Former Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby has received a sentence of 12 months of home detention from United States District Court Judge Lydia K. Griggsby. Mosby had been convicted on two counts of perjury and one count of mortgage fraud. This is a shockingly lenient sentence.
During her two trials, Griggsby, a Joe Biden appointee and the first black female U.S. District Court judge in Maryland, acquiesced to virtually every major request from Mosby’s lawyers. The judge’s final accommodation was the most critical: rejecting the prosecution’s request for a 20-month prison sentence.
In addition to her crimes, Mosby’s lack of remorse was striking. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Sean Delaney and Aaron Zelinsky pointed out that “Ms. Mosby’s convictions appear to have in no way caused her to believe that she did anything wrong,” and that she “does not accept responsibility for her actions.” Even as a convicted felon, Mosby has remained unrepentant.
By contrast, federal prosecutors reasoned, “If [Mosby] believes she did no wrong, there is every reason to believe she will do wrong again. . . . As such a significant sentence of incarceration is warranted.” Doing so would have been crucial as a matter of public policy as well, prosecutors said, as the Court would “make clear that those who break the law, including those in positions of public trust, will be held accountable.”
Why didn’t this happen in the Mosby case? Mosby launched a high-powered political and media blitz to pressure the trial judge not to sentence her to prison time. (She has also written to President Biden requesting a full pardon.) The theme of this ongoing campaign: her case is another example of white supremacy, an attempt to take down a progressive, black female prosecutor working for “racial equity” in America’s racist criminal justice system. Or, as Mosby proclaimed on The Breakfast Club podcast, “I’ve been targeted as a result of my attempts to balance the scales of justice.”
Wrapping herself in the cloak of victimhood has been Mosby’s go-to move when the heat is on. From the outset, Mosby claimed that the federal case against her was rooted in “racial animus,” and that she was a political target of prosecutors. The judge considered and dismissed these absurd allegations. Griggsby is black. The chief prosecutor, United States Attorney for Maryland Erek Barron, is the first black person to hold that office, and also a Biden appointee. In both trials, majority nonwhite juries found her guilty.
To distort the truth of her fact-based prosecution and conviction, Mosby assembled an all-star team of white-supremacy conspiracy theorists—including Ben Crump, Al Sharpton, Joy Reid, and Roland Martin—to invent a narrative of racial animosity. She has also enjoyed a high-profile lobbying effort on her behalf from the Congressional Black Caucus and NAACP and more than a dozen activist groups. The CBC and NAACP wrote letters asking President Biden to pardon Mosby—letters based on misinformation about her conviction as a criminal defendant and a whitewashing of her record as a criminal prosecutor. “We share your desire for racial equity,” both letters reminded the president. In other words, judge criminal offenders by their race, not their behavior. NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson stated: “The sad reality is, as Black women take their rightful places in positions of power, dark forces seek to tear down both their progress, and that of our community” (emphasis added). The letters describe Mosby’s record as Baltimore City State’s Attorney as “stellar” and “exemplary.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Mosby’s legacy in Baltimore is one of chaos, death, and destruction—with black people suffering disproportionately as crime victims. As a George Soros-backed prosecutor, Mosby deliberately subverted the rule of law in Baltimore for eight years in the name of racial equity. She refused to prosecute quality of life crimes. As a result of her dropping or refusing to prosecute gun and violent-crime cases, the number of murders and shootings exploded. Her shameful plea deals put the most violent criminals back on the street, enabling them to reoffend.
Communities felt the devastating impact of these policies. In 2014, the year before Mosby’s election, Baltimore recorded 211 murders. Only a year into her tenure, the murder total shot up to 342, an unprecedented 62 percent increase. From 2015 to 2022, Baltimore averaged 333 murders annually, adding up to a grim total of 2,666. The vast majority of these victims were black.
We now know that Mosby’s non-prosecution, de-prosecution, and early-release policies may have resulted in as much as 79 percent of Baltimore’s murder wave. A bombshell 2022 study determined that, if “homicide defendants had received and served their eligible sentences for previous offenses, a majority” of those studied “would not have been free to commit their alleged homicides.” In other words, Mosby could have prevented as many as eight out of ten murders if she had incapacitated these offenders for their earlier crimes. Hundreds of young black men might still be alive today.
Dismantling and delegitimizing the police and destroying community trust are central tenets of progressive prosecutors’ plans to subvert local law enforcement. For Mosby in Baltimore, this was mission accomplished.
In 2015, a career criminal and convicted drug dealer named Freddie Gray died while in police custody. Mosby seized on the episode to advance her radical anti-police agenda. Without evidence, she charged six Baltimore Police Department officers with Gray’s death. At trial, three officers were found not guilty, and Mosby herself dropped the charges on the rest—but the damage was done. Community distrust of the police intensified, hundreds of veteran officers retired early or quit to work for other departments, and the number of new police applicants in Baltimore plummeted.
The Baltimore Police Department is broken. It has 700 unfilled vacancies, and officers are stretched beyond the breaking point. It will take years, if not decades, to recover from the damage inflicted by Mosby’s policies. It’s sadly ironic that, just like the thousands of criminals she protected while in office, Mosby will not face real justice for her own crimes.
We can at least ensure, however, that those who portray Mosby as a well-intentioned “reformer” face the truth. The real story of Mosby in Baltimore must be told. It was a disaster—all the way down.
Photo by Larry French/Getty Images for BET Networks