High Crime Area Residents Breathe a Sigh of Relief as Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, A Prosecutor Who Acts Like a Public Defender, is to Step Down in 2027
Mary Moriarty, the Hennepin County Attorney, announced that her office will no longer prosecute crimes like weapons violations, drugs, parole violations, or other crimes discovered during traffic stops where the justification for the stop is driving conduct and/or equipment violations.
On September 20, 2025, the Hennepin County Chief of Police Association held a press conference in response to this policy. 34 police chiefs representing 45 communities with a total of 1.3 million citizens were represented.
Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt, along with metro area police chiefs who spoke that day, assured the public that they will keep doing what they are doing to get guns off the street and keep their communities safe from crime, regardless of Moriarty’s choice to not charge individuals committing crime. Witt stated, “Just this year our deputies and detectives seized three hundred and seventy seven guns…Forty seven percent of those confiscated were from legal low-level traffic stops. That’s 175 guns.” She told other stories. A woman’s life was saved by a low-level traffic stop. She had been stabbed by the driver, and he and his buddy were on their way to find a place to kill her. They were pulled over for illegally tinted windows that hid the fact that both were wearing ski masks and gloves. Witt told of a semi-automatic weapon confiscated as a result of a low-level traffic stop that was implicated in a shooting in Minneapolis and a homicide in Robinsdale.
This was just the latest controversy in a string of controversies under the watch of Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty since she came into office in 2022. Ms. Moriarty spent 31 years defending people. She was a public defender for 25 years, before serving as Hennepin County Chief Public Defender. In this position, she got high praise. In 2019 the National Center for State Courts deemed Hennepin County one of the best public defender offices in the nation under her leadership, something Hennepin County citizens should be proud.
But her zealousness to defend those accused of crime has gone too far. In 2020, the Board of Public Defense voted 4-2 against re-appointing Moriarty to the post that she’s held since 2014, put her on paid leave and later gave her a letter of reprimand. That was based on allegations that she had a “fractured relationship” with others in the justice system, made inappropriate social media posts, and created a culture of fear in her office. She sued the Board. In 2022 the board settled the case without admitting wrong doing by awarding Ms. Moriarty $300,000.
However, it is clear her many years of experience as a public defender has hampered her judgement as a prosecutor. It would be hard, after spending most of one’s professional life investigating racist behavior and bias, not to see it at every turn. It would be even harder after 31 years of defending those caught by the law, to shift to prosecuting those same individuals.
It also appears that Mary Moriarty entered the Hennepin County Attorney’s office with an agenda. In her time in office she has acted more like a defense attorney than a prosecutor. In March of 2023 two teenagers 15 and 17 were charged with second degree murder for the shooting death of Zaria McKeever, at the request of her boyfriend, Erik Haynes. Hayes told the juveniles to shoot McKeever and gave them a gun. The 15 year-old shot McKeever, with the help of the 17 year-old. A plea deal was struck where the juveniles were given 18 to 24 months in a juvenile correctional facility and probation until the age of 21. There was such an uproar by Ms. McKeever’s family and the community over the light sentence that Governor Tim Walz Attorney appointed General Keith Ellison to take the case away from Moriarty.
Throughout 2023, Moriarty was criticized in the press by families of victims and high crime communities for her leniency toward drug dealers and other violent offenders, from a drug dealer who caused an overdose death facing maximum prison sentence of 25 years but got a plea deal for probation and up to 240 days in jail, to car jackers, and to sex offenders of teenage girls.
In 2024, Ms. Moriarty dropped charges against a state trooper for the deadly use-of-force after being pressured by use-of-force experts who debunked her prosecution. The final straw happened when it came out her office cherry picking the State Patrol’s use-of-force expert’s affidavit in her court filings and when she let go of her own use-of-force expert, Jeffrey Noble, when he found the trooper’s use-of-force in compliance with policy.
