In Minnesota, a disagreement on how to prosecute two teenagers suspected of killing a 23-year-old has put two of the state’s leading criminal justice reformers into a high-profile political dispute, testing how much change even progressive politicians are willing to embrace.

Last Friday, Governor Tim Walz assigned State Attorney General Keith Ellison–a former six-term congressman and Deputy Chair of the Democratic National Committee–to handle the prosecution of the murder, taking the case away from Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty. Walz decided to give Ellison the case after Ellison criticized Moriarty as too lenient and requested it be transferred to him. His move is a direct rebuke of the newly elected Moriarty, whose win in November had marked a major triumph for criminal justice reformers. 

Moriarty is one of many progressives who believe there is a false choice between public safety and a punitive carceral system. She ran last year for prosecutor because after the murder of George Floyd she saw “an opportunity for racial reckoning” in Minneapolis, and the possibility of it slipping away as racialized fears of crime took hold. Moriarty promised to change the criminal legal system in Hennepin County by using more rehabilitative options and diversion programs to reduce incarceration as opposed to imposing harsh sentences. 

A central plank of that vision, as she explained to Mother Jones and Bolts last October, was changing how the criminal legal system treats kids, including moving away from trying minors as adults. “It’s really important to focus many more resources on our youth. And also to look at it from a science perspective,” she said. “We know kids are very susceptible to impulsive behavior….And with so many guns out there, we’re ending up with a lot of tragic consequences.”

A recent memo from Sarah Davis, Moriarty’s Director of the Children and Families division, translated that campaign rhetoric into office policy. Citing youth brain development as “the foundation of our approach,” Moriarty’s prosecutors would “make every effort to keep children out of the court system when possible” to reduce youth recidivism. 

Ellison and Moriarty have long worked together in Minnesota to push reform. A Democrat who endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders for president, Ellison gained nationwide acclaim for leading the successful prosecution of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. At the time, Moriarty had recently been controversially dismissed from her position as chief public defender. During the Chauvin trial, she worked as a local television analyst, translating Ellison’s prosecution for a lay audience. Ellison called for an investigation of her dismissal and publicly raised the possibility that it was punishment for her racial justice advocacy. In 2022, when Moriarty began to campaign for County Attorney, Ellison endorsed her. The political nonprofit TakeAction hosted canvassing events supporting Moriarty’s election and Ellison’s reelection. 

This case radically changes their relationship. After narrowly winning his election for attorney general against an opponent who called him “soft” on crime, Ellison has swooped in to prosecute the murder despite Moriarty’s insistence he should not. 

She harshly criticized the move by Walz and Ellison as an “undemocratic” overreach, likening the decision to those made by Republican politicians nationwide who have attempted to usurp the authority of local prosecutors. 

The case shows the immense difficulties that progressive prosecutors face as they attempt to carry out the mandate of reform on which they were elected, and guide the public away from a tough-on-crime approach. “One of the reasons being a prosecutor is so difficult is because you have to look at a case where there’s an unimaginable harm and then decide what accountability, justice and punishment are appropriate to request,” Moriarty said in a press conference Friday.

On November 8, 2022, just days after Moriarty and Ellison won their elections, Zaria McKeever, 23, was killed in a home invasion in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Park. Prosecutors claim two brothers, ages 15 and 17 years old at the time, killed McKeever on behalf of Erick Haynes–McKeever’s ex-boyfriend and the father of her one-year-old child. Initially, Michael Freeman—the long-serving county attorney who embodied the traditional carceral approach Moriarty ran against and came under immense criticism for his handling of police killings—planned to try the brothers in adult court. 

After Hennepin County elected Moriarty, prosecutors changed course. Instead of a trial, her office offered plea deals that sentenced the brothers to two years in a juvenile facility with extended probation in exchange for testimony against Haynes. If they violated their probation, the brothers would be subject to an adult sentence under a doctrine called Extended Juvenile Jurisdiction (EJJ)– a hybrid approach reserved for young people over the age of 14 who are accused of committing certain serious crimes, the adult sentence can be imposed up to the age of 21. The elder brother accepted the deal.

The announcement of the change in prosecution deeply angered McKeever’s family. “It was choked down our throat without any concern about how we felt,” her stepfather Paul Greer told the Star Tribune. “We will not stand for it.”At a community meeting that McKeever’s family attended at Shiloh Temple, a prominent Black church in Minneapolis, Ellison voiced his disapproval of the plea deals. Ellison then sent a letter to Walz last Thursday asking to take over the case before the Friday hearing for the young brother. In the letter, he noted that Moriarty had “refused” his initial request to take over the prosecution. Walz granted the request, saying that “this authority is rarely used, and it should remain an option of last resort.” According to the Star Tribune, a Minnesota governor has stepped in only one other time in the state’s modern history to reassign a case against the will of a county attorney. 

