Dennis Ward, State’s Attorney for Monroe County, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on in the county.
A new law would allow minors to be charged with third-degree murder for those who sell fentanyl that results in death.
Ward said, “We charge juveniles a lot of times as adults based on their criminal histories and the egregiousness of their acts that they commit when the homicide’s committed. I don’t see any difference between using a gun or a knife or using fentanyl. Fentanyl, it’s deadly. It doesn’t belong in this world, and certainly, in my opinion, it doesn’t belong to Monroe County in any way, shape or form. We’ve had a few arrests here lately for fentanyl. I know the sheriff’s office and Key West PD have made some arrests and some for trafficking amounts that we’re certainly going to pursue as much time as we can get, even simple possession of fentanyl and try and get at least significant county jail time and hopefully prison time, because I don’t want fentanyl in Monroe County. I was a little bummed, though, some of these people may be allowed into a drug court program. I’m going to have to talk to Representative Mooney about excluding fentanyl from any drug court program. Whenever we charge someone with murder and we want to seek the death penalty or something, we have to go before the grand jury and even with fentanyl, we go to the grand jury and get their authorization for that. I like the reaction of their Miami attorneys when they find out we’re asking for prison time. I mean, they don’t do that up on Miami.”
The grand jury report came out about the charges facing three former Key West city officials.
Ward said, “The grand jurors certainly outlined some things that they thought needed to be dealt with, either changed or eliminated. It’s a pretty detailed report. I guess it’s a guide. Of course, the city of Key West doesn’t have to do any of that if they don’t want to, but that’s between them and the voters. We interviewed a lot of witnesses, and I guess we had a lot of different evidence that we utilized to present before the grand jurors, and we worked with them for a significant period of time and what a great group of grand jurors. I mean, they showed up whenever we asked them to show up. We have to have a 15 of them to have a quorum. We choose 21 and the day we chose them, we just went right into a couple of things. I think we had a child sexual battery, where a father sexually battered his seven year old and four year old daughters. We quickly got a grand jury indictment. We’re going to seek the death penalty in that case, and then we went into the Key West cases, and the grand jury report speaks for itself. Now we’re preparing to prosecute the people that were indicted, the chief building official, his brother, the city attorney, and the head of Code Enforcement, who has since resigned, and we’re putting together our cases and getting our discovery requirements met and sent out to their attorneys. At the same time, we’re still working on the County Air Rescue cases where we indicted people there and arrested people there, as well as the TDC. In the next week or two, we’ve got a few complaints on the village of Islamorada. I’m spending a lot of time on prosecuting these elected officials and appointed government employees. It’s just a sad state of affairs for the people that we elect into office and how they conduct themselves. They just have no respect for the law and no respect for themselves, and certainly no respect for the taxpayers. So I’ve got a lot more cases that I need to prosecute.”
The office is still short on staff.
Ward said, “I’m still short handed about half a dozen attorneys, and now I’m looking at bills that are going to eliminate some state attorney positions. I think there are unfilled positions that I can’t fill, but I use some of the money from those to pay my prosecutors a little bit higher than they do around the rest of the state, because of the extreme cost of living here in the Florida Keys. So it’s always something that we’re going through to protect this community and keep this community safe.”
Domestic situations are another issue for the office.
Ward said, “Another thing I’m looking at is these injunctions when people get into these domestic situations, and more likely than not, it’s a woman, and we had an incident last week where a young lady was stabbed by her baby’s daddy in Key West, and an individual who happened to be in the workplace at that time stood up and got in front of, in between him and her, and he got stabbed in the back a couple of times. But these violations of injunction, you look at this case, and you see it all the time. I guess the biggest one in the media these days is the one Broward County where this jackass went to his ex wife’s house, broke in through the back door, as he was going through the back door, her father was sitting out back, basically for protection, he shot him. She ran out the front door across the street. He had grabbed the child when he went in, and he walked the child across the street to the neighbor’s house and went into the neighbor’s house and killed the neighbor and killed her. Of course, there was an injunction, a stay away order. These are first degree misdemeanors for violations. I think that we need to work on something here. I’ll get with Mooney on this and Ana Maria and work on trying to get that moved up to a second degree felony, which is a substantial increase in prison time, so people will be looking at 15 years. So I think that these injunctions need to be taken a little more serious than they’re being taken. I think we need a bigger amount of prison time we can threaten these people with if they violate it.”
