Ben Crump, Angela Rye call on Biden to pardon Marilyn Mosby, Kim Gardner

Civil Rights attorney Ben Crump and political advocate and commentator Angela Rye are currently pleading with the president to pardon Marilyn Mosby, the former Baltimore City state prosecutor who rose to fame for criminally charging several officers in the 2015 death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. In a statement, Crump and Rye questioned the validity of Mosby’s conviction on fraud and perjury charges. This is not the first time that Biden has been urged to pardon Mosby. In May, a group of 15 civil rights organizations, including the NAACP and the National Urban League, wrote a letter to Biden calling on him to pardon Mosby. The letter claimed that she was the victim of “the political persecution and malicious prosecution of the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice” and that she was singled out for political reasons and treated differently than others who committed similar actions — an argument similar to that used by Biden in his pardon of his son.

Crump and Rye also called on Biden to potentially pardon former St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, who prosecuted Eric Greitens, a Republican and the former governor of Missouri. Gardner also once sued St. Louis for blocking racial justice reform. She reached a pretrial diversion agreement with federal prosecutors after being charged with ethics violations over spending in the Greitens case. In their statement, Crump and Rye said that “Marilyn Mosby is on house arrest right now with her law license hanging in the balance over purchasing property with her own money. Kim Gardner was forced into taking a plea deal for a $5,000 expense that was approved in an ethics opinion.” Crump and Rye went on to say that “we welcome a conversation with President Biden to discuss ways to use his pardon power to free those ‘others’ who deserve justice also.”

Meanwhile, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley is urging Biden to take a much wider scope in using his clemency powers. Reacting Monday to Biden’s pardoning of his son, the Massachusetts Democrat said in a statement that “in the remaining days of his presidency, I have called on President Biden to use his clemency power to change the lives of families across this nation — families who are disproportionately Black and brown, with loved ones behind the wall, suffering from injustices of the legal system.”
In an interview with Radio Boston, she said, “President Biden should be using his pardon authority — keeping those hundreds of thousands of people in mind who pose no threat to society, whose lives are deteriorating due to this mass incarceration crisis and an unjust criminal legal system.”

Pressley has been part of a group who has urged Biden in the past to make sweeping clemency grants before leaving office. In November, her name was the first of over 60 members of Congress who signed a letter urging Biden to grant sweeping clemency for federal inmates before leaving office. The letter noted that “In our growing federal prison population, 90% of people are convicted of non-violent offenses” and it lamented that “people of color are disproportionately put behind bars, along with individuals from low-income communities, LGBTQIA+ folks, and those with disabilities.”

With Biden set to leave office next month, it is likely that he will grant clemency to more individuals during the last weeks of his presidency as other presidents have done. Advocates like Crump and Rye and legislators like Pressley hope that their pleas will convince him to do for others what he recently did for his son.