Will a nasty 2018 State Attorney Primary bring professional consequences for lawyers seeking Florida office?

Chris Crowley. Screenshot via Florida Channel.

Could fallout from a contentious 2018 State Attorney race in Southwest Florida change the rules for lawyers seeking office in 2026?

The Florida Bar brought an action against Chris Crowley over his campaign conduct after he lost a contentious 2018 Republican Primary for State Attorney in Florida’s 20th Judicial Circuit. Over the course of the race, Crowley rigorously criticized opponent Amira Fox’s record as Chief Assistant State Attorney under former State Attorney Steve Russell, while his political supporters attacked her Palestinian heritage.

Crowley, a former Republican State Committeeman for Lee County, maintained for years that he never lied about Fox, and that his rhetoric, however heated, should enjoy protection as political speech.

But the Bar alleged that the “humiliating and disparaging” attacks from one lawyer about another crossed a line to the point of being “prejudicial to the administration of justice.” A Bar referee in 2020 found Crowley guilty of misconduct and ordered his license to practice law be suspended for 60 days.

Crowley for years has fought that decision all the way to the Florida Supreme Court, arguing it would chill not only his own speech but that of any lawyer seeking office in Florida.

Bar officials argued at a Supreme Court hearing in June that all candidates for legal offices such as State Attorney, Public Defender and even Florida Attorney General should adhere to professional standards already expected of candidates for Judge.

Justice Charles Canady, the longest-serving member of the Florida Supreme Court, showed skepticism and said the Bar’s argument “flies in the face of a lot of a tradition of the way campaigns and the First Amendment works in this country.”

It’s unclear if other members of the court found Crowley’s argument more compelling than they found his assertions about Fox offensive. In the coming months, the court will release a ruling to determine not only if Crowley must take off two months from practicing law, but if every candidate for legal office in 2026 must comport their campaign rhetoric to a new standard.

Nasty campaign

Crowley once worked in the State Attorney’s Office in Fort Myers, but shifted to private practice when Russell in 2018 announced he would not seek another term. Russell signaled a desire for Fox to succeed him in office. But when Crowley filed for the seat, it set in motion one of the nastiest Republican Primaries in a red region rich with caustic rhetoric.

Before the August election, Crowley would be arrested for violating election laws by holding a gift basket lottery. But he publicly alleged that Fox and Russell were behind the charges. In one radio ad produced by his campaign, he called the legal attack “corrupt” and “swampy.”

But he also took aim at Fox’s heritage, slamming a book written by her father, Taher Dajani, that expressed sympathy with Palestinians waging war with Israel. Crowley demanded at campaign events that she renounce the book, and one political mailer posed that “she won’t answer questions about Sharia Law. Why?”

Crowley also worked with controversial political consultant Roger Stone, a South Florida-based ally of President Donald Trump who vowed on social media to “expose the radical Muslim running for State’s Attorney.” He alleged Fox’s “real name is Amira Dajana” and that her “family founded the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization” in a post reported by the Naples Daily News.

The candidate also personally shared an article on his Facebook page from the right-wing American Thinker questioning a rise in the number of Muslim candidates seeking office in the U.S. The article included Fox, though she is not Muslim, and alleged family ties to deceased Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Ultimately, the heated rhetoric didn’t land with voters. Fox won 57% of the Republican Primary vote and went on to win the General Election against only write-in opposition. She declined to comment for this article, but at various points she attended Zoom meetings about the Bar’s disciplinary measures involving Crowley.

Crowley acknowledges that Fox allies may have found his campaign tasteless, but said he never violated the law and that his rhetoric did not justify a threat to his legal license. At his hearing before the Supreme Court, he called Fox a “nice lady.” He also stressed that the most personal attacks came from other sources, and that he cannot be held responsible professionally for others’ speech.

“I don’t know my opponent’s religion, and I don’t care,” Crowley said at the Supreme Court hearing. “Some other people said some stuff. I didn’t, OK — just to clarify those facts. When I joined the Army in 1995, I took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. Now the Florida Bar says the Constitution doesn’t apply to Florida attorneys.”

Crossing the line?

But the Bar said officers of the court should be held to a higher standard, even when seeking office. Mark Mason, representing the Bar to the Supreme Court, said Crowley did more than voice unpopular opinions. “Mr. Crowley leveled several false statements accusing his opponent in a race for state Attorney of corruption,” he said.