“While I share the belief that too many juveniles are involved in the adult criminal-justice system, accountability for the seriousness of this crime has been missing in this case,” Ellison said in a statement on Friday. “I respect that county attorneys are duly elected by their constituents to exercise their discretion; however, the disposition of the juvenile shooter that Hennepin County has proposed in this case is disproportionate to the seriousness of the crime committed and falls far short of the family’s and community’s expectations for justice and safety.”

In a tense press conference on the same day, Moriarty defended the plea deals as her following through on campaign promises–changing how the county attorney’s office would deal with young people involved in gun violence. In 2021, when homicides approached a near record high, two thirds of shooting victims in Minneapolis were under the age of 31, according to a city report. “I am keeping a promise,” Moriarty said “[Ellison and Walz] are not.”

Moriarty said Ellison and Walz “are entitled to their opinion, but their actions here show that they also don’t really believe fully in democracy–because they are stopping me from doing the job voters elected me to do. That is unacceptable. They have set a very dangerous precedent.” 

In fact, Ellison is doing what his recent Republican opponent Jim Schultz warned of throughout the campaign last fall. “In a scenario in which we have somebody like a Mary Moriarty in the Hennepin County Attorney’s office,” Schultz told MinnPost when asked about the possibility of taking over prosecution, “I think we have to take a look at something along those lines.” Ellison denounced this overreach at the time. (When Mother Jones and Bolts asked about using a technique Ellison criticized, his office said they “don’t have anything to add” beyond the initial statement.) 

The Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild sent a letter to Walz and Ellison expressing their “vigorous objection” to the decision, warning that it joins a national trend. 

In Florida, Ron DeSantis removed twice-elected Hillsborough County state attorney Andrew Warren after Warren pledged not to prosecute those who seek or provide abortions. In Pennsylvania, the state legislature attempted to impeach Larry Krasner, one of the most well-known reform prosecutors in the country. In Missouri, the attorney general is in the process of trying to remove St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner from office. A new bill in the Georgia state senate would create a “Prosecuting Attorneys Oversight Commission” with the power to remove prosecutors from office, just as Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis ramps up an investigation into Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. 

“You have tragically become part of a disturbing reactionary national trend and placed yourselves in the company of the likes of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Missouri Governor Mike Parson by preventing a local progressive prosecutor from exercising her prosecutorial discretion in acting consistently with her principles–and the principles that she was elected to carry out,” the Guild wrote. “Your decision to play to the crowd does grave damage toward making reform a reality.”

The Minnesota County Attorneys Association voted unanimously to oppose Walz’s decision to hand the case to Ellison, despite the attorney general asking for their support. The MCAA is made up of prosecutors across the state, showing a rejection of this kind of jurisdictional encroachment that transcends traditional political lines. “To so-called left wing prosecutors and so-called right wing prosecutors there seemed to be general agreement that this was a problem,” said Friedman.

During the 2022 campaign, Ellison was hammered by Schultz as being “soft on crime,” before narrowly defeating him in the closest statewide race of the year. “To what extent is this about the perception of him politically across the state versus what he thinks is justice in this situation?” asked Michael Friedman, the former Executive Director of the Minneapolis based Legal Rights Center. “I’m not saying that with a specific accusation. I just think those are the kinds of questions that would need to be asked of him.”

At the press conference Friday, Moriarty said that in offering the two teenagers a plea deal she was trying to “make sure that there is accountability” without incarcerating someone for an extended period of time, after which it is likely they would “come out more dangerous to the community.” 

There is research to back up this idea. “If you can keep children out of the adult justice system until they’re in their mid-twenties, they’re extremely unlikely to enter it,” said Chris Uggen, the Distinguished McKnight Professor in Sociology, Law, and Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. “So in that sense, much of the science is on [Moriarty’s] side.” (However, Uggen added that “blended sentences” like the EJJ offered to the two teenagers is itself a “compromise” that has mixed results.)

But at the event, Moriarty was shouted down by McKeever’s loved ones for these ideas.

“What do you get for executing someone and shooting somebody five times? What’s the law for that? asked McKeever’s cousin Shontell Bishop and her sister Tiffynnie Epps.” “The law, not the science.”

“We could send this 15-year-old to prison and he’d get out in his early 30s,” Moriarty explained. 

“Wonderful,” a supporter of McKeever shouted back. “Zaria didn’t make it to her early 30s.”

