Oren Miller has been exonerated. On Thursday, a Florida appeals court overturned the conviction of the 73-year-old retiree turned former Sumter County commissioner, who was removed from office by Ron DeSantis in 2021 amid a battle with the Florida governor’s high-dollar donors. The court took the unusual step of not just vacating the previous conviction, but also instructing the lower court to insert a new verdict of “not guilty.”
The saga of Miller and his fellow commissioner, Gary Search, who was similarly prosecuted, captured national attention earlier this year after The Intercept reported on the backlash to their effort to roll back property taxes in The Villages retirement community. A surge in public support for Miller’s legal defense fund enabled him to appeal his conviction.
Ahead of the investigation into Miller and Search, as The Intercept previously reported, a top Villages official, who has hosted DeSantis for fundraisers, told Search on Election Day he had the personal phone number of DeSantis, adding, according to Search: “Search, just remember one thing: I’m a big person, you’re a little person. I can squash you anytime I want.”
During oral arguments, a three-judge panel made up exclusively of Republican appointees eviscerated the prosecution, giving Miller hope the conviction would be vacated — a tall bar for a jury verdict. That it was not just vacated, but also flipped to a not-guilty verdict makes the ruling all the more unusual.
Miller’s attorney had made the same arguments to trial Judge Anthony Tatti, but the motion was rejected. That the appeals court unanimously disagreed with Tatti is a stinging rebuke.
Miller and Search ran for office pledging to roll back a property tax increase that had been foisted on residents to fund future development in The Villages. They argued that if the developer, which also owned the local newspaper and radio station, wanted to expand the size of the retirement community, they should do so with their own money.
Shortly after Miller and Search were sworn in, the local prosecutor launched an investigation into whether they had violated Florida “sunshine laws” around transparency and open government. They were never charged with doing so, but as part of the investigation, the state’s attorney interrogated both Miller and Search about phone calls they had after the election. Commissioners are barred from talking about commission business outside of open meetings, and the investigators wanted to know about calls between the two that had happened earlier in the year. Miller, who said none of the calls were about commission business beyond who was picking up donuts and such, was repeatedly hazy in response to questions as to when the calls stopped. At one point, the investigator prompted Miller with a claim he had not made, saying that the calls ended in January. Miller agreed with him, but elsewhere gave different estimates, and at another point said that whatever the phone records said was accurate.
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He has been a staff reporter for Politico and the Washington City Paper and is a co-host of the show Counter Points. He is the author of the books “We’ve Got People” (2019) and “This Is Your Country on Drugs” (2009). His third book, published in December 2023, is “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.”
