The NAACP led a group of civil rights groups in asking President Biden to release Marilyn Mosby, who used to be the state’s attorney for Baltimore.
For getting a lower interest rate, Mosby lied on his mortgage application, which led to his conviction in February. The person was first found guilty in November 2023 of two counts of lying related to taking money out of the City of Baltimore’s Deferred Compensation Plan. She could go to jail for up to 40 years.
Along with 14 other groups, the NAACP wrote to Biden that they thought Mosby was unfairly targeted and found guilty “after enduring the political persecution and malicious prosecution of the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ).”
“We are very worried that the previous administration abused their power to bring an unfounded charge against Ms. Mosby, and even worse, that the current administration’s U.S. Department of Justice didn’t care about the clear political reason for the unfair prosecution against Ms. Mosby,” the letter says.
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The groups say that Mosby’s dedication to due process and fair treatment of people of color made government officials, including former President Trump, angry.
In a speech to police in February 2020, William Barr, who was then Attorney General, said bad things about attorneys, including Mosby.
Since police killed George Floyd, Mosby has been on national TV and in media a lot as an expert on police misconduct and prosecutions. When Trump said he would send federal agents to Baltimore in July 2020, Mosby said she would go after any federal agents who did wrong things to people in Baltimore.
During the month of August of that year, the letter said, Mosby found out that the federal government was looking into her, which many saw as punishment for her brave actions in protecting the constitutional rights of her people.
The letter says that Mosby was wrongly convicted in November. However, the NAACP and other groups said she did meet an objective standard to be able to take the money out of the retirement plan, even though the DOJ said she didn’t need it because she kept her full pay.
Also, Mosby was the only person who was charged, even though 739 people took money out of their retirement accounts without being charged for doing so, including three people in her own office. It then didn’t give her due process or the chance to testify or present proof that would have cleared her, the letter says.
It was her false statement about a $5,000 “gift” on a mortgage application that got her convicted in February. In the letter to Biden, it was said that expert evidence at the trial proved Mosby was given bad advice.
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In the end, the letter says that the financial effects are much smaller than the normal million-dollar threshold for the Department of Justice.
“We expect that the deliberate and unfair prosecutions and political persecutions that happened under Trump will not happen again under Biden,” the letter says. “Ms. Mosby’s case is not the only one; it is just one of the newest and worst ones. Fixing this problem is necessary because it’s an unfair injustice and shows how the previous government abused their power.
A lot of different groups, like Color of Change, Fair and Just Prosecution, National Action Network, National Bar Association, National Black Justice Coalition, National Black Law Students Association, National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, National Council of Negro Women, National Urban League, Until Freedom, and World Without Genocide, also signed the letter.
The president and CEO of the NAACP, Derrick Johnson, said that Mosby’s conviction shows how the justice system targets Black Americans.
Johnson said in a statement, “We’ve watched, decade after decade, as people who want to promote injustice have wrongfully prosecuted Black Americans.”
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