This confrontation highlights the complex racial dynamics of the case. Ellison is the most powerful Black political figure in the state coming to the aid of a Black family who believe their calls for justice have gone unheard in a place where Black people are “overpoliced and underprotected.” In 2021, there was one Black shooting victim for every 150 Black residents in Minneapolis. For white people, there was one shooting victim for every 3,768 residents. According to a data analysis by the Minnesota Reformer, police fail to solve nearly eight in ten shootings in Minneapolis. 

Moriarty is a white prosecutor with a track record of calling out racist practices in the office she now leads. Her 30-plus year career on the other side of the courtroom has enshrined a steadfast belief that punitive policies disproportionately harm Black people, and don’t produce public safety in the long term. “There was no bait and switch here,” said Uggen. “This is exactly what she ran on.” 

Her opponent last year, a Black former judge and prosecutor who argued for a more punitive approach, framed Moriarty’s policies as putting criminals first, saying she was insensitive to the dilemma that Black people who live in high-crime neighborhoods face. Moriarty went on to win every single one of those neighborhoods. But this episode reveals the hurdles that await reform prosecutors as they seek to go about the job differently, especially among the populations experiencing violence most acutely.

“I don’t want to imply that Moriarty is on the wrong side of the racial justice issues at all, because she has been a true champion,” said Uggen. “[But] race is very much front and center in this issue, as it is in everything regarding justice in Minnesota.”

The post Minnesota’s Keith Ellison Thwarts a Reform Prosecutor He Endorsed appeared first on Bolts.

Still, Moriarty continued to assail the racial disparities in law enforcement, calling herself “angry and disappointed” over the behavior of the MPD and the prosecutor’s office. The following year, months after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis unleashed a national reckoning over police violence, Moriarty was ousted from her job in what she called retaliation over her speaking out for racial justice in the county. 

Now Moriarty is heading back into a prominent public role, but this time she will take over the prosecutor’s office.

In a major victory for reform prosecutors, Moriarty easily won the race for Hennepin County Attorney on Tuesday, with 58 percent of the vote. She defeated her opponent Martha Holton Dimick, a retired county judge and a former prosecutor in the office. (Freeman announced earlier this year he would not seek re-election.)

Moriarty and Holton Dimick embraced opposing sides in a national debate on criminal justice—a progressive turn versus more of a tough-on-crime approach—that traces back to a long history of conflict in the Minneapolis region, Eamon Whalen reported last month in a joint article for Bolts and Mother Jones.

Moriarty says she was moved to run for county prosecutor after seeing the tide turn on the racial justice reckoning and criminal justice reforms that began to emerge in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd uprisings. 

“I did see an opportunity for change slipping away,” she told Bolts and Mother Jones. “And I thought, people who really value public safety, and a fair and just system need to step up during this time of turmoil and really present options that aren’t the same old things we’ve had for decades, which haven’t kept us safer.”

Moriarty promised to ramp up police accountability and to institute a “do-not-call” list that would bar her staff from relying on police officers who have been shown to repeatedly lie on the stand as witnesses in cases. She also said she would seek to expand alternatives to incarceration such as diversion and restorative justice programs.

Her opponent, Holton Dimick, accused progressives of endangering public safety by criticizing police, claiming a “narrative” that police should be defunded was fueling crime. “[Defund] was basically giving the criminal element in our city and across the county, the go-ahead and commit crimes sign,” she told Bolts and Mother Jones. She has also attacked Moriarty over her background as a defense attorney.

Moriarty and Holton Dimick have circled one another throughout their career, as one worked for the public defender’s office and the other was a prosecutor under now-U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar, the former county attorney. The two once found themselves on opposite sides of a case where the judge dismissed charges against the person Moriarty was defending and admonished the prosecutor, Holton Dimick, for how aggressively she attempted to pursue charges against the man. 

Moriarty is one of several reformers who seized new prosecutor offices on Tuesday. Kelly Higgins, a Democratic defense attorney, won the DA race in fast-growing Hays County, Texas, after promising a “sea change” in the county; he told Bolts that he was moved toward more progressive positions by a group of activists that have been organizing in Central Texas.

Kimberly Graham, who represents abused and neglected children in court, won in Polk County, (Des Moines), Iowa’s most populous county. She told Bolts in June that she was inspired to run upon hearing a podcast interview with Rachael Rollins, the former DA of Boston who was one of the flag-bearers for so-called progressive prosecutors.

Reform candidates suffered losses as well as Republican incumbents prevailed in critical races in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, and Douglas County, Nebraska. In Dallas and San Antonio, Democratic DAs beat tough-on-crime challenges. Other major races for prosecutor remained undecided as of publication in Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona, Alameda County (Oakland), California, and King County (Seattle), Washington. 

In Minneapolis, the prosecutor race acquired special importance given the conflicts over race and policing in the months and years that have followed George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, and it morphed into a test of how Minneapolis voters—especially those living in areas that are seeing higher levels of crime—define public safety.