In April of this year, Ms. Moriarty required her prosecutors to consider race in the negotiation of plea deals, a policy that initiated a civil rights investigation in May by the Department Of Justice as to whether it violates the law to sentence persons convicted of the same crime differently based on their race.
It is no wonder that high crime neighborhoods breathed a sigh of relief when, on August 7th, Moriarty announced that she was not going to seek reelection for the Office of the Hennepin County Attorney in 2026.
Local politicians love to say that crime is going down in Minneapolis. However, compared to the overall crime rate for the rest of the city, Midtown Phillips’ crime rate is 198% higher, East Phillips’ crime rate is 193% higher, and in Ventura Village crime is 182% higher. These are areas where its residents feel forgotten by the city and often call their neighborhoods the “containment zone.”
These are areas of the city where a violent criminal like Trivon Leonard Jr is released from Hennepin County jail, after arresting him for speeding at 90 miles per hour. After keeping him a day, they released him because the county either didn’t bother to check or didn’t care if he was wanted or was in violation of his parole in another state. This violent drug dealer from Chicago returned to the ‘hood. Four hours later he shot up an encampment that caused the death of a 30 year old Native woman.
This is the part of town where the city allowed encampments to grow and fester on their own property for more than four years before putting a stop to it. And the residents in these neighborhoods know it wouldn’t have taken that long if it was happening in Southwest Minneapolis. Encampments dot the landscape of the Phillips neighborhoods, attracting gang activity and high numbers of homicides, like the shooting deaths of four young persons by gang member James Duane Ortley on April 30th, and a mass shooting on Lake Street, causing several gun injuries and one death on September 2nd, just to name a few.
It’s easy to see why the people living in those high crime neighborhoods hope to get relief in 2027 when Mary Moriarty’s social experiment ends and we hopefully elect someone who takes violent criminals off their streets. Anyone will be better than her.
“Mary Moriarty’s Social Experiment Ends in 2027” –> Two more yers of this? Damage mitigation for now I guess
Donna, I am 100% with you until you got to the concluding sentence. “Anyone will be better than her.” This is simply not true. Voters and, especially, early supporters of candidates to succeed Moriarty need to be vigilant in assessing these candidacies. NO candidate who is not willing to repudiate Moriarty and her policies should be deemed acceptable just because he or she “is not Mary Moriarty”. One declared candidate, St. Rep. Cedric Frazier, has been a supporter of many of Moriarty’s policies, and I think it’s fair to say that he is generally philosophically in tune with her. My personal belief is that he intends to preside over a “second Moriarty term” in office. I could be wrong, but it will be up to Frazier to SAY I’m wrong, and it behooves every voter who wants a return to the Prosecutor being a prosecutor to insist on a clear declaration, from EACH candidate, of what disagreements they have with Moriarty, and what – precisely what – will be different with them as County Prosecutor. Any who cannot articulate clear differences will NOT “be better than her”.
Thanks for the information!
There is ample data about crime and criminality, and Moriarty is following the data. She’s also following sound philosophy about the role of the justice system in the society.
The “tough on crime” crowd is following their feelings, and their lust for revenge against criminals. That’s a fact. If Moriarty’s point of view is so wrong, why is crime following national trends in Minneapolis? Why would crime be down at all? If her “social experiment” is so bad, wouldn’t we see it in data?
We don’t. That should shut people up, but it doesn’t. Because the “tough on crime” crowd has an unending desire for more punishment. How much punishment is appropriate for a given crime? They’re never specific. Because it’s always just MORE.