The Bar took particular issue with an atypical method Crowley used to calculate the prosecution record for the State Attorney’s Office during Fox’s time as the Chief Assistant State Attorney. Crowley routinely said the Office recorded just a 39% conviction rate, a figure he calculated by taking total arrests in the judicial circuit and dividing that by the number of cases that resulted in a guilty verdict and sentence.

“There could be a million reasons that there wasn’t a conviction and it doesn’t have to do with the office,” Mason argued. Regardless, he said the math was inaccurate, and the statistic floated by Crowley is flatly false.

Scott Tozian, an attorney for Crowley, argued the Florida Bar cannot hold lawyers responsible for rhetoric during a campaign.

Justice Jamie Grosshans questioned whether Crowley was arguing that lawyers could make statements with “a reckless disregard for whether they’re true.” Crowley stands by the statistic, and Tozian said no one has proven otherwise. But when Grosshans asked if “misleading” rhetoric would violate Bar standards, Tozian argued it should not.

“The whole idea of the First Amendment giving breathing space to political speech, it’s got to be something that’s pretty severe,” Tozian argued. “Otherwise, the First Amendment doesn’t mean anything.”

During the debate, Justice John Couriel questioned how many political races the Bar could potentially touch.

“If it were an election for Governor, and that sort of clearly, demonstrably true or false statement was made, what would the Bar’s position be in that case?” Couriel asked.

That seems especially relevant considering that Gov. Ron DeSantis remains a licensed lawyer eligible to practice in Florida, as is his Democratic opponent in the last election, former U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist.

But Mason said standards should be different for executive or legislative elections. The Bar argued to Justices that candidates for legal offices like State Attorney and Public Defender must abide by different professional standards. When Couriel asked if such elections should be held to the same rules as lawyers running for Judge, Mason answered affirmatively.

“It would apply to any candidate for legal office. However, that term ended up getting defined in subsequent case law,” Mason said.

But Justices also expressed some concern that Mason, as he criticized Crowley’s method of calculating a conviction rate, could not cite a figure the Bar would accept as accurate instead.

“It seems like you should have to establish that something’s false first before someone then has to defend themselves,” suggested Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz.

Mason disagreed.

“Very frankly, the burden was on him to establish that he had an objective factual basis,” he said. “The Bar just had to show that he made those statements that were questioning her integrity or her qualifications, and then he had to establish the objective factual basis.”

Wider ramifications

That’s a burden that could fall on a number of candidates if the court agrees. That includes Attorney General James Uthmeier, who has already filed to run statewide in 2026 and who has been involved in some sharply political efforts in the months since DeSantis appointed him to office.

A spokesperson for Uthmeier declined to comment on the pending case.

But just applying the standards to other State Attorney races in Florida could be messy as more political attention falls on those contests than in recent decades.

DeSantis suspended two Democratic State Attorneys, Andrew Warren in Hillsborough County and Monique Worrell in Orange County, alleging that neither aggressively enforced the law. Both ran for office in 2024 against replacement prosecutors appointed by DeSantis, and many of the same allegations were repeated on the campaign trail.

Worrell won her race and returned to office. She declined to comment about Crowley’s case.

Warren, though, lost in November to State Attorney Suzy Lopez, and maintains frustration at what he considered mischaracterization and outright lies about his record as a prosecutor. “The Governor and his cronies absolutely mischaracterized my record every time they talked about me,” he said. “That was found to be true in a court of law.”

But Justices also declined to reverse DeSantis’ suspension of Warren, and the Democrat voiced mixed feelings about how consequences might be doled out if State Attorney candidates’ law licenses go on the line as soon as they start to campaign.

“The Governor and his followers do things others would never get away with,” Warren said. “If rules are only enforced on one political party’s candidates, that would be a travesty of democracy. If the rules were enforced fairly to raise the bar in State Attorney or Public Defender races, then that’s a good thing for voters.”

Terry Miller, Fox’s Campaign Manager in 2018 and subsequent races, hopes to see Crowley face consequences for the tactics in the campaign.

“It seemed a couple Justices were more concerned with arguing the merit of the law rather than applying the law to this case,” Miller said. “However, it is not the statute that is on trial. The question is/was whether or not Mr. Crowley broke the law as it is written — which I believe he did.”

Lawyers stressed that the case relies on professional standards enforced by the Bar, and that the Florida Supreme Court has oversight power on the organization’s disciplinary proceedings.

Crowley no longer lives in the Fort Myers area, or even the state of Florida. He now resides in Georgia, where he works as a lawyer for federal law enforcement.

But he said the free speech ramifications remain too steep for any candidate seeking office to ignore.

“The Florida Bar should have never pursued this action from the beginning,” Crowley said.