Last year, progressive activists championed Question 2, a measure that would have dismantled the Minneapolis Police Department, replacing it with a new public agency in charge of safety, but voters rejected it. Holton Dimick publicly opposed the measure at the time, and this year she was backed by local leaders like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey who opposed it as well. Moriarty declined to say how she voted last year, but she had the backing of prominent progressives who supported it such as Attorney General Keith Elison and U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar.

During her campaign, Holton Dimick invoked that result as showing a desire for more law enforcement, and she stressed that the 2021 measure failed in north Minneapolis, a predominantly Black part of Minneapolis that has faced rising gun violence, as evidence that the communities most affected by crime would prefer her law-and-order message. (Question 2 also failed last year, and by a larger margin, in the wealthier wards of southwest Minneapolis.)

But on Tuesday, as reporter Eamon Whalen tweeted, Moriarty carried nearly all precincts in the wards that make up north Minneapolis. 

The post Minneapolis Elects a Career Public Defender as Its New Prosecutor appeared first on Bolts.

For the first time since the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020, voters in Minneapolis and greater Hennepin County will vote for their new top prosecutor. County Attorney Michael Freeman, whose office came under intense scrutiny that summer over racial disparities and its handling of police brutality, announced last fall he was not seeking re-election. An August primary cut a crowded field down to two candidates: Mary Moriarty, the county’s former chief public defender who regularly clashed with Freeman during her tenure, and Martha Holton Dimick, a judge who used to work for Freeman’s predecessor, Senator Amy Klobuchar. 

The candidates embody two sides of a debate that has divided Minneapolis and the nation since the summer of 2020. Moriarty is carrying the mantle of progressive criminal justice reform. Amidst a surge in homicides, Holton Dimick strives for a more traditional law and order agenda, and often seems outright hostile to the prospect of wielding the prosecutor’s office for the purpose of reform. 

“A referendum on what we want to do as a community moving forward since George Floyd was murdered,” is how Malaika Eban, the deputy director at the Minneapolis-based Legal Rights Center, described the race for Hennepin county attorney. “Even though this is a nonpartisan race, [the candidates] have been offering two really different perspectives on what to do in order to keep our community safe,” she added. 

Floyd’s killing on a south Minneapolis street corner in 2020 sparked a historic nationwide outpouring of protest and debate over policing and racism in America. This call for a less punitive, less racist system of policing dovetailed with the aims of reform-minded prosecutors in cities around the US who have leveraged the discretion held within district attorney’s offices in an attempt to undo mass incarceration. But since 2020 reform critics have invoked the rise in violent crime around the country to push back, and they often use Minneapolis as an example in their arguments about how criminal justice reform has gone too far. 

“A dangerous and dystopian ghost city, racked by gun violence,” wrote New York Times opinion columnist Thomas Friedman in 2021, describing post-Floyd Minneapolis. An August segment on Fox News featured Laura Ingraham interviewing two Minneapolis officers while the chyron onscreen read: “Two Years After Floyd Riots, Radical Leadership Leaves Minneapolis In Shambles.” This sentiment expressed by Friedman and Ingraham is supported with scant evidence, and works more as a critique of rhetoric rather than of any actual policy change, but a high-profile loss for the left in a 2021 referendum to dismantle the local police department has also fueled the sense of a local activist movement in retreat. Whether it’s bail reform, the movement to defund the police, or the recall of the progessive San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, criminal justice reform efforts have been demonized and spuriously connected to rises in crime. 

And yet the continued structural problems among the Minneapolis police also persist. This past April, MPD was the subject of a scathing report from the State Department of Human Rights that found the department engages in a pattern of “discriminatory, race-based policing” and “emphasizes a paramilitary approach to policing that results in officers unnecessarily escalating encounters or using inappropriate levels of force.” The city and state are now in the midst of negotiating a state-level consent decree, with a second federal decree to follow when the U.S. Department of Justice finishes their investigation. 

This combination of the aftermath of the 2020 protests, a police department in a legitimacy crisis, and a rise in violent crime have coalesced to make the upcoming prosecutor election a crossroads for Hennepin County. 

The frontrunner in the race is Moriarty, a 31-year Hennepin County public defender, who finished first in the primary with 36 percent of the vote. As the county’s chief public defender from 2014 to 2020, Moriarty played a key role in exposing racial disparities in traffic stops and undercover marijuana sting operations that Freeman’s office failed to act on. Moriarty was dismissed as chief public defender in a controversial move by a state board in 2020, which set up an opportunity for her to run for the office she’d spent much of her career vociferously critiquing. Moriarty was spurred to run, she told me, because the “racial reckoning” in Minneapolis supposedly kicked off by the George Floyd protests of 2020 was morphing into a crime panic.

