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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By ALEXA ST. JOHN (Associated Press)

Coral reefs around the world are experiencing global bleaching for the fourth time, top reef scientists declared Monday, a result of warming ocean waters amid human-caused climate change.

Coral reef bleaching across at least 53 countries, territories or local economies has been confirmed from February 2023 to now, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and International Coral Reef Initiative said. It happens when stressed coral expel the algae that are their food source and give them their color. If the bleaching is severe and long-lasting, the coral can die.

Coral reefs are important ecosystems that sustain underwater life, protect biodiversity and slow erosion. They also support local economies through tourism.

Bleaching has been happening in various regions for some time. In the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, bleaching affected 90% of the coral assessed in 2022. The Florida Coral Reef, the third-largest, experienced significant bleaching last year.

But in order for bleaching to be declared on a global scale, significant bleaching had to be documented within each of the major ocean basins, including the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

Monday’s news marks the second worldwide bleaching event in the last 10 years. The last one ended in May 2017. Brought on by a powerful El Nino climate pattern that heated the world’s oceans, it lasted three years and was determined to be worse than the prior two bleaching events in 2010 and 1998.

This year’s bleaching follows the declaration that 2023 was the hottest year on record.

“As the world’s oceans continue to warm, coral bleaching is becoming more frequent and severe,” Derek Manzello, NOAA Coral Reef Watch coordinator, said in a statement.

Selina Stead, a marine biologist and chief executive of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, called climate change “the biggest threat to coral reefs worldwide.” She said scientists are working to learn more about how coral responds to heat and to identify naturally heat-tolerant corals, but said it is “critical the world works to reduce carbon emissions.”

One reef that fared better than others last year was the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, which was afforded some protection by its location in deeper water in the Gulf of Mexico about 100 miles off the Texas coast. Sanctuary officials didn’t immediately respond to messages Monday seeking the latest on the health of the sanctuary’s corals.

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Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate solutions reporter. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, @alexa_stjohn. Reach her at ast.john@ap.org.

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

By MICHAEL R. SISAK and MICHAEL BALSAMO (Associated Press)

The federal Bureau of Prisons said Monday it is planning to close a women’s prison in California known as the “rape club” despite attempts to reform the troubled facility after an Associated Press investigation exposed rampant staff-on-inmate sexual abuse.

Bureau of Prisons Director Colette Peters said in a statement to the AP that the agency had “taken unprecedented steps and provided a tremendous amount of resources to address culture, recruitment and retention, aging infrastructure – and most critical – employee misconduct.”

“Despite these steps and resources, we have determined that FCI Dublin is not meeting expected standards and that the best course of action is to close the facility,” Peters said. “This decision is being made after ongoing evaluation of the effectiveness of those unprecedented steps and additional resources.”

FCI Dublin, about 21 miles (34 kilometers) east of Oakland, is one of six women-only federal prisons, and the only one west of the Rocky Mountains. It currently has 605 inmates — 504 inmates in its main prison and another 101 at an adjacent minimum-security camp. That’s down from a total of 760 prisoners in February 2022. The women currently housed at the prison will be transferred to other facilities and no employees will lose their jobs, Peters said.

Advocates have called for inmates to be freed from FCI Dublin, which they say is not only plagued by sexual abuse, but also has hazardous mold, asbestos and inadequate health care.

Last month, the FBI again searched the prison and the Bureau of Prisons again shook up its leadership after a warden sent to help rehabilitate the facility was accused of retaliating against a whistleblower inmate. Days later, a federal judge overseeing lawsuits against the prison, said she would appoint a special master to oversee the facility’s operations.

An AP investigation in 2021 found a culture of abuse and cover-ups that had persisted for years at the prison. That reporting led to increased scrutiny from Congress and pledges from the Bureau of Prisons that it would fix problems and change the culture at the prison.

Since 2021, at least eight FCI Dublin employees have been charged with sexually abusing inmates. Five have pleaded guilty. Two were convicted at trial, including the former warden, Ray Garcia. Another case is pending.

Last August, eight FCI Dublin inmates sued the Bureau of Prisons, alleging the agency had failed to root out sexual abuse. Amaris Montes, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said inmates continued to face retaliation for reporting abuse, including being put in solitary confinement and having belongings confiscated.

All sexual activity between a prison worker and an inmate is illegal. Correctional employees have substantial power over inmates, controlling every aspect of their lives from mealtime to lights out, and there is no scenario in which an inmate can give consent.

