Top Minneapolis Prosecutor’s Woke Policies Under Fire

A Soros-bankrolled public defender elected in 2023 to the top prosecutor position for Hennepin County Minnesota, which includes Minneapolis, is taking fire for her soft-on-crime policies.  Michael Goldberg of the Associated Press reports that County Attorney Mary Moriarty’s decisions to seek rehabilitation rather than prison time, even for murderers, has caused even her former supporters to say that she has gone too far and “not abided by the goals of that office, which are safety and justice.”   Moriarty, who received over $500,000 from Soros, ran on the  promise to reform the criminal justice system, abandoning punishment and focusing on the root causes of crime. That approach has caused a reported 150 seasoned county prosecutors, investigators and support staff to quit their jobs since her election. “People are afraid to talk. The morale is horrible,” said one former prosecutor.

One of Moriarty’s targets was to divert juvenile offenders from trial to rehab programs. The year after her election 36% of county juvenile offenders were diverted.  But her focus on diversion was even higher for adult offenders, with 81% being diverted since her election. In a New York Post story by Olivia Land published during Moriarty’s first year in office, the families of violent crime victims spoke out against her soft-on-criminals approach.

Veteran prosecutor Catherine Markey was only told moments before a plea hearing that the DA was only seeking probation for one of the teens involved in the 2019 carjacking that killed her son, Stephen Markey.  “It’s a trend definitely because of Mary Moriarty,” the former prosecutor told the paper of those accused of serious crimes getting slap-on-the-wrist deals. “She’s still playing public defender—the only thing is, that’s not her role anymore,” Markey said of the city’s chief prosecutor.

Sherrice Barnett similarly recalled her horror at being told the teen charged with murdering her 27-year-old son, Derrell Freeman, would be spared a prison sentence. “I couldn’t breathe,” she told the paper.  I said, ‘I just got to get up out of here.’ I never would have imagined in a million years that it would have went that way.”

Another mom, Nancy Caspersen, recalled her disgust at the repeat offender charged with the third-degree murder of her daughter, Kailey—for selling her the pain pills laced with fentanyl that killed her in 2021 — getting probation and up to 240 days in jail instead of the maximum sentence of 25 years in prison. “It ain’t fair. It’s not right. She’s my only child,” Caspersen tearfully told the Star Tribune. “It makes me feel like she didn’t matter to these people.”

Despite the outcry Moriarty is digging in, “There have been times I’ve asked myself, is this the city where George Floyd was murdered? But at the same time, if I look historically, any time there’s been progress, there’s always backlash,” Moriarty said. “There’s nothing different about this than when people in the past have tried to change systems that have been in place for decades.”

The progressive prosecutors funded by liberal billionaire George Soros seem to have one thing in common, they either don’t know or don’t understand American criminal justice history. The reason that the systems of increasing consequences for crime “have been in place for decades,” is because alternative systems have been tried and failed, at an immense cost of innocent human lives and public safety. Voters in Portland, Oregon, St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco have figured this out and fired their pro-criminal district attorneys. Voters in California’s Los Angeles and Alameda Counties are poised to fire their Soro-bankrolled district attorneys this fall.

Let’s hope that this trend continues.