“I did see an opportunity for change slipping away,” she said. “And I thought, people who really value public safety, and a fair and just system need to step up during this time of turmoil and really present options that aren’t the same old things we’ve had for decades, which haven’t kept us safer.” Moriarty has emphasized a data-driven approach that would lessen the severity of punishment by investing more in diversion programs that promote alternatives to incarceration, and restorative justice programs. 

“The difference with me is I know that people can be held accountable, and that doesn’t have to mean sending them to prison for years and years and years,” said Moriarty. 

As a longtime critic of the abuses by the MPD, Moriarty plans to form a new police accountability unit within the prosecutor’s office. Moriarty told me that currently, the county attorney’s office reviews more police body camera video than police leadership does, which would allow her office to identify police misconduct when the department is unwilling to. As it stands, the majority of complaints against Minneapolis cops are kept hidden through a disciplinary loophole enacted by Mayor Jacob Frey and former Chief Medaria Arradondo in 2021 called “coaching,” which withholds police misconduct data from the public. (The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the MPD in 2021, stating that this practice violated public record laws). 

Holding police accountable, “is the only way we’re actually going to be able to prosecute violent crime effectively, because that’s how you’re going to get good police work,” said Moriarty. Moriarty also says she would establish a publicly-accessible “do-not-call” list, following the lead of other reform candidates across the country; if a cop has proven to continually lie under oath, she plans to ban attorneys from calling them as witnesses, which would make it difficult for that officer to continue to interact with the public.

“Tough, but fair,” is how the Minneapolis Star Tribune described Moriarty’s opponent Martha Holton Dimick, in their editorial board’s endorsement. Holton Dimick, a recently retired district court judge and former prosecutor who finished with 18 percent of the primary vote, has said she was compelled to run for office by Floyd’s murder. She also often mentions the gun violence of the last two years in north Minneapolis, where she has lived for decades. 

Like Moriarty, Holton Dimick says she wants to expand court diversion programs and that for low-level offenders incarceration should be a “last resort.” But the central thrust of her campaign has been a direct, explicit and often pugnacious refutation of the city’s activist movement to dismantle the local police department. And despite a rise in outsiders like civil rights attorneys and public defenders taking over prosecutor offices, Holton Dimick has attacked Moriarty over her professional background, calling her a “disgraced former public defender” with an “opposite professional perspective,” who “has just worked with criminals” in debates and fundraising emails to her supporters. 

According to Holton Dimick, the radical activists with plans to defund the police are responsible for the gun violence in her neighborhood. Holton Dimick frequently cites the defund movement as the primary culprit for the violence because of the coercive power of the “narrative” it supposedly produced. “[Defund] was basically giving the criminal element in our city and across the county, the go-ahead and commit crimes sign,” she told me in an interview. “The wrong narrative is out there. And we need to send a new narrative that says if you commit crime, there are consequences.” 

Holton Dimick focuses on narrative effects, rather than pointing to actual budgetary effects, for a reason: 8 million dollars were shifted away from the MPD in 2021, but the department now has a higher budget than they did before George Floyd was murdered. Moreover, violent crime has risen across the nation, including in states, cities, and rural areas controlled by Republican governments and tough-on-crime prosecutors.

Minneapolis has been a surrogate for these national conflicts, and the starkly divergent visions of Holton Dimick and Moriarty map onto debates that have resonated more loudly since the summer of 2020. But while this is a fight that was heightened by the murder of George Floyd, it’s also one that goes deep into the history of policing and prosecution in Minneapolis. They themselves faced each other in the courtroom on at least one noteworthy occasion. 

And more broadly, their stories reflect decades of local history that made Minneapolis the kind of place where protests like those in 2020 could set off.

—

When George Floyd was murdered, Mike Freeman was already on shaky ground with many in Minneapolis. In 2016, Freeman declined to charge two white cops named Dustin Schwarze and Mark Ringgenberg for shooting and killing a Black man named Jamar Clark. The decision came after Clark’s death had provoked a tense 18-day occupation of the 4th Police Precinct in north Minneapolis. 

In the immediate days after Floyd’s murder, a group of Minnesota lawmakers urged in an open letter of that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz appoint Attorney General Keith Ellison to take over Chauvin’s prosecution, in part referencing the Clark decision. “[Mike] Freeman did a ton to erode trust with [communities of color in Minneapolis]. From the decisions made to over-prosecute folks for low level offenses, to the handling of George Floyd’s murder,” said Eban.

