A federal appeals court has overturned former Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s mortgage fraud conviction, but they kept in place her perjury convictions.
Mosby won the mortgage fraud decision in a 2-to-1 split in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals based in Richmond, Virginia
Her legal team made their arguments in January.
She recently told the Native Land Pod, “We feel really great about the appeal.”
Mortgage fraud case
The prosecution’s case hinged on a letter Mosby’s now ex-husband, former city council president Nick Mosby, gave her where he promised to “gift” her $5,000 for a mortgage on a condo in Florida.
The money was really coming from Mosby herself, prosecutors said.
But court ruled Judge Lydia K. Griggsby’s “overbroad” jury instruction was inappropriate because it said jurors must consider “whether any act occurred in the furtherance of this crime in the District of Maryland.”
Mosby was traveling between Maryland and Florida at the time
The appellate court found “there is no direct evidence in the record specifying that [Mosby] transmitted the gift letter to her mortgage lender from the District of Maryland.”
The appeals court ruled she is entitled to keep her Longboat Key, Florida condo, which the government tried to seize.
“This error could have been remedied by direction from the district court that the jury
could establish venue by finding that an element of the crime was committed in Maryland,” the appellate court said in its decision. “But that is not what the jury was told. Instead, both the district court and the government told the jury, ‘The government need not prove that the crime itself was committed in this district [to establish venue].'”
The court found, “This excision of the elements of the offense from any act in furtherance of the crime leaves us in the dark about what venue determination was reached by the jury. We are thus left to conclude that the error was sufficiently prejudicial to warrant reversal.”
Perjury stands
Mosby told the podcast she hit “rock bottom” and the trials were one of the lowest points in her life.
“They tried to break me on so many different levels and make an example out of me for what I stood for,” she said. “It had absolutely nothing to do with anything that I did wrong. I withdrew my own retirement savings that I put away every two weeks to buy property. That was the extent of what I was accused of.”
Those perjury convictions relating to her retirement account will stand, the appellate court found.
Prosecutors built their perjury case around declarations Mosby made that she was undergoing financial hardship because of COVID-19.
At the time, the government allowed people with COVID hardships to make penalty-free retirement account withdrawals.
Mosby did so despite having no financial hardships and making several hundred thousand dollars a year as state’s attorney, prosecutors said.
Here is a timeline of her two trials.
“Having to fight the federal government was really difficult. I lost everything. I lost my marriages. I lost my career. I lost my house. I lost my car. It was my home. It was a lot, and so many folks I thought would be there were not,” Mosby said to Native Land pod.
She has not commented on the appeals court’s decision Friday.
Mosby served two terms as Baltimore City’s state’s attorney.
