Former State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby became a national figure in 2015 when, a few months into office in Baltimore, she charged six police officers who were involved the death of Freddie Gray with serious crimes, including murder and manslaughter. Young, Black, and charismatic, she developed a reputation on the national stage as a “progressive prosecutor.” She appeared regularly in the national media as an expert on police accountability and earned headlines for progressive actions including ending the prosecution of marijuana possession and other low-level offenses.
On May 1, nine years to the day after Mosby announced charges in the Gray case, she appealed to the public for sympathy for her own legal woes. “I’ve done absolutely nothing wrong, nothing illegal, nothing criminal,” she insisted during an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid. On May 23, Mosby will be sentenced on three federal charges for fraud and perjury related to the purchase of two homes in Florida. She also mentioned that she is seeking a pardon from President Joe Biden. The NAACP is supporting her request, and a petition is circulating online in support as well.
Mosby’s dramatic fall from grace is a familiar story in U.S. politics: The career of an otherwise seemingly laudable politician is ended by personal greed and/or issues unrelated to their leadership in office. Yet, the story of Mosby’s career is told very differently among Baltimore insiders and close observers. Her progressive bona fides haven’t been broadly accepted in Baltimore, beginning with her handling of the Gray case. And she has been accused of “malicious” and “vindictive” prosecutions.
There is an ironic twist to Mosby’s journey from prosecutor to defendant: She and her supporters, including Reid, have made similar accusations about the federal prosecutor, Leo Wise, who indicted her and who is currently prosecuting Hunter Biden. Wise’s anti-corruption efforts in Baltimore brought down a police squad known as the Gun Trace Task Force, a police commissioner, a mayor, a state senator, a prominent attorney, and Mosby. The local media portrayed Wise as cleaning house in the city, but he has his own controversial history. Mosby’s case is a tale of two prosecutors, both of whom built their reputations on anti-corruption but faced similar accusations of political targeting.
Wise’s backstory as a “bulldog” has been told in the media but largely in a way that minimizes Mosby’s claims. In 2008, Wise was named as the first chief counsel of the Office of Congressional Ethics. Within two years, he resigned from the role after there were complaints about racial and political targeting. At one point, he had eight open investigations, all of them targeting Black Democratic members of the House. He was also criticized for selecting investigations on a whim; letting investigations become public news, sometimes before elections; and digging into personal finances. The Congressional Black Caucus drafted a resolution to limit Wise’s discretion. Wise moved to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Maryland in 2010, where he worked mostly on financial fraud and embezzlement cases for several years.
Meanwhile, in 2015, Mosby took over as the Baltimore State’s Attorney. Within four months, her office was consumed by the Freddie Gray case. She faced her first public accusations of a “malicious prosecution” from the officers in the case and their supporters. The officers filed a lawsuit that was ultimately thrown out by the Supreme Court, so it wasn’t taken seriously. They did, however, have a point.
Mosby was widely praised for her seemingly bold and progressive charges in the Gray case. Yet, the fanfare around the case overshadowed the fact that Gray’s cause of death was left mysterious after four trials with no convictions. Prosecutors argued Gray suffered a broken neck from being thrown forward in the van while it was in motion because he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. The judge pointed out that there was no evidence to support that theory, and he faulted the prosecutors for legally unsound charges, like alleging assault while making claims about actions merely being negligent.
As the author of an investigative book on the Gray case, I obtained unreleased evidence showing that officers used excessive and deadly force on Gray when they stopped the van around the corner from where they arrested him and took him out of the van to shackle his legs, as some witnesses had told the media. Case files show that prosecutors knew about this evidence from early on and didn’t share it with the medical examiner or during the trials. Instead, they explicitly argued in court that the officers did not use force on Gray at all, aside from reckless driving.
Case files and notes from Mosby’s office further show that prosecutors rushed the charges before investigating most of the evidence and that politics was in play in their decisionmaking. Ultimately, the officers who cried “malicious prosecution” benefited from Mosby’s office not pursuing the stronger brutality case. But they were not wrong that she put a politically expeditious narrative above the facts and law.
Not long after the officers were acquitted, Mosby was being publicly accused of a “malicious prosecution” again, but this time by Baltimore activists. Two months after Gray’s arrest, in June 2015, Keith Davis Jr. was shot at more than 30 times by police who believed he had committed a robbery.* Rather than prosecute the officers, Mosby’s office prosecuted Davis, who survived, first for the robbery and then, when he was acquitted on those charges, for a murder charge filed days after his robbery acquittal. Police claimed that Davis had murdered someone on the same day of his arrest, despite no apparent motive or connection to the victim.