Congratulations on being the only person I know who can read the minds and feelings of those who are “tough on crime.” with an “unending desire for more punishment.” Maybe people like myself who live in high crime neighborhoods would like a little peace, are sick of their car windows smashed, their houses invaded, their garages broken into, , their teenaged daughters being recruited at the bus stops by traffickers, their sons being hustled to sell drugs on their streets and hearing gun fire and reading about a homicide no more than two blocks away. Data shows that crime is down in the city overall, but in poor BIPOC, working class communities crime is up, and they are the victims of most of it. It hasn’t gone down, it’s been pushed into the ‘containment zones.’ Maybe people in these neighborhoods don’t want to see a violent criminals like Trivon Leonard let out of jail the day after endangering the life of folks living here and four hours latter causing a shoot up that kills a woman in an encampment in my neighborhood. Here’s a fact, most of the carjackings in Henn. Co. have been committed by teenage boys, some as young as 11 years old, many of them possessing firearms. And a number of the parents, who have lost control of these kids have begged the courts to sentence them and get them off the street. Under Ms Moriarty Henn. Co. has 81% of all the carjackings in the state, and most committed by armed juveniles, some after a long list of active pending investigations. At least five people and 3 carjacking juveniles have been killed in car crashes caused by carjackers fleeing police in Minneapolis this year. These kids are redeemable, but not if they are given a slap on the hand and let back on the street. Even their parents are begging to get them off the street.
The first thing mentioned in this article is Moriarty’s policy to stop in person enforcement of low level traffic stops. What no one seems to mention is that Saint Paul has had this policy for some time, and it has not negatively effected them. As Belmontmink said, there is ample national evidence to show a policy such as this is generally successful. It is a strategy to address the unconscious, and sometimes conscious racial biases that are ever present in police forces. All it does is reduce the risk of our BIPOC neighbors from receiving statistically higher amounts of citations, and criminal charges – and in the worst case scenario, prevent more needless deaths and situations like what we saw with Duante Wright in Brooklyn Center in 2021. He was pulled over for having an air freshener hanging in his car.
I knew I was going to rile some readers by writing about Ms. Moriarty’s directive to her staff to consider race in her sentencing, because it sounds like I’m clueless about the racist systems we all live under. However, if I was going to write something about how my BIPOC community is affected by the high crime in our area of the city I had to write all the facts, all the controversial moves she has made in her term in office. I might have added one sentence about that issue and that would have been; “Why would she want to bring the DOJ down on us, especially this DOJ when we are in the myst of organizing to protect our immigrants?” I think it’s racist to think that Back and Brown people don’t care that their streets are littered with needles, drug dealers are menacing them, homicides and shoot outs have been happening all around them, and human traffickers are hanging around the school bus stops trying to recruit their middle school aged girls. They do. And Mary Moriarty isn’t helping by giving the criminals ruling their streets a slap on the hand. There are a million reasons for violent criminal behavior, and being a victim of racism is one of them, but that doesn’t mean that the most poor, BIPOC, and vulnerable neighborhoods have to be victimized by them.
I could say a lot about this one and all the [redacted for violating community standards] individual arguments contained therein but I guess I’d like to just focus on this one.
“In April of this year, Ms. Moriarty required her prosecutors to consider race in the negotiation of plea deals, a policy that initiated a civil rights investigation in May by the Department Of Justice as to whether it violates the law to sentence persons convicted of the same crime differently based on their race.”- does the author truly believe that addressing discriminatory racist practices is bad because [redacted for violating community standards] says it is? This article is filled with rejections of the actual research in the area of crime but…truly this one was beyond the pale of what I could imagine and just at a human level I’d like an answer to that question
I thought Lutherans were more forward thinking and progressive than this. A profound disappointment.
What was way beyond a “profound disappointment” to this Lutheran was attending two funerals of my after school kids who lost their lives to violence, one killed by a stray bullet and one the victim of an armed robbery. To do everything you can to protect the most vulnerable in high crime neighborhoods is what I would call “forward thinking and progressive.”
As a lutheran- do you believe that literal children who do bad things are irredeemable and should be punished forever? Where do the concepts of grace and mercy fit into your view of justice here that maximum punishment is the only way through? I’m also curious what you have done to go out and support the people who are living in the homeless encampments rather than just being mad that you have to see them and know they exist?
