Joe Mauer and Hannah Brandt need no introduction in this neck of the woods.

After growing up in the St. Paul area during their childhoods, Mauer was the No. 1 pick in the the 2001 MLB Draft and went on to have an illustrious baseball career with the Twins, while Brandt starred for the Gophers women’s hockey team before representing Team USA and establishing herself among the best in the world at what she does.

U.S. Olympic gold medalist Hannah Brandt high-fives students at Galtier Elementary School on Oct. 24, 2018. She was joined by Minnesota Wild center Joel Eriksson Ek and Wild mascot Nordy in a stop for the Face Off for Fitness program. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Fittingly, the Catholic Athletic Association is recognizing Mauer and Brandt for their excellence, with the nonprofit on the verge of inducting them into their Hall of Fame. The other inductees this year include Mauer’s father Jake, mother Teresa, and brothers Jake and Bill.

The induction was set to take place at the the 75th Anniversary celebration on Monday night at the University of St. Thomas. The event itself celebrated the past, present, and future of the Catholic Athletic Association, which has served more than 500,000 student athletes since its inception in 1948.

Additionally, Mauer and Brandt also were set to be named Outstanding Athletes from the Last Quarter Century.

Some other notable names who have garnered the accolade in the past include Jim Rantz, Paul Molitor, Chris Weinke and Jean Tierney Holt.

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Legislation introduced in the City Council Thursday would stop government agencies from buying water in plastic bottles smaller than one gallon. The ultimate goal is to use water coolers or water packaged with paper cartons and aluminum instead.

Environmental groups and lawmakers are on a mission to stop New York from consuming unnecessary single-use plastic, which means it’s used only once before it gets thrown out. Hundreds of millions of single-use plastic bottles are consumed in the city alone each year.

In an effort to cut back, legislation introduced in the City Council Thursday would stop government agencies from buying water in plastic bottles smaller than one gallon. The ultimate goal is to use water coolers, or water packaged with paper cartons and aluminum instead.

Fragments of plastic often wind up in our bodies and can cause a wide range of health issues like birth defects, lung growth and childhood cancer. One study found that bottled water contains on average 240,000 plastic particles per liter. It’s also bad for the environment: plastic is made from climate-change inducing fossil fuels like oil.

“When you drink a bottle of Fiji water, you might as well be drinking a bottle of oil,” said one of the bill’s sponsors, Councilmember Erik Bottcher.  

“There’s absolutely no reason for people to drink a bottle of water that comes from the Pacific Islands,” he added. “Think about how much oil it took to get that bottle of water across the globe. And for what? We have the best municipal drinking water right here in New York City.” 

Citing the need to end the city’s reliance on fossil fuels as a key motivator, former Mayor Bill de Blasio signed an executive order in early 2020 to stop city agencies from purchasing or selling single-use plastic bottles. 

At the time, New York City’s government was purchasing “at least one million single-use plastic beverage bottles” each year, the order pointed out.

RELATED READING: Chemical Industry Amps Up Lobbying to Block New York’s Waste Reduction Bill

The measure is technically still in effect, but lawmakers and environmentalists warn that an executive order could eventually end if Eric Adams or any future mayor decides to stop enforcing it, or even revoke it. 

If the legislation passes, it will prohibit plastic water bottles from being purchased via government contracts for good, keeping them out of city owned-buildings and preventing agencies like the Department of Correction (DOC) from distributing them to anyone under their care, like to those in city jails. 

The bill does, however, provide exemptions for when plastic bottles must be passed out for critical public health, safety, welfare, and emergency preparedness needs. So if the DOC relocated inmates to a new facility, for instance, they could still receive bottled water when they are in transit. 

While the bill only tackles government contracts—ultimately making a small dent in the city’s larger plastic footprint—advocates say the strategy is to tackle the problem from all angles by passing as much anti-plastic legislation as possible.

The city has already banned the use of plastic straws and plastic utensils in takeout orders unless a customer requests them. New York State also passed a ban on plastic to-go bags in 2020. 

Food and beverage packaging makes up about 36 percent of the world’s plastic, approximately 85 percent of which ends up in landfills or as unregulated waste. A lot of it also ends up in the ocean: 33 billion pounds of plastic gets carried out to sea each year worldwide.

“There are billions of single-use plastic water bottles used in this country. If we could make a substantial dent in reducing that in a large place like New York City, that already puts us on the path of more sustainable packaging,” said Judith Enck, founder of the environmental group Beyond Plastics.

Single use plastic also takes hundreds of years to decompose.

