In the race for Hillsborough County State Attorney, Democrat Andrew Warren has defeated Republican incumbent Mark Ober. Warren received 50.41 percent to Ober’s 49.59 percent, a difference of 4,719 votes.
Ober has been the State Attorney since 2000, and has rarely even faced a Democrat in his subsequent re-election bids.
Warren is a former federal prosecutor who left the Justice Department late last year to commit himself to defeating Ober. He proved early on that he was serious by staying almost even with the well established Ober in terms of fundraising.
Warren tok aim at Ober’s policies, saying that juveniles were being charged as adults in Hillsborough County more than “just about anywhere in the entire country,” and cited a recent Harvard University study that said that Hillsborough was one of the worst counties in the entire country in handling death penalty cases (the case also cites Pinellas, Duval and Miami-Dade, alleging that all four shared a “history of overzealous prosecutions, inadequate defense lawyering, and a pattern of racial bias and exclusion.”).
Warren also questioned Ober’s ethics, and made the most out of a comment that Ober at a debate regarding a victim of a sexual abuse case.
