The Florida Commission on Ethics Friday voted to recommend that the governor publicly censure and reprimand Broward County Sheriff Gregory Tony, ending a yearslong series of investigations that wound up proving only one minor breach: failing to mention when renewing his driver’s license in 2019 that his license had been previously suspended.
The Florida Commission on Ethics Friday voted to recommend that the governor publicly censure and reprimand Broward County Sheriff Gregory Tony, ending a yearslong series of investigations that wound up proving only one minor breach: failing to mention when renewing his driver’s license in 2019 that his license had been previously suspended.
Tony had been accused of lying on law enforcement applications by not disclosing his arrest as a 14-year-old after he shot to death an 18-year-old man in 1993. But his lawyers successfully argued his detention as a juvenile in Pennsylvania was not an arrest for a crime, under that state’s law. A juvenile judge subsequently acquitted Tony of the murder charge, which Tony has said was because he acted in self-defense.
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WATCH HEREThe accusation he lied when he swore he never had a criminal record expunged was also found not to be proven because juvenile records in Pennsylvania were automatically expunged by the court when a judge found him not guilty – something Tony would not have necessarily known when he filled out the application.
The ethics commission voted 3-2 to accept the terms both Tony and the board’s advocate agreed to in advance: a public censure and reprimand, the mildest of disciplines available for them to recommend.
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Tony was not present at Friday’s hearing, but his attorney Stephen Webster, told the panel Tony’s “detractors have been coming after him non-stop relentlessly” since he was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2019, following the removal of the prior sheriff, Scott Israel, over his handling of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school the previous year. “They brought every sling and arrow they could against the man and in spite of that he has led the third largest sheriff's office in the United States of America with absolute dignity and integrity.”
After an administrative judge recommended Tony receive a letter of counseling – also among the mildest of punishments – from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for the same driver’s license digression, Webster said Tony agreed to the recommended punishment before the ethics commission.
The former sheriff’s office employee, Jerald Fuller, who filed the ethics complaint in 2022 expressed his displeasure with the settlement in an email to the commission, saying, “Using the words ‘state ethics commission’ and your name in the same sentence is comical… Greg Tony has no business being in law enforcement and he knows it… Thanks for nothing!”
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Webster, Tony’s attorney, had a different view.
“Enough is enough,” he said Friday. “Sheriff Tony needs to lead Broward County and the and his detractors, the people who didn't agree with his appointment, need to live with it and deal with it. We're not supposed to use these commissions for political acts grinding. And that's what's happened here."
