Orlando Mayor Is Cleared of Election Law Violation
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
Published: April 21, 2005
IAMI, April 20 - Florida prosecutors on Wednesday dropped a case charging Mayor Buddy Dyer of Orlando with violating election law, and Gov. Jeb Bush reinstated Mr. Dyer after a six-week suspension.
Mr. Dyer was indicted last month on a felony charge of paying a campaign worker to collect absentee ballots before his election last year. Three other people were indicted on related charges, and they, too, were cleared Wednesday. Brad King, a special prosecutor assigned to the investigation, said he was dropping the charges because none of those indicted had meant to break the law.
"There was no evil intent on these peoples' part," Mr. King said in a news conference.
Besides Mr. Dyer, those cleared were Patti Sharp, Mr. Dyer's campaign manager; Ezzie Thomas, who worked for the Dyer campaign as a get-out-the-vote consultant; and Judge Alan Apte of Orange County Circuit Court, who was charged with illegally paying Mr. Thomas to collect absentee ballots before his own 2002 campaign.
The indictments, which a grand jury handed up March 10, came after a long investigation of whether Mr. Thomas had illegally collected absentee ballots for the campaigns of Mr. Dyer and Judge Apte. A state law passed in 1998 prohibits providing or accepting "pecuniary gain" for absentee ballot collection.
The law was passed after the results of a Miami mayoral race were thrown out because of absentee ballot fraud. But no one has been prosecuted under the law, and its author in the State Legislature told The Orlando Sentinel last week that Mr. King was misinterpreting it.
Returning to Orlando City Hall, Mr. Dyer told reporters that there had been no plea bargain or special deal.
"The only outcome I would accept was that the truth be told and all charges be dropped," he said. "That has now been done."
All of those charged agreed to pay $500 each toward the costs of the investigation.
Mr. Dyer acknowledged during the investigation that his campaign had paid Mr. Thomas for get-out-the-vote work, but said neither he nor anyone working for his campaign had intentionally broken the law. He said the charges were politically motivated. Mr. Dyer is a Democrat in a nonpartisan office; Mr. King, like Governor Bush, is a Republican.
The governor assigned Mr. King, prosecutor for the state's Fifth Circuit, to the case because the state attorney's office for Orange County had a potential conflict of interest. Governor Bush was not legally required to suspend Mr. Dyer but did soon after the indictments were unsealed on March 11. He reinstated Mr. Dyer by executive order on Wednesday, as required when municipal officials are cleared of charges.
"If in fact the charges could not be verified, I'm happy for the mayor, regardless of his party affiliation," Mr. Bush told reporters in Tallahassee, Fla.
Mr. Dyer and the others had been free on their own recognizance while awaiting trial. The charges - for Mr. Dyer, Ms. Sharp and Judge Apte, paying for absentee ballot collection, and for Mr. Thomas, receiving payment for such collection - are third-degree felonies that carry a potential sentence of up to five years.
Mr. Dyer's lawyers were planning to ask a judge to dismiss the case, saying that prosecutors were misusing a broadly written and poorly understood law meant to prevent crimes like vote buying. A special election to replace Mr. Dyer temporarily, scheduled for May 3, has been canceled.
Soon after Mr. Dyer won last year's election, his Republican opponent sued, charging that several thousand absentee ballots should be disqualified as fraudulent and seeking a new election. Though Mr. Dyer, a former state senator, won by nearly 5,000 votes, he avoided a runoff by only 234 votes. A judge dismissed the suit last month.
The state investigation was politically charged from the first, drawing criticism from Democrats during last year's re-election campaign of President Bush, Governor Bush's older brother. Some elderly black residents of Orlando said that agents from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which conducted the investigation and reports to Governor Bush, had intimidated them during interviews at their homes about the absentee ballots they cast in the mayoral race last March.
Democratic groups then accused Governor Bush's administration of trying to suppress the black vote in Orlando, a coveted swing city, before the presidential election, an accusation that Mr. Bush dismissed as outrageous.
Politicians from both parties have paid Mr. Thomas to get out the vote, including Glenda Hood, Florida's secretary of state, when she was running for mayor here and Senator Mel Martinez when he was seeking a county office. Both are Republicans.
Christine Jordan Sexton contributed reporting from Tallahassee |
