Charging decisions cannot be political if they are to be equitable

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It is extremely likely that Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, in her former career as a public defender, experienced situations in which she strongly believed that the client she represented should not have been subject to prosecution at all. Criminal defense lawyers who worked at the Legal Rights Center, a nonprofit also in service to defendants who cannot afford a private attorney — and at which I served as the executive director for 15 years — expressed frustration about this to me on several occasions.

However, our clients did not have the resources or political power of a police union behind them, and therefore did not attempt to access the governor with the hope of interfering in the charging decision. Instead, our lawyers only fought the perceived injustice in the place properly designed to fairly weigh such arguments: a court. Our first step would be to assert that there was insufficient probable cause to bring the charge. If the judge ruled against us, the next course was to persuade a member of the jury that the prosecution’s evidence did not provide proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. If that lost also, the client then had the ability to use state public defenders to bring an appeal, perhaps finding error in the trial judge’s rulings about allowable evidence or other matters.

Whatever any not-fully-informed person (which includes me) may believe about the reasonableness of Moriarty filing a criminal charge against Minnesota state trooper Ryan Londregan in the shooting death of a motorist during a 2023 traffic stop, we all have a stake in keeping politics out of it, as that gives unequal advantages to the members of our society who are more able to access political power than others.

In this particular case, a judge ruled that the charge against Londregan was backed by probable cause, admittedly a broad standard but one that certainly undercuts the belief that it was extremely obvious the charge was inappropriate. Even so, Moriarty dismissed the charge long before a scheduled trial (“With charges dismissed, tempers flare,” June 4). As she would know, and as Legal Rights Center staff and clients came to know, it used to be far more common for prosecutors carrying out shaky or even patently unjust prosecutions to wait until the day of trial to dismiss such cases, first attempting to see if the defendant might plead guilty to something out of fear that a court or jury will be biased against them and the risk of not being exonerated at a trial would be too catastrophic. (Which some defendants unfortunately do, for the same reason people buy insurance to protect against loss from fire, however rare fires may be.)

To his credit, Gov. Tim Walz never did substitute his uninformed judgment for the future jury which would have weighed evidence more fairly, or substitute himself for the judge responsible for determining if there continued to be sufficient legal grounds to even present the case to a jury.

But it is unfortunate that he suggested after the fact that he would not have maintained the courage to allow the appropriate court process to run its course, thereby promoting unequal power in society based on who may access the executive branch to undercut the judicial branch.

Michael Friedman, of Minneapolis, was executive director of the Legal Rights Center from 2006 to 2020.