Freeman embodied status-quo policies around criminal justice. He was Hennepin County’s chief prosecutor from 1991 to 1998. He only stepped down to mount an ultimately unsuccessful run for governor. In 1998, now-U.S Senator Amy Klobuchar was elected on a platform that included “More Trials, More Convictions.” Freeman regained his office in 2006 when Klobuchar left for Washington and has held the position ever since.

The tenures of Freeman and Klobuchar reflect what the Fordham University law professor Jed Shugerman calls “the prosecutor politician.” Historically, prosecutor’s offices have been “a stepping stone to higher office,” across the country, which can lead to an increased punitiveness towards civilians, a closer alliance with police departments, and a tendency to privilege public opinion and political expediency above administering justice. Perhaps that is why this commitment to law and order excluded accountability for police officers. During Klobuchar’s tenure there were 29 civilian deaths at the hands of law enforcement. No police officers were charged.

Still, the tides of public opinion changed over the past decade, and as the police killings of Jamar Clark in Minneapolis and Philando Castile just outside St. Paul rocked the Twin Cities, the stark racial disparities in Hennepin County’s criminal legal system (and just about everything else) gained more attention. An ACLU study in 2015 found that Black and Indigenous residents of Minneapolis were more than eight times more likely to be arrested for low-level offenses than white residents, for instance. 

And during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Klobuchar’s punitive record held back her ambitions. She faced the loudest questions over her handling of the case of Myon Burrell, which more than any exemplified the pitfalls of tough-on-crime politics. 

In 2002, Klobuchar charged Burrell, a sixteen-year-old at the time, with the murder of an eleven-year old girl named Tyesha Edwards, after a stray bullet ripped through the walls of her family’s house and killed her while she was doing her homework. It was a highly-publicized tragedy, and Klobuchar would later promote her work prosecuting the case in a Senate campaign ad, in her book, and on the primary debate stage in 2019. It ultimately led to Burrell serving 18 years for a murder that the state had no hard evidence tying him to. He’d been sentenced to life in prison. 

An Associated Press and American Public Media (APM) Reports investigation revealed that two witnesses placed Burrell at a convenience store called Cup Foods at the time of Edwards death. 18 years later, George Floyd would attempt to purchase cigarettes with a counterfeit twenty dollar bill from a clerk at the very same store before he was killed by Chauvin. Seven months after Floyd’s murder had brought Minneapolis into the national spotlight on matters of racism and the criminal legal system, Burrell’s sentence was commuted by the state pardons board. They said the case demonstrated a “failure to investigate that illustrates tunnel vision.”  

In the mid-1990s, Minneapolis’ homicide rate was among the highest in the country, earning the unfortunate nickname “Murderapolis.” In 2021, the homicide rate tied the record set in 1995. (In 2022, homicides appear to be coming down.) Holton Dimick—who was hired as a prosecutor by Klobuchar in 1999—has drawn parallels between the two eras, touting her work in those years helping make Minneapolis safer. But she pushes aside that such an approach would mean more cases like Burrell’s.

When I asked if she had a reflection on what Burrell’s case could teach the city as it lives through another era of heightened gun violence, Holton Dimick demurred. She worked in a different division at the time and what she knew about Burrell’s case is what she’d read in news coverage, she said. “I know that that’s something that you all want to hear about, but you’re asking the wrong candidate,” said Holton Dimick.

That’s because as a free man, Burrell has spent some time over the last year with a new title: Mary Moriarty campaign staffer. 

In our interview, Moriarty held up Burrell’s early support for her campaign as indicative of the type of change she would bring. “That somebody who had those things happen to him wanted to support my campaign because he believed that I would make the system better for everyone is really an honor,” said Moriarty, who worked as a public defender in Hennepin County at the time of Burrell’s prosecution, but was not involved with his case.

A rare look at the two candidate’s styles also came in 2002. Moriarty was assigned a client who was charged with three different prostitution-related offenses. A woman he believed was his girlfriend claimed that he was actually her pimp. In the initial trial, the man was acquitted on one of the charges. But he had to stand retrial on another. Like the first judge, the second judge said they’d exclude an expert witness because it was not relevant. The prosecutor then attempted to recharge the count that had already been acquitted with a third separate judge, and included a witness tampering charge that would’ve prevented Moriarty from continuing to represent her client.

In the end, all charges were dismissed against Moriarty’s client, and the judge harshly admonished the prosecutor in their closing statement, questioning whether they were intentionally trying to “deprive [Moriarty’s client] of his appointed counsel, Miss Moriarty,” and added that their conduct “makes it impossible for any other remedy to give meaning to the kinds of constitutional rights and protections that this court is sworn to uphold and preserve.” 

The prosecutor on the case was Holton Dimick.