For the next six years, Mosby would not stop prosecuting Davis for the murder, despite two hung juries and two overturned convictions, one resulting from a discredited jailhouse informant. While she appeared on cable news programs and in Op-Eds as an exemplar of a “progressive” prosecutor, her office turned Davis into “the most aggressively prosecuted man in American history,” according to legal scholar Colin Miller.
Mosby’s zeal against Davis is hard to reconcile with her approach in the Gray case. One factor seemed to be her antagonism towards Davis’ wife, Kelly Davis, who became a vocal opponent. In 2022, a judge accused Mosby of having a “presumption of vindictiveness” and “personal animosity” toward the Davis family and their supporters based on statements and actions.
Accusations of vindictiveness continued to follow Mosby, including claims of retaliatory and politicized treatment of employees in lawsuits and affidavits. Still, Mosby remained popular and was reelected in 2018.
Mosby’s reelection took place during a period of intense corruption scandals in Baltimore. Wise was prosecuting a string of high-profile cases, including the Gun Trace Task Force and Mayor Catherine Pugh, who pleaded guilty to fraudulently selling copies of children’s books she had written to nonprofit organizations and other groups in exchange for money and political favor. In 2020, Wise took over as chief of the Fraud and Public Corruption Unit in Maryland.
There was one major red flag in Wise’s Baltimore portfolio, though: His targets continued to be almost all Black. Shortly after he took office, he indicted police commissioner Darryl DeSousa, a Black man, for failure to pay taxes. He did not indict the white police commanders who oversaw the Gun Trace Task Force, one of whom was named in court as a conspirator. Wise did indict two white Gun Trace Task Force officers, but only because they ended up being heard on a wiretap that was tracking a drug crew. The officers had extraordinary records of complaints but were not under investigation until the wiretap.
Wise seemed to approach his new role in Baltimore as he did his position in Congress. The Baltimore defense bar also became concerned with his apparent antagonism toward lawyers. He indicted and convicted Kenneth Ravenell, a prominent Black attorney, for money laundering. He then indicted Ravenell’s own attorney and defense investigator for obstruction of justice. He was unsuccessful in those additional cases. Wise even accused the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers of taking laundered money from Ravenell at one point.
Mosby was Wise’s last major corruption target in Baltimore. A year before her indictment, in March 2021, Wise’s office made it known to the press that Mosby and her husband, Nick Mosby, the City Council president, were under investigation. The Baltimore Office of the Inspector General had published a report showing that Marilyn Mosby was not properly reporting on her extensive travel and was running a questionable nonprofit. Nick Mosby seemed to retaliate against the OIG by seeking to limit its independence. There was a cloud of apparent impropriety around the Mosbys during 2021.
Yet, Marilyn Mosby was never indicted for anything to do with the OIG report. Wise finally indicted her in January 2022 for making false statements on financial documents in 2020, which had allowed her to purchase two properties in Florida—arguably minor, victimless crimes. According to the indictment, she had falsely checked a box indicating a COVID-related hardship to access her retirement income, and she wasn’t honest about her finances on mortgage applications.
Mosby’s attorney spoke out, claiming that Wise was leading a racist and “selective and vindictive” prosecution. He cited examples of Wise making inflammatory statements about her office in the past. He also noted that, as it was an election year, Wise had previously donated to Mosby’s two opponents. Sherrilyn Ifill, the former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, spoke out on Twitter: “There must be a federal prosecutor assigned just to Black mayors.”
The local support for Mosby was limited, though. Especially for activists and city residents who supported Keith Davis Jr., Mosby being prosecuted by an arguably vindictive prosecutor was her just deserts.
In 2023, Wise was demoted and removed from his position as anti-corruption chief. He was also removed from prosecuting the Mosby case. His boss, U.S. Attorney Erek Barron, had taken over in 2021 and had put some checks on him. As in Congress, Wise had a brief but intense reign in Maryland that ended with a whimper. He transitioned to the DOJ’s public integrity section, where he has been attracting controversy during his prosecution of Hunter Biden for tax and gun offenses—a case Biden’s team claims is “politically motivated.”
Ultimately, Wise’s impact in Baltimore was to indict a handful of police officers for racketeering and try a series of other financial cases with narrow targets. But the cultures of police brutality, cover-ups, prosecutorial misconduct, and even purchasing political influence in Baltimore largely remain unbothered, and both Mosby and Wise played important roles in limiting the fallout.
Correction, May 13, 2024: This article originally misstated that police shot Keith Davis Jr. more than 30 times. They shot Davis three times.
