Civil rights groups and some Democratic lawmakers are urging President Biden to pardon Marilyn Mosby, the former Baltimore state’s attorney convicted of mortgage fraud in February. Mosby’s advocates argue that she was the target of a politically motivated prosecution under the Trump administration after she unsuccessfully prosecuted six Baltimore police officers in the 2015 death of Freddie Gray. U.S. authorities alleged that Mosby lied to mortgage lenders while purchasing two Florida vacation homes in 2020 and 2021. In February, a jury acquitted Mosby of fraud related to the first property but convicted her of making a false statement to a mortgage lender to acquire the second one. Mosby, 44, is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday and faces up to 40 years in prison, though prosecutors are seeking a sentence of 20 months, reports the Washington Post.
In a letter to Biden, more than a dozen civil rights groups, led by the NAACP called on the administration to intervene in Mosby’s case, describing her conviction as a “miscarriage of justice.” On Thursday, the Congressional Black Caucus sent a similar letter to Biden, stating that Mosby had applied for a presidential pardon. The letter from the civil rights groups laid out Mosby’s clashes with the Trump administration in 2020, before and after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police that May. Mosby made frequent media appearances as an authority on police misconduct and police prosecutions. In a July 2020 op-ed for the Post, Mosby confronted Trump, who had threatened to deploy federal agents to Baltimore to tamp down unrest after the murder of Floyd. Mosby vowed to prosecute any federal agents who engaged in unlawful actions against Baltimore citizens. In their letter to Biden, the civil rights groups suggested that Mosby’s public challenges to the Trump administration prompted the Justice Department to open an investigation into her. “Two months later [after The Washington Post op-ed], Attorney Mosby learned she was under federal investigation, a move widely perceived as retaliation for her courageous stance in protecting her constituents’ constitutional rights,” the letter stated.