A federal appeals court on Friday overturned the mortgage fraud conviction of Marilyn Mosby, the once-prominent Baltimore state’s attorney who rose to national attention after the 2015 death of Freddie Gray — but upheld the guilty verdicts on her perjury charges.
In a 2-1 decision, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the jury in Mosby’s trial received “erroneously overbroad” instructions about venue. The case, tried in Maryland in early 2024, centered on a condo she had purchased in Florida.
The ruling means the reversal of the forfeiture of her Florida condo, since it was tied to the vacated conviction.
However, the three-judge panel found there was “no error in the district court’s adjudication of Appellant’s perjury convictions,” which stem from her withdrawal of money from city retirement accounts by claiming COVID-related hardship, thereby avoiding a penalty.
In November 2023, a federal jury convicted Mosby on two counts of perjury for falsely claiming to have experienced financial hardship resulting from the pandemic to obtain distributions from the City of Baltimore’s Deferred Compensation Plan.
She was later sentenced to 12 months of home confinement, which she completed last month, in addition to 100 hours of community service and three years of supervised release.
Despite a coordinated push for a presidential pardon in May 2024 — led by the NAACP and more than a dozen civil rights groups — Mosby was never pardoned. Advocates cited what they called an “injustice” and alleged political targeting.
The 45-year-old Democrat first made national headlines following the 2015 killing of Freddie Gray and its subsequent investigation. Mosby, at the time the youngest top prosecutor of any major city in the country, led the investigation into the officers who arrested Gray.