“When I see a plastic bag or a food wrapper on the side of the road, unless someone picks it up, which is rare, it’s going to stay there for centuries,” Enck told City Limits. 

Enck and other supporters say tackling city agencies’ purchase of water bottles is a step forward in the ultimate goal of curtailing pollution, safeguarding human health and halting climate change.

“Earth Day is on the horizon, with a mandate to put the Planet over Plastics–and our legislation will help accomplish that crucial mission,” Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who is also sponsoring the bill, said in a statement.

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Mariana@citylimits.org. To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.

Mary Moriarty, a former public defender, became Minneapolis’ top prosecutor last year after convincing voters shaken by the murder of George Floyd that she could improve public safety by reining in police misconduct and making the criminal justice system less punitive.

Turbulence quickly followed. The attorney general of Minnesota, Keith Ellison, a fellow Democrat who had endorsed Moriarty as she campaigned to be Hennepin County attorney, took over a murder case from her office last spring after concluding that it had offered an overly lenient plea deal to a juvenile defendant.

By fall, two judges took the unusual step of rejecting plea deals offered by Moriarty’s office, deeming them too permissive for violent crimes.

After Moriarty this year charged a state trooper with murder in the shooting of a motorist who drove away during a traffic stop, criticism mounted.

Several law enforcement officials questioned the strength of the evidence in the case, and Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, as well as members of Congress from both parties, have voiced concern about the prosecution.

“Mary Moriarty has done one hugely positive thing,” said Chris Madel, a lawyer representing Ryan Londregan, the state trooper who awaits trial in the death of Ricky Cobb II. “She brought back bipartisanship to Minnesota in that people on both the left and the right agree she’s doing a terrible job.”

Moriarty is one of a handful of left-leaning prosecutors elected in recent years promising to overhaul justice systems by jailing fewer people, holding police accountable for misconduct and reducing racial inequities. Some met strong resistance as they pushed to limit cash bail requirements and sought less severe punishments against certain types of crimes to reduce the prison population.

In 2022, voters in San Francisco recalled Chesa Boudin, the district attorney, as residents grew exasperated over property crimes and open-air drug dealing. In St. Louis, Kimberly Gardner, the elected prosecutor, resigned last year after a tumultuous tenure. But voters have sometimes stuck by the prosecutors, even as police unions, elected officials and others rallied against them. An effort by Pennsylvania lawmakers to oust Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s district attorney, fell short, and a recall bid of George Gascón, the district attorney in Los Angeles County, failed.

In Minneapolis, the prosecution of Londregan in the months ahead will be a new test of public sentiment in the city that set off a national outcry over racism and police misconduct following Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.

In an interview, Moriarty, 60, said she was under no illusion that the vision she campaigned on would be easy to carry out. But the intensity of the pushback she has seen has been jarring, she said.

“I actually find it hard to believe we’re in the city where George Floyd happened,” she said. “It’s very easy to scare people with crime. It’s a tactic that people have used forever, and it’s starting to work again.”

Public defender years

Moriarty began learning about law as a child while driving near their home in rural northern Minnesota with her father, a criminal litigator who played cassette tapes with lectures about the rules of evidence. After college, Moriarty briefly worked as a journalist before receiving a law degree from the University of Minnesota.

Kevin S. Burke, a former chief district judge who hired Moriarty as a law clerk, described her as a gifted trial lawyer who had a knack for nailing opening statements and closing arguments.

Rising through the ranks of the Hennepin County public defender’s office, Moriarty showed a creative streak. Once, she hired a local theater actor to teach lawyers how to connect with jurors and turn legal theories into compelling narratives.

Representing criminal defendants for decades convinced Moriarty that the court system was primed for punishment, too seldom offering tools to help people turn their lives around.

“My observation of some of the prosecutors here was that there was somebody called the perpetrator and somebody called the victim, and the victim had to be stereotypically pristine, and there was never any crossover,” she said. Her cases reflected a more nuanced reality, she said, including defendants who themselves had been victims of crimes.

In 2014, Moriarty became the first woman to lead the Hennepin County public defender’s office. She received accolades for going beyond routine criminal defense by helping clients find jobs, housing and medical care.

Her final year as chief public defender was rocky. In late 2019, the Minnesota Board of Public Defense suspended her and launched an investigation into her management style, citing an allegation from an employee that she had created a “culture of fear.”

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Moriarty disputed that characterization and recalled the period as traumatic. She said she believed the investigation was instigated by sexism, her efforts to get raises for her staff and a tense exchange she had with a prosecutor over his use of the word “thug.”

Moriarty was reinstated but departed after it became clear the board would not retain her when her term ended. She left with a $300,000 settlement in which she agreed not to work as a public defender in Minnesota.

