gov. Chris Christie and approved by 62% of the state’s voters in a 2014 constitutional referendum.
In 2019, New York ended use of money bail and jail for most cases involving misdemeanors and lower-level felonies. Concerns about rising crime following the COVID pandemic resulted in state lawmakers there passing changes, such as directing judges to adopt a broad definition of “harm” and raising the possibility bail could be set in cases like repeat shoplifting offenses, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
In 2023, Illinois became the first state to completely eliminate cash bail.
Reflecting the backlash to those efforts, President Donald Trump signed an executive order in August 2025 that aimed to limit cashless bail in Washington, D.C., and threatened to revoke federal funding for other jurisdictions that use it.
Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, and Maryland all have reduced or limited cash bail, according to GovTrack.us.
A study by Brennan Center for Justice of 33 cities with more liberal bail policies in 2024 found that there is “no statistically significant relationship between bail reform and crime rates.”
Hope Florida ad
DeSantis also attacked Rodríguez Wednesday over a 30-second television ad that highlighted the leaked grand jury presentment in the Hope Florida case. The Republican Party of Florida had filed a lawsuit late last week against the Florida Democratic Party and three statewide candidates on the ballot — Rodríguez, David Jolly, and Annette Taddeo (running for chief financial officer) — as well as 11 TV stations.
The GOP withdrew the lawsuit Wednesday, after a judge denied its request. The FDP is no longer airing that aid on broadcast TV, but is showing a different version digitally.
“For him to put our First Lady, who has done an amazing job for this state and never received a dime for all the stuff she’s done, into a commercial? That’s a major-league dirtbag, and I’m going to ensure that he ends up suffering a very stinging defeat in November,” DeSantis said.
“I think that it’s very clear that my opponent and his allies including the governor are very scared of accountability,” Rodríguez said Thursday. “He’s lashing out, name calling, and the reasons he’s doing that is that he has no answer to the fact that $10 million was taken out of the Medicaid program,” a reference to the Hope Florida situation.
