The Minnesota Supreme Court has suspended a senior Hennepin County prosecutor placed on leave a year ago after a lie to a judge resulted in the rare decision to dismiss a rape case.
Catherine McEnroe, a 31-year lawyer who has been with the Hennepin County Attorney's Office since 2013, is suspended for 60 days and required to pay a $900 fine, the court ordered. The Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility filed for disciplinary action in the fallout of the case dismissal last January.
The court order says that McEnroe committed professional misconduct warranting public discipline for "making knowingly false statements to a court and opposing counsel during a criminal trial and engaging in dishonest conduct to cover up the false statements."
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty — within days of taking office after a landslide election — made the decision to dismiss the case and place McEnroe on leave.
Moriarty said at the time that dismissing the case was a last resort, but she stands by the decision that jolted the Twin Cities legal community. Such dismissal is extremely rare, but the teenage victim told the Star Tribune in an interview that she expects the criminal justice system to fail women.
A juror seated for the trial penned a letter to the editor, questioning Moriarty's decision and saying the unpunished rape of a teen "weighs extremely heavily in the public interest."
Binh Tuong, deputy director of the Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility, said in a court stipulation that Moriarty's office had "alternatives to the dismissal, and it was not the inevitable outcome of [McEnroe]'s misconduct."
"The false statement was not substantive, there were other prosecutors who could have completed the trial (with just one professional witness remaining), and defense counsel's motion for a dismissal was still pending with the court."