Late in 2021, Moriarty launched a campaign to replace the county’s departing top prosecutor, laying out a platform that supporters saw as an answer to the outrage that followed Floyd’s murder. She promised to create a unit to hold “officers accountable when they break trust and commit crimes,” and to steer more juvenile offenders into therapeutic alternatives to incarceration.

In 2022, Moriarty easily defeated a more conservative rival: a retired judge and former prosecutor who got the endorsement of the local newspaper and law enforcement unions.

Contentious cases

Soon after she took office, critics emerged. Relatives of victims said they were dismayed by plea deals offered to minors charged with violent crimes.

Susan Markey’s brother, Steven, was fatally shot during a carjacking in 2019. Husayn Braveheart, who was 15 at the time of the shooting, was charged with murder.

After a judge rejected a plea deal offered by Moriarty’s office that would have spared the teenager from going to prison, Moriarty allowed Braveheart to plead guilty to attempted first-degree assault, a lesser crime, arguing that he had “made enormous strides” and responded well to treatment.

Markey called the outcome profoundly misguided and said Moriarty has continued to behave like a public defender.

“She became a prosecutor, but she’s continuing to utilize the same tactics and espouse the same views,” said Markey, who is a lawyer. “She’s a political idealist that doesn’t respond to outside feedback or facts that don’t align with her perspective.”

Last spring, Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, took over for Moriarty’s office in prosecuting a case in which Zaria McKeever, the mother of a baby girl, was fatally shot in her home in a Minneapolis suburb. Authorities said McKeever was targeted by a former boyfriend, who enlisted two teenagers to carry out the shooting.

Moriarty had intended to send one of the teenagers, Foday Kevin Kamara, who was 15 at the time of the shooting, to a two-year rehabilitation program for juvenile offenders. But relatives of McKeever viewed the punishment as too lenient and objected, and Ellison obtained the governor’s permission to take over the case. The teenager, now 17, has since pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and prosecutors say they will seek to keep him in prison until he is about 23.

Trooper’s charges

Now questions have emerged over Moriarty’s decision this year to charge Londregan with second-degree murder.

In July, state troopers pulled over a vehicle driven by Cobb along Interstate 94 in Minneapolis. During the stop for driving without working taillights, troopers determined that Cobb was subject to arrest over a suspected violation of a restraining order involving a former romantic partner, officials said.

Body camera footage captured Londregan, who is white, and another trooper reaching into the vehicle in an effort to take Cobb, a 33-year-old Black man, into custody. Almost immediately, Cobb’s vehicle appeared to lurch forward, and Londregan fired his weapon twice. The troopers tumbled to the ground, and the car sped away before coming to a stop a quarter of a mile away. Cobb, who was shot in the torso, died at the scene.

Madel, Londregan’s lawyer, said the trooper believed that he and his partner were at risk of serious injury or death when he fired his weapon, making the officer’s use of force lawful.

Court filings show that Moriarty’s office retained an expert on questions of police use of force, but it stopped working with him after the expert, based on preliminary evidence, suggested that the trooper may have acted lawfully.

Moriarty said the charges against Londregan are justified. She added she decided a use-of-force expert was not needed after prosecutors concluded that the troopers had acted in a way that was contrary to their training for such situations.

Marvina Haynes, who leads an advocacy organization that fights wrongful convictions, said the prosecution of Londregan sent a powerful message. “It’s critical to let law enforcement know that this isn’t the Wild West and that this isn’t an open battlefield,” she said.

The Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association issued a statement calling the case an “unjust prosecution” and urged the governor to reassign it to the attorney general. Walz said he, too, had concerns. Six of Minnesota’s eight representatives in the House of Representatives — including two Democrats — criticized the prosecution.

Brian O’Hara, chief of the Minneapolis Police Department, said that the case has cemented a view that many police officers have long held about Moriarty.

“They already believed she would overcharge a cop and undercharge someone who is out there doing violent crime,” said O’Hara, who acknowledged a strained relationship with the top prosecutor. “All the cops talk about it.”

T. Anansi Wilson, a Mitchell Hamline School of Law professor who leads the Center for the Study of Black Life and the Law, said he was skeptical when he first heard Moriarty speak about overhauling criminal justice as a candidate.

Still, he said he had grown to admire her determination to follow her conscience even as backlash mounted.

“This is the first time we’ve ever had in our lives prosecutors that are willing to say: ‘What about all the people I’m throwing in jail?’” he said. “They’ve taken Black Lives Matter, and they’ve actualized it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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