The tenure of Kimberly M. Gardner has been a failed experiment from the very beginning.
After getting elected Ƶ circuit attorney in 2016, she began chasing experienced prosecutors out of the office. It was more ideological than personal. Prosecutors, like cops, are mostly conservative. They believe in law and order. Gardner saw things from the other side.
Her aunt had been married to Sam Petty, this city’s most notorious heroin dealer. He grew up poor in north Ƶ. When he was 14, he killed a man and was sent to a juvenile institution. He became a Muslim and then a revolutionary. He founded the Black Liberators, a paramilitary organization loosely affiliated with the Black Panthers.
People are also reading…
H. Rap Brown of Atlanta was a good friend.
In 1971, Petty and Brown were arrested in New York after a shoot-out with police. It was a high-profile trial. Supporters in the courtroom raised clenched fists and chanted, “Black Power!” Petty and Brown were convicted.
The government took the Black radicals much more seriously than it has the white radicals of today. By the time Petty got out of prison in 1976, most of his revolutionary cohorts were dead or locked up. Petty got into narcotics.
In 1985, the cops finally caught him. He had been on their radar for years. Busted with him was his second wife, Gardner’s aunt. (His first wife had been shot dead on the morning she was scheduled to testify to the grand jury. The case was never solved.) Cops confiscated two ounces of cocaine, weapons, 10,000 rounds of ammunition and manuals on guerrilla warfare. Although the drugs and guns almost certainly belonged to her husband, Gardner’s aunt had sold cocaine to an undercover narcotics detective. Despite having no criminal record, she got eight years.
Gardner was a child at the time. Her family was in the funeral home business. She eventually went to law school and then worked for a short time as a prosecutor in the circuit attorney’s office. She then won a seat in the Legislature.
Just about the time Jennifer Joyce decided not to run for reelection as circuit attorney, liberal money was looking for a cause. Urban education had proved too hard, the potential results too far down the stream. The criminal justice system seemed like a better option. You could change things in an instant. Gardner was a beneficiary of this newfound interest in criminal justice.
To an old-school liberal like me, Gardner’s election seemed like a promising way to look at old problems through a new lens. Here was a person who understood the complexities of life. Perhaps she could see the humanity in us all.
But when I asked if her aunt’s experience colored her thinking, she called my question “reckless,” and through a spokesperson said, “I continue to be disappointed with some in the Ƶ media, and their efforts to continually discredit me, my family and my work.”
Perhaps her distrust was understandable. I was friendly with many of the experienced prosecutors she had chased out, and I am good friends with the former narcotics detective who made the buys from her aunt. He is now retired from the police department. He is a regular visitor to juvenile institutions where he plays chess with the young offenders.
In a functioning criminal-justice system, there is always friction between police and prosecutors. Police figure they have enough evidence to arrest somebody, but the prosecutors figure they need more evidence to convict. It is a constant push-pull.
There was no give in Gardner’s game. She made it clear that she did not trust the police. At all.
It is a problem when prosecutors are too trusting, but it is a disaster when they consistently take the side of the accused. With Gardner at the helm, the system broke down.
The most famous breakdown occurred when she indicted then-Gov. Eric Greitens. Asked why she hired a private investigator from out of state, she said the city police wouldn’t handle the case because it involved public corruption. The police chief and the director of public safety denied that she had ever approached them about the case.
Eventually, she dropped the charges against the governor, and her investigator was charged with six counts of perjury. He pleaded guilty to tampering with physical evidence. Gardner was reprimanded by the Missouri Supreme Court and fined for violating professional misconduct rules.
But the case that really stuck with me was the shooting death of 7-year-old Xavier Usanga in 2019. The shooting occurred when Malik Ross, wearing a bulletproof vest and caring a Glock, fired at two teens across the street. An errant round killed Xavier.
Ross then stole money from his employer so he could get out of town. That’s what he told police. He knew what he had done, and he had to leave. He also said he fired in self-defense, although audio from a nearby security camera recorded only one weapon being shot and the shell casings recovered were from only one weapon.
Gardner refused to prosecute. As was her custom, she did not explain her reasoning. Fortunately, the stealing case went to federal court, Ross pleaded guilty. The federal prosecutor asked the judge — a Bill Clinton appointee — to sentence above the guidelines because the underlying cause of the stealing was the shooting death of a child. Ross’ attorney argued that the judge should not take into account a crime for which her client had not even been charged.
But the judge did. The guidelines called for 14 months and the judge gave Ross 10 years.
That is not the way the system is supposed to work, but what is it supposed to do when a prosecutor refuses to do her job?
Gardner has continually denounced all criticism against her as racist. She easily won reelection in 2020. The once-great television show “60 Minutes” came here and did a flattering piece on the embattled prosecutor who stands up to her racist critics. I’ve talked with Black friends in the criminal justice system and the political world and they shrug. Her followers are passionate. It seemed eerily similar to Republican officials and Donald Trump.
I have longed for the bad old days when powerful bosses ran the political parties. A group of such bosses would have had a sit-down with Gardner long ago. “We understand that crime is a complicated matter and the root causes are well beyond your control, but the dysfunction in your office has come to represent the problem.”
She would have resigned to explore the ever-alluring “new opportunities.”
But I did not think it would happen. More likely the hostile Republican-led Legislature would establish a new office to handle serious crimes and appoint a new prosecutor. Gardner’s followers would take to the streets. It would be one hot mess.
But in the wake of the horrific crash in downtown last weekend, after which Gardner first blamed the judges and then issued a rebuke against finger-pointing, the mayor spoke up. Gardner has lost the faith of the community, the mayor said. Then others spoke up.
We can’t undo what happened to the innocent teenager who was so terribly injured by a young man who should not have been on the streets, but maybe we can fix ourselves. An honest, competent prosecutor will not make crime disappear, but things will feel better, as they always do in a society with a functioning criminal-justice system. An imperfect system, to be sure, but a working one.