ST. LOUIS — The day before Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner negotiated her removal from office, Andrew Warren fighting to get his job back.
“From the beginning, we’ve believed that the law is on our side,†he said as he entered court, “and we hope that the court sees it this way.â€
Warren is, or was, the prosecuting attorney in Tampa, Florida, before he was removed from office last year by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican whose presidential ambitions are turning his state into an authoritarian theme park.
Gardner and Warren are different sides of the same coin. They are Democrats, progressive prosecutors, who received at least some indirect campaign support from liberal billionaire George Soros, a Jewish immigrant from Hungary who some Republicans have unfairly demonized for living out the American dream. From the first day of their elections, like progressive prosecutors in dozens of other cities, they were attacked by police unions and other critics as being soft on crime, often with no evidence to back the claims.
People are also reading…
“What has happened in ºüÀêÊÓƵ and in other parts of the country should be deeply troubling to anyone who cares about democracy and upholding the will of the people,†says Miriam Krinsky, executive director of , a nonprofit that supports progressive prosecutors.
Krinsky’s not wrong. But all politics are local, and not all progressive prosecutors are the same. Warren is in court fighting for his job, and already got one federal judge to examine the evidence and say DeSantis acted capriciously and without cause. On Thursday, Gardner succumbed to the pressure specifically because she doesn’t want to see the failure of her office displayed in court for all to see, in the quo warranto action brought against her by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey.
Gardner’s prosecutorial career collapsed in failure, with an office depleted of attorneys and unable to function. Judges were seeking to hold her in contempt when prosecutors didn’t show for murder cases. Defendants were held in jail for years in cases that didn’t come to trial because she couldn’t get the job done; only to have cases dropped and refiled, so as to start the clock on justice ticking again.
It was a slow-motion failure that was several years in the making, even before her second election.
Here’s what I wrote ahead of that election, when former incendiary police union spokesman Jeff Roorda was whipping up angry outrage directed at Gardner:
“Two things can be true at the same time. Gardner can be under relentless, and in some cases, unfair, attack from the status quo — particularly the police union — because she represents a new way of thinking about the role of the prosecutor. The same thing is happening in other jurisdictions in which progressive-minded prosecutors have been elected, such as Philadelphia; Tampa, Florida; Chicago; San Francisco; Brooklyn, New York; and Baltimore. But she’s also had missteps of her own making — including the hiring of an investigator who has been accused of lying to the court during the dropped prosecution of former Gov. Eric Greitens.â€
Gardner outlasted Roorda, but she is going out the same way Greitens did, resigning under pressure, not wanting the full facts of her failure displayed in public, while taking no responsibility for her own mistakes.
Her letter of resignation blames everybody but herself. That’s not an uncommon trait among politicians, but it’s an unfortunate one. Accountability doesn’t have to be so difficult. For instance, I was slow to see Gardner’s failures, believing more in the idea of her than seeing how badly she was actually performing her job. My muted criticisms should have been louder and more explicit. See, that wasn’t so hard.
But the blame game is over and now the heavy lifting begins. The prosecutor’s office is decimated with a full slate of murder trials scheduled over the summer. Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, now must choose a replacement, at least until next year’s election, to right the ship. Hopefully he does so with the significant input of Mayor Tishaura Jones, a Democrat, and other city leaders, political and civic.
To guide his decision, Parson should heed the words of former Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster, who once lamented to me that elections for prosecutors and attorneys general are fought over the wrong battleground. The most important skill in one of those offices is to be able to run a law firm, a big law firm, with dozens of attorneys doing the daily blocking and tackling of keeping the criminal justice system working, and fair.
In the short term, ºüÀêÊÓƵ needs a manager who can hire people with the skills to prosecute cases, and the ability to show up to work. That’s job one. Perhaps that theme can carry over into the next election in 2024, when the city’s voters will pick up the pieces from Kim Gardner’s tragic fall.