Marilyn Mosby spared prison sentence in perjury and fraud case ...

Former Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby was spared a prison sentence Thursday, with the judge overseeing the case imposing a penalty of three years supervised release with one year to be served on home detention.

U.S. District Judge Lydia Kay Griggsby cited Mosby’s role as a mother of two and her public and personal fall from grace among her reasons for varying from the sentencing guidelines, which had called for a sentence of 12 to 18 months. She said there had already been “important consequences” as a result of the prosecution.

After the hearing, Mosby told supporters that “angels” were brought into her life and thanked the local people who were fighting for her from the beginning.

”This is not over, but God was here today,” she said, declining to take questions from reporters.

God “touched the heart of the judge” and allowed her to go home with her children, Mosby said.

Prosecutors sought 20 months incarceration, telling Griggsby that Mosby had lied to the public about the case and shown no remorse all while undermining the justice system. In recent weeks she had mounted an aggressive media campaign seeking a pardon, in which she proclaimed she had been railroaded by the system.

“Marilyn Mosby does not care about facts. She does not care about the law. She does not care about the truth,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Delaney said.

Defense attorneys had argued that Mosby had already been sufficiently punished through her professional and personal downfall, while supporters painted the prosecution as retribution for her progressive criminal justice policies and part of a pattern of punishment of civil rights leaders who challenge the status quo.

“Ms. Mosby pursuing a pardon, pursuing an appeal is who Ms. Mosby is,” public defender James Wyda told Griggsby. “Ms. Mosby fights for everyone else’s rights, and she’s fighting for her own.”

Mosby declined to address the court and did not have a visible reaction to the sentence. She could be seen dabbing her eye with a tissue and embraced supporters.

Mosby, 44, a Democrat who served two terms as the city’s top prosecutor from 2015-2023, was found guilty at separate trials of two counts of perjury and one count of making a false statement on a loan application. The convictions relate to her purchase of two luxury vacation homes in Florida.

The sentence also calls for Mosby to complete 100 hours of community service, and to wear location monitoring device while on home detention. In a separate proceeding earlier in the day, Griggsby also ordered that she must forfeit a Florida vacation condo she purchased using fraudulently obtained funds. Griggsby said she could recoup her down payment and an equivalent percentage of proceeds from the sale of the home.

Supporters arrived by the busload and filled the courtroom as well as an overflow room. More than a dozen supporters asked Griggsby to show Mosby mercy, recalling her tireless efforts to reform the criminal justice system in Baltimore. They included family members, former colleagues in the State’s Attorney’s Office, and a man who her office exonerated of murder.

For portions of the hearing, Mosby sat with her head bowed and hands clasped as if in prayer. Her ex-husband, City Council President Nick Mosby, sat behind her with their teenage daughters sitting on either side of him.

In 2020, Mosby twice certified under the penalty of perjury that she had experienced a qualifying “adverse financial consequence” to withdraw a total of $90,000 from a retirement account through a provision in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act. A jury determined that she lied.

Mosby then used that money to buy a home in Kissimmee, Florida, and a condominium in Longboat Key, Florida.

A second jury concluded that she also lied when she submitted a letter to the mortgage company that claimed her husband at the time, Nick, who’s the outgoing president of Baltimore City Council, had agreed to gift her $5,000 at closing toward the condo.

Defense attorneys focused their arguments that the case was novel and unusual. They said she was the only public official ever prosecuted in federal court in Maryland “for offenses that have no victim, financial loss or abuse of public office,” Wyda said.

“This is a unique, it seems, unprecedented case. Its unusual nature alone is a basis for probation,” Wyda said.

Mosby has painted the case as an overzealous prosecution, motivated by racial and political animus. Her progressive policies had upset the status quo, supporters said, and she was targeted to be taken down. They’re arguments that Griggsby prevented from being made in court, saying there was no basis.

Mosby took office in 2015 as the youngest top prosecutor in the country, and rocketed to national prominence after bringing charges against six officers in the death of Freddie Gray at a time when police killings were sparking outrage but rarely accountability. It’s that prosecution, she has claimed, that put her in the crosshairs of investigators.

“The prosecution of Marilyn Mosby seems intended to send a chilling message to other progressive prosecutors that their careers, their families, and their freedoms can be stripped away if they strive for equality and justice for everybody in the community, not just some,” civil rights attorney Ben Crump told Griggsby in remarks that made references to Rosa Parks, Afeni Shakur and Angela Davis.

Mosby in her recent press appearances painted the charges as payback from former President Donald Trump, though she was indicted during the administration of President Joe Biden, by a U.S. Attorney’s Office led by a Biden appointee. Griggsby, the judge overseeing the case, is too a Biden appointee.

Prosecutors railed against Mosby’s mischaracterizations. She said in a national radio interview that she had been placed under a gag order and unable to defend herself, and that the federal government wanted to separate her from her children for 40 years. She said the government tried to portray the case as though she had stolen Paycheck Protection Program loans.

“It’s a lie,” Delaney said of each claim.

Delaney said he believed Mosby pursued truth as the city’s top prosecutor, which made her misstatements “that much more egregious.” He said a message needed to be sent to Mosby because absent a jail sentence, there was “every reason to believe she would do wrong again.”

At multiple points in the hearing, Griggsby expressed concern about Mosby’s public remarks about the case, and even raised the idea of requiring her as part of the sentence to make a public statement. Both the prosecution and defense said they did not think that was appropriate. But Griggsby did not dwell on the “lack of contrition or perceived lack of contrition” in her sentencing remarks.

While the defense said the case against Mosby was the only of its kind, prosecutors said it was instead simple and straightforward: Mosby committed perjury and mortgage fraud, cases that are charged every day. Delaney said that rather than going after her for her policies, it would be wrong to not pursue the violations found by investigators.

“Surely it cannot be the case that if the highest prosecutor in Baltimore was found to have committed perjury and mortgage fraud, the United States of America should simply look the other way because of her policies,” he said, “and we do not cut them a break because of their politics either.”

Delaney said there was in fact a victim in the case: “The people’s faith in the system of justice, their public officials and the rule of law.”

Pointing to remarks from some of Mosby’s supporters, Delaney said her “persistent and repeated lies” had “real, substantive, deleterious effects on the public perception of the pursuit of justice.”

After laying low following her convictions, Mosby successfully rallied a wide range of high-level and grassroots support in recent weeks ahead of the sentencing hearing.

The NAACP and more than a dozen other organizations sent a letter to Biden describing the prosecution as a “miscarriage of justice and an example of the last administration’s misuse of authority” and called on him to issue a pardon.

Crump and more than 50 other lawyers later joined the call. So did the Congressional Black Caucus.

Bernice King, the daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., also released a statement in support of the effort.

Mosby’s pardon application states: “While pardon applications generally express remorse and regret, what happens when justice was not served and in fact, denied?”

This story will be updated.

Baltimore Banner reporter Pamela Wood contributed to this report.