Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby was soundly defeated in her bid for a third term, finishing third in the Democratic primary. Mosby was first elected in 2014 — one of the original state’s attorneys backed by George Soros’ organizations. But after being indicted on two counts each of perjury and mortgage fraud and with violent crime out of control in Baltimore, voters decisively rejected her.
Mosby’s defeat follows the ouster of San Francisco’s radical district attorney Chesa Boudin in a recall election last month. And Los Angeles DA George Gascòn will almost certainly be challenged in a recall very soon.
It appears, that Americans are getting fed up with prosecutors who don’t prosecute crimes and believe it’s OK for violent criminals to roam free — even after getting arrested.
Mosby was defeated by Ivan Bates, a defense attorney. “People are afraid to come out of their house. People are afraid of the crime,” Bates told the Baltimore Sun. “We didn’t have any voters hardly ever mention the fact that’s he was indicted their whole displeasure was that crime was out of control and somebody needed to do something.”
Perhaps it was her decision not to prosecute entire categories of crimes.
Her prosecutorial policies, specifically a decision to quit prosecuting simple drug possession, prostitution and trespassing, were hailed by progressive pundits and lambasted by the city’s business community and the FOP. Prosecution of minor offenses disproportionately impacts poor and Black people, and Mosby sought to fix systemic inequities in the criminal justice system.
“The white community hasn’t supported Marilyn, for the most part, from the beginning of her tenure,” Murphy said.
Some took issue less with the substance of the policy change than how it was rolled out. Former prosecutors told The Baltimore Sun in June that they regularly found out about office developments from the media, rather than from Mosby herself. Police Commissioner Michael Harrison also has said Mosby did not tell him in advance that her office would no longer prosecute drug possession.
The number of murders in Baltimore has skyrocketed under Mosby. In the last full year of previous prosecutor Gregg Bernstein’s tenure in 2014, there were 211 homicides. There have been 202 homicides in the city so far this year, and in every year of Mosby’s tenure, the city exceeded 300 homicides.
And as the killings continued, Mosby’s office deteriorated. In 2018, more than 200 prosecutors worked there, according to city salary records. As of June, there were fewer than 140 prosecutors on staff. Her administration cited the COVID-19 pandemic and salaries as reasons why people left. In contrast, former attorneys told The Sun in June that grueling hours, large caseloads and depleted morale drove them out. What’s more, the staffing levels were so low they likely posed a threat to public safety, they said.
William H. “Billy” Murphy, a prominent criminal defense attorney and Mosby supporter, claims that criticism of Mosby’s record on homicides is unfair.
“Much of the criticism of a prosecutor is unfair because prosecutors can’t prosecute if police don’t make the cases,” Murphy told The Sun.
“If the police are laying down on the job, and there’s ample evidence of that because arrests are way down, what are they going to do now?” Murphy said. “Will they start making arrests because we have a new prosecutor? I hope they will.”
One of Mosby’s first acts was to arrest six police officers who were involved in the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old man who died as a result of injuries he received while being transported in a police van. The officers were all acquitted, and federal authorities refused to prosecute the case. From then on, Mosby was at war with the Baltimore police.
As in other major cities where a Soros-backed DA is prosecuting, police walk the tightrope between doing their jobs and becoming a target of a rogue prosecutor’s charges of “racism.” This reluctance has led to a reduction in arrests for all crimes in addition to the failure of these DAs to prosecute other offenses.
Eventually, the American people will wake up to the fact that the problem isn’t the police; it’s the prosecutors.
When you listen to them talk, they use the same pet phrases: mass incarceration; structural racism; prosecutorial discretion; school-to-prison pipeline; restorative justice; reimagining policing or prosecution; over-policing; institutional change; and correctional-free lunch. The latter would require prosecutors to take into consideration the cost of incarcerating people.
But when you look at the actual crime rates in the cities where these prosecutors have been elected, those rates have gone up dramatically, and the rogue prosecutors from those cities don’t like to hear it.
George Soros set out to transform the American justice system. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. And a lot of innocent people have died proving his point.