How long does the process take for legislators to change laws like that?
Ward said, “As long as the legislature takes to come back into session, which will be early next year, because I think it’s an election year for some of them, they’ll start early. We can’t get it before them until next year, and then it’ll have to go to all the committees. I’m sure there’ll be some of these people that’ll be outraged over the fact that we’re asking for that amount of time. But I mean, we can structure the statute to at least give prosecutors some type of leeway to pursue greater amounts of jail time, and up to and including a significant amount of prison time for these people that are offenders, repeat offenders, that just choose not to abide by whatever the injunction says. They all know they have it because they get served with it, and then they have to show up for a hearing and sometimes it’s a short hearing, sometimes it’s a lengthy hearing, and then the parameters are established, and that’s it. I get it. These things are emotional and what have you. But I’m getting tired of watching women getting murdered and beaten and robbed and raped while there’s a domestic injunction in place. I’m just, I’m up to here with it, and I’ve been dealing with it with my 53 years in the judicial system. Before it was just like a stay away and then finally, they made the domestic battery laws a lot stricter, back, I believe, in the 80s, and required law enforcement officers to make an arrest if they see any visible signs of some type of domestic abuse. So that was a big step, a huge step in protecting mainly women, and now I think it’s time to increase the penalties for this thing.”
A recent case found a Marathon man was arrested for hitting a child with the buckle side of a folded leather belt.
Ward said, “I’m sure there’s a stay away order in that case. The detectives were in my office, in the Upper Keys, getting the warrant signed on that case maybe two days ago, I think.”
How is the federal government doing in the first few months of President Donald Trump’s second term?
Ward said, “I don’t get into that, district court judges making these sometimes ridiculous rulings, and sometimes they have value. That’s something that the Supreme Court and Congress is going to have to try and fix. That’s our process in the country and some people are upset about it, and some people are happy about it, but that’s the way it runs through. The big thing about the federal government right now is the story that came out about Sheriff Ramsay and his office being excluded from some narcotics investigations because of a leak in his office. I don’t think that has any credence. I don’t think it has any evidence as such. I don’t know where that came from. I know that we, Sheriff Ramsay and I have expressed our severe displeasure with some of the ways that a lot of cases that we get down here that should be handled by the feds. I’m prosecuting, specifically a very severe child pornography case, child sexual use case, that we asked them to go up to a Midwestern state with an individual had a place, and we asked them if they would help us and search that place and review and get into their computer systems, and they told us that they didn’t have jurisdiction. Then we had a huge amount of cocaine come in, and we asked them to prosecute that case and investigate with us, and they refuse to do that, and Sheriff Ramsay and I have been very vocal about it, and I think this is sour grapes. I think they’re trying to attack the integrity and credibility of Sheriff Ramsay and the sheriff’s office, and I find that highly unprofessional, and I wish that this Kash Patel would take a look at this and get that agent that started that on the carpet and resolve this thing and fire this guy.”
Michael Stapleford of KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM said, “We have a lot of respect for you and for Sheriff Ramsay and his ethics.”
The difference in prosecution between here and Miami is starting to have an impact.
Ward said, “I’ve got a phone call into the state attorney up there, because the other day we had a violation of probation. People that are on probation here get arrested up in Miami because a lot of them are from Miami for a new law violation, and that violates their probation down here, and we’re having difficulty getting reports from the State Attorney’s Office and the law enforcement agencies up there. Look, I don’t care what they do up there with their crime and what have you. That’s not my problem. I have nothing to do with that. But when you start making these decisions that impact on Monroe County and the people that I represent, then we’re going to have a problem. So I called up there and we’ll see what, what the response is going to be, and it’s just their bond judge up there. I mean, our judges issue warrants and put bond amounts on there, and their judge up there, when they get arrested on our warrant, change our bonds and let these people out. So I’m not happy about that. I don’t know where I have to go with that. Maybe the Judicial Qualifications or commission, or maybe the Florida Supreme Court, but I’m not going to put up with that.”