No I don’t believe children who commit a homicide should be punished forever. Where in my article do you find the words “forever” or “maximum punishment?’ This may surprise you, but I too know about the developing brain and am familiar with the research done presenting the juvenile brain as one that has not developed a full concept of right or wrong, is impulsive and can be easily manipulated, If you are familiar with the case, you are aware that they were not tried as adults, nor sent to an adult prison with hardened criminals. They were sent to a juvenile correctional facility, though no picnic, has a range of programing; chemical dependence treatment, counciling, a place they can work toward and receive a GED etc. and maybe a place where with the right kind of help, their brains can develop to come to realize the horrendous thing they did, and work on themselves. I believe in mercy, justice and redemption and working with kids for 30 years has proven to me that these kids can be turned around. But these kids need more time. Ms Moriarty was correct to try them as juveniles and send them to a juvenile correctional facility. However, she was wrong in giving them so little time. They need more time, (off the street) than what they were given.; which was at most, two years. But, my article wasn’t about that. It was about the effect Moriarty has on high crime neighborhoods. I don’t know where you live, but did you even wonder if the community might be frightened of these children? Hypothetically speaking, how would you feel if you ran into your sister’s killer in a neighborhood grocery store? This kind of thing happens in high crime communities, because most criminals return to their own neighborhoods, and the family member of a homicide victim when running into the victimizer is traumatized all over again. In this case we have no prosecutor. She was doing the work of the defense, both prosecution and defense working for mercy and grace for the perpetrators and no one working for the healing of a family and a community or giving them a sense of justice. My article was taken from the perspective of neighborhoods wracked by crime.
As for encampments, they too have wracked the neighborhoods (that have been forced to host them) with crime. And bringing them sox, blankets and food; building yurts for them and supplying them with fire wood has not helped them to get their lives in order. In fact it has encouraged more of them to stay on their drugs and their headlong journey into destruction. An untreated Fentanyl addiction is a death sentence. What kind of a society lets people kill themselves? So, I don’t enable or “support” them in that way. However, because of the destruction they have brought to our BIPOC, working class neighborhood, by attracting drug dealers, traffickers and the worst kind of violence I for sure am mad but not because I have to “see them and know they exist.” Believe me, I know they exist. My neighborhood has hosted 44 encampments within 4 years, most within two blocks of me and 3 were right across the street. Even though, I have compassion for them and continue to support the people in these drug camps. For the passed three years I have been lobbying our city to work with the state and county to bring them under a roof with treatment, using the latest proven Medical, Assisted Treatment (MAT) to stave off their cravings and dope sickness and to give them wrap around services in a community environment that is culturally sensitive. I have met with city officials about this, I headed a committee that organized a community meeting of 100 neighborhood residence and city, county and state lawmakers with a presentation of solutions. I’ve been at every City Council and City Council Committee meetings in which this subject is the issue and if they call for testimony I am at the podium. I have deeply educated myself about addictions and solutions. I have lobbied for a Navigation Center and heavily guarded (from dealers and traffickers) tiny houses. There is still no Navigation Center or tiny houses, but the camps are not there anymore due to a new city strategy, which has been met with some success, as a third of them have gone into shelter and are being helped with low-bar housing. A community of users who were sheltered by the MN Indian Women’s Resource Center after their encampment burned down followed by extremely cold weather is a model of what can happen, when encampments are forced to shut down, as many in this newly formed community are seeking and finding healing, health and sobriety. However, the high crime neighborhoods are still witnessing users wondering the streets, congregating in areas to meet their dealers and shoot up. This has not stopped me from continuing to “support” them by making noise at City Hall downtown.
Thank you, Donna, for your article and all the work you do for your community. You clearly see the complexities of the poor victimizing the poor, and how minimizing the violence is damaging to everyone.
Usually, people elected to positions of authority/leadership are sworn in by the presiding judicial authority and swear an oath to perform the duties of the position. I don’t have any firsthand knowledge in this instance, but has anyone checked to see if Ms. Moriarty might have violated her oath?