Several cases like this one—where Holton Dimick was reprimanded or had a decision overturned or reversed—have been highlighted by People Over Prosecution, a political action committee that began as an attempt to recall Freeman in 2020 and is now supporting Moriarty. 

Moriarty’s time as a public defender came to an end in controversial circumstances in 2020, when the Minnesota Board of Public Defense declined to extend her contract for another term in the chief public defender position. It followed a suspension and a letter of reprimand for allegedly instituting a hostile work environment for her employees, and for wielding the media against her justice partners, like the county attorney’s office. Moriarty said that the ouster was punishment for her racial justice advocacy, then sued and was awarded a $300,000 settlement. Just last month, rank-and-file public defenders in the county gave the head of the board, Bill Ward, a vote of no confidence; Ward endorsed Holton Dimick and is a donor to her campaign.

Cedrick Frazier, a Democratic lawmaker from the northwest suburbs of Minneapolis who has led police reform efforts in the Minnesota State House over the last year, has remained a Moriarty supporter through these events. Frazier was mulling a run of his own before he decided to endorse Moriarty, who he used to work alongside as a public defender. 

Frazier recalled a story to me from early in his career, when Moriarty advised him to consider the “ripple effect” potential incarceration would have not only on his client, but on his client’s family and broader community. “That is exactly the kind of the thoughtfulness we need in the criminal justice system, when we’re talking about having someone that’s in a position that could maybe intercede or intercept and prevent some crimes from happening just by the way you handle cases as a prosecutor,” said Frazier.

—

These longstanding tensions over the shape of law enforcement in Minneapolis came to a head in 2021, when progressive activists and their allies on city council put a city charter amendment on the ballot. That amendment would have removed the minimum staffing requirements for police from the charter, moved its control from the mayor to the city council and refashioned it into a Department of Public Safety with a “comprehensive public health approach.” 

Police officers would have kept their jobs, but the scope of their duties would have been gradually reduced. But because the amendment was supported by politicians and activists who had publicly committed to defunding and abolishing the police, the amendment known as “Question 2,” became a referendum on just that. 

In November 2021, Question 2 lost 56-44 percent. 

Holton Dimick has aligned herself with that result to win over the county this year. Moriarty told a reporter she won’t be sharing how she voted on the amendment. If a future police ballot question faced a legal challenge, she may have to recuse herself as county attorney, she’s said. Holton Dimick has criticized that decision as dishonest and she has made her own “no” vote a routine part of her stump speech. 

“We can’t go about reforming a police department that doesn’t exist,” she said. 

While Holton Dimick has said she’s committed to reforming the department, she also sought and earned an endorsement from the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, whose legal fund paid for Derek Chauvin’s defense. Dimick doesn’t think it sends any mixed message.

“It really depends on who you want to ask. I don’t think so,” said Dimick. 

I asked Paul Ostrow, a current prosecutor for a nearby suburban county and former Minneapolis city council member who ran in the primary against Dimick and Moriarty as a moderate, about the endorsement process. 

Ostrow also sought the endorsement from the MPPOA, but was taken aback that the screening panel—which included the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis—weren’t interested in his ten point plan to improve public safety. Instead, “they were almost exclusively questions about police prosecutions,” he told me. “It was really the only issue that was discussed at that screening.” 

Ostrow is not endorsing in the general election but said that alliance could be of concern. “I don’t want to necessarily assume why they endorsed Martha,” he said. But “the [Minneapolis] Police Federation was a major voice in that screening. I think there’s reason to be concerned about that. We’re heading into a consent decree, and the last thing we need is to have a county attorney whose objectivity can be questioned.”

The political battle lines drawn by the “Question 2” referendum fight have continued into 2022. In the August primary, Rep. Ilhan Omar was nearly upset by primary challenger Don Samuels, a former city council member who was the leader of the opposition to Question 2. 

Holton Dimick has received endorsements from Samuels and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey. Jacob Hill, Frey’s deputy campaign manager for his 2021 reelection, now manages Holton Dimick’s campaign. He was also a staff member on Samuels’ congressional campaign. 

Moriarty is endorsed by Omar and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, the two most prominent politicians who supported Question 2, along with some of the same organizations who were part of the Question 2 coalition. 

Holton Dimick has repeatedly stressed that this type of change is out of step with her neighbors in north Minneapolis, a predominantly Black part of Minneapolis that has suffered from both the rise in gun violence and routine abuse by the police. “Mary lives in Southwest MPLS. My community voted the same way I did last year by a large margin. Please stop speaking for us,” Holton Dimick wrote in a tweet earlier in the campaign. 

