Baltimore’s Marilyn Mosby can keep Florida vacation home, court rules
Former Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby’s conviction for mortgage fraud has been overturned by a federal appeals court, which ruled that jurors had not properly considered whether the crime occurred in Maryland.
The perjury convictions of Baltimore’s former top prosecutor remain in place, for lying to receive pandemic-related relief. But a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit threw out a requirement that Mosby forfeit one of two Florida homes at the center of her legal troubles.
“The district court’s venue instruction to the jury was erroneously overbroad,” U.S. Appeals Court Judges Stephanie D. Thacker and G. Steven Agee wrote in a 34-page opinion, which tossed out Mosby’s mortgage fraud convictions and returned the case to a trial judge for further proceedings. “We are thus left to conclude that the error was sufficiently prejudicial to warrant reversal.”
In 2021, still in office but looking to get into real estate, Mosby withdrew $90,000 from her city employee retirement account and avoided tax penalties by claiming—falsely, a jury found after a November 2023 trial—that she was experiencing financial hardship due to the covid pandemic.
She then failed to disclose on mortgage documents that she had unpaid federal taxes and that the IRS had placed a $45,000 lien against all properties owned by her and her husband, Nick Mosby (D), who at the time was president of the Baltimore City Council.
Mosby testified that she did not realize she had to disclose those debts and was kept in the dark by her husband about them. The jury sided with her, but found that she did commit fraud by having her husband give her a “gift” of $5,000 to secure a favorable interest rate in a Florida property.
Prosecutors alleged that Mosby, 45, lied to mortgage lenders while purchasing two Florida vacation homes—one in Kissimmee, just minutes from Disney World, and a beach condominium in Longboat Key. After deliberating for one day, the jury in a second trial in early 2024 acquitted Mosby of fraud related to the first property but convicted her of making a false statement to a mortgage lender in 2021 to acquire the second one. Mosby sobbed as the verdicts were read.
On Friday, the appeals court said the trial judge, U.S. District Judge Lydia K. Griggsby of Greenbelt, improperly told jurors that the government did not have to prove that Mosby committed the crime in Maryland, only that “any act in furtherance of the crime” occurred there.
Instead, Thacker wrote, the jury “had to find that [Mosby] transmitted the Gift Letter to her Florida mortgage lender from the District of Maryland. Preparatory acts, such as preparing, filling out, or signing the Gift Letter do not suffice.”
The appeals court also vacated the forfeiture order related to the Longboat Key condo, which was obtained through the alleged fraud.
In dissent, U.S. Appeals Court Judge Paul V. Niemeyer said he would have upheld Mosby’s convictions and Griggsby’s instructions.
“Evidence introduced at trial allowed the jury to find that, while in Maryland, she prepared, signed, and transmitted a false gift letter to an out-of-state mortgage lending business to satisfy financial requirements for closing her purchase of real property in Florida,” Niemeyer wrote, saying that the majority ignored several more recent precedents that support Griggsby’s instructions.
Preparing and transmitting false statements count as key elements of a crime that establish venue, he wrote, and “In this case, there was ample evidence for the jury to conclude that Mosby both prepared and transmitted the false gift letter in Maryland and that venue in that forum was therefore proper.”
The Maryland U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment. Mosby’s attorney did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mosby was sentenced in May 2024 to terms including 12 months of home confinement, 100 hours of community service and three years of supervised release, and completed home confinement earlier this year.
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