Source: The Washington Post / Getty
Former Baltimore County state attorney Marilyn Mosby was found guilty of perjury, leaving her to face a possible ten-year jail sentence.
On Thursday (November 9), a federal jury returned a guilty verdict against Marilyn Mosby on two counts of perjury for falsely claiming to experience hardship to withdraw money from her retirement fund. Each count brings with it a potential sentence of up to five years imprisonment.
The initial indictment brought against Mosby in January of this year detailed that the 43-year-old had claimed that the hardship was due to the COVID-19 pandemic, citing the CARES Act which allowed people to make such a move. But it was later discovered through payroll documents that in her role as state attorney for Baltimore County, Mosby still earned a considerable salary of $250,000 with no reduction in her weekly work hours. Federal prosecutors stated that she used the money on down payments for vacation homes in Florida.
“Telling the truth especially matters when public officials are looking to access funds for their own personal use,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Aaron Zelinsky attorney said during the closing statements of the three-day trial. “We should not allow her to lie and commit perjury to purchase Florida vacation homes in the worst pandemic in 100 years.”
The verdict is the latest blow to Marilyn Mosby, who had attained national prominence due to the turmoil surrounding the death of Freddie Gray, a Black man arrested for possession of a pen knife in 2015 who died under suspicious circumstances while under police custody. Mosby stood by the medical examiner’s report stating that Gray’s death was a homicide, calling for the six cops involved to be indicted. Three of the officers were found not guilty leading Mosby to drop charges against the remaining officers.
A separate case where Mosby faces two counts of federal mortgage fraud is on the horizon for the former attorney, whose loss in this case means that she will lose her license to practice law. The belief is that federal attorneys have a stronger case with those charges. “Now what’s interesting is to see if the government decides to prosecute her on the second [charges] or if they work out some kind of plea agreement,” defense attorney Albert I. Alperstein said to The Baltimore Sun.