But the wealthier, whiter wards in southwest Minneapolis also voted against Question 2 overwhelmingly, and were decisive in tanking the referendum. It’s these same neighborhoods where Holton Dimick had her best performances in the August primary, whereas Moriarty won every precinct in north Minneapolis. 

For Eban from the Legal Rights Center, the debate around how Black people and other communities of color relate to law enforcement tends to oversimplify a complicated question. “[What the community is asking is] can you all do better? Can you all involve us in that process? Can you understand this tension that we have to hold every day of wanting to be safe and not trusting the people who are supposed to be keeping us safe?” said Eban. “I don’t think that that means that the community wants more of the same, that they’re asking for harsher punishments and more prosecution.” 

In the summer of 2020, Moriarty saw a window for crime, policing, justice and punishment to be different than they had in Minneapolis for the first time in decades. How that call for change has been interpreted and put into political action in the two years since George Floyd’s murder however, has been anything but predictable. 

“[In 2020] I thought, well, here’s the biggest opportunity [for change], because we’re not going back,” said Moriarty. “I think it remains to be seen where we’re going.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Jacob Hill’s position on the Jacob Frey campaign.

The post Two Years After George Floyd’s Murder, Who Will Be Minneapolis’s New Prosecutor? appeared first on Bolts.

The two county attorneys of Minnesota’s Twin Cities have announced new policies on how their offices will handle the prosecution of marijuana-related offenses.

Hennepin County (Minneapolis)

County Attorney Mike Freeman issued a memo in August, which he presented at a news conference last week. The memo first addresses marijuana possession. Since possession of less than 42.5 grams is a misdemeanor handled at the city level, Freeman’s memo addresses cases above 42.5 grams, which are felonies. His policy is that people arrested for possession will be asked to complete diversion programs, either as a condition for charges to not be filed at all (if possession is under 100 grams) or as a condition for charges to be dropped.

The office may offer a stay of adjudication to people it deems not eligible for diversion based on the office’s criteria. Spokesperson Chuck Laszewski told me that they the office already used these diversionary options prior to this memo, but for fewer cases and smaller quantities. Second, the memo addresses the sale of less than 42.5 grams of marijuana: Such cases will be charged, then pushed to pretrial diversion. It was revealed last year that nearly all people arrested in sting operations by the Minneapolis police and then charged by Freeman’s office were African American. The memo also outlines numerous exceptions to all these policies such as possession of a firearm or prior convictions, which the county’s chief public defender denounced in the Star Tribune.

Ramsey County (St. Paul)

County Attorney John Choi issued a Feb. 28 memo that only addresses marijuana sales: His office will no longer file charges for sales of less than 42.5 grams. When I asked whether this is conditional on completing diversion (as in Hennepin), spokesperson Dennis Gerhardstein clarified via email that “these cases will be declined/refused for prosecution.” However, the policy would not apply if there is “a clear and compelling public safety reason.” Gerhardstein told me that Choi would need to approve this determination. According to the memo, elements that could justify this determination include the sale of THC oil or factors the state defines as aggravating.

When I asked Gerhardstein for their policy toward possession, he said that they already divert felony possession cases, but that they do so through a pretrial program (as opposed to precharge one, as is the case with some cases in Hennepin) program. He added that Choi thinks “we should allow the marijuana cases to be included in our pre-charge diversion program in the near future.”

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Thomas Gallagher, a criminal defense attorney in Minneapolis who is on the board of Minnesota NORML, the state affiliate of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, told me that he thought Freeman’s announcement was not ambitious enough. He called on Freeman to process more cases without filing charges, if not drop them altogether. “The reason I think it’s realistic for the Hennepin County prosecutor to not charge any marijuana cases is that there are prosecutors right now on the East Coast that are saying we are not going to charge any marijuana cases, period,” Gallagher said. “If they can do it, why can’t Hennepin County do it?”

Last month, Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, citing a “crisis of disparate treatment of Black people,” rolled out a policy of not prosecuting marijuana possession cases regardless of quantity. Mosby told NPR that “if you are arrested for having and being in possession of a marijuana, you will then be released without charges.”

I asked Freeman and Choi’s offices whether they considered adopting a policy like Mosby’s, and why they chose not to. “We did think about it, but believe that the current paradigm of petty misdemeanor plus the legislation that we are working on (42.5 to 200 grams = misdemeanor level) would be what the public would generally support in our jurisdiction,” Gerhardstein wrote in an email about Ramsey County, referring to proposed legislation to make possession a misdemeanor. Laszewski pointed me toward Freeman’s memo, which says that “our state should not have to rely solely on discretionary decisions by local police and prosecutors to ensure that our laws are sensible and just.”

Freeman and Choi’s memos come amid a statewide debate about legalizing marijuana, a move backed by Minnesota’s newly elected governor, Tim Walz.

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