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By JOSH BOAK and JILL COLVIN (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Tax Day reveals a major split in how Joe Biden and Donald Trump would govern: The presidential candidates have conflicting ideas about how much to reveal about their own finances and the best ways to boost the economy through tax policy.

Biden, the sitting Democratic president, plans to release his income tax returns on Monday, the IRS filing deadline. And on Tuesday, he is scheduled to deliver a speech in Scranton, Pennsylvania, about why the wealthy should pay more in taxes to reduce the federal deficit and help fund programs for the poor and middle class.

Biden is proud to say that he was largely without money for much of his decades-long career in public service, unlike Trump, who inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from his father and used his billionaire status to launch a TV show and later a presidential campaign.

“For 36 years, I was listed as the poorest man in Congress,” Biden told donors in California in February. “Not a joke.”

In 2015, Trump declared as part of his candidacy, “I’m really rich.”

The Republican former president has argued that voters have no need to see his tax data and that past financial disclosures are more than sufficient. He maintains that keeping taxes low for the wealthy will supercharge investment and lead to more jobs, while tax hikes would crush an economy still recovering from inflation that hit a four-decade peak in 2022.

“Biden wants to give the IRS even more cash by proposing the largest tax hike on the American people in history when they are already being robbed by his record-high inflation crisis,” said Karoline Leavitt, press secretary for the Trump campaign.

The split goes beyond an ideological difference to a very real challenge for whoever triumphs in the November election. At the end of 2025, many of the tax cuts that Trump signed into law in 2017 will expire — setting up an avalanche of choices about how much people across the income spectrum should pay as the national debt is expected to climb to unprecedented levels.

Including interest costs, extending all the tax breaks could add another $3.8 trillion to the national debt through 2033, according to an analysis last year by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Biden would like to keep the majority of the tax breaks, based on his pledge that no one earning less than $400,000 will have to pay more. But he released a budget proposal this year with tax increases on the wealthy and corporations that would raise $4.9 trillion in revenues and trim forecasted deficits by $3.2 trillion over 10 years.

Still, he’s telling voters that he’s all for letting the Trump-era tax cuts lapse.

“Does anyone here think the tax code is fair? Raise your hand,” Biden said Tuesday at a speech in Washington’s Union Station to a crowd predisposed to dislike Trump’s broad tax cuts that helped many in the middle class but disproportionately favored wealthier households.

“It added more to the national debt than any presidential term in history,” Biden continued. “And it’s due to expire next year. And guess what? I hope to be president because it expires — it’s going to stay expired.”

Trump has called for higher tariffs on foreign-made goods, which are taxes that could hit consumers in the form of higher prices. But his campaign is committed to tax cuts while promising that a Trump presidency would reduce a national debt that has risen for decades, including during his Oval Office tenure.

“When President Trump is back in the White House, he will advocate for more tax cuts for all Americans and reinvigorate America’s energy industry to bring down inflation, lower the cost of living, and pay down our debt,” Leavitt said.

Most economists say Trump’s tax cuts could not generate enough growth to pay down the national debt. An analysis released Friday by Oxford Economics found that a “full-blown Trump” policy with tax cuts, higher tariffs and blocking immigration would slow growth and increase inflation.

Among Biden’s proposals is a “billionaire minimum income tax” that would apply a minimum rate of 25% on households with a net worth of at least $100 million.

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The tax would directly target billionaires such as Trump, who refused to release his personal taxes as presidents have traditionally done. But six years of his tax returns were released in 2022 by Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.

In 2018, Trump earned more than $24 million and paid about 4% of that in federal income taxes. The congressional panel also found that the IRS delayed legally mandated audits of Trump during his presidency, with the panel concluding the audit process was ” dormant, at best.”

Biden has publicly released more than two decades of his tax returns. In 2022, he and his wife, Jill, made $579,514 and paid nearly 24% of that in federal income taxes, more than double the rate paid by Trump.

Trump has maintained that his tax records are complicated because of his use of various tax credits and past business losses, which in some cases have allowed him to avoid taxes. He also previously declined to release his tax returns under the claim that the IRS was auditing him for pre-presidential filings.

His finances recently received a boost from the stock market debut of Trump Media, which controls Trump’s preferred social media outlet, Truth Social. Share prices initially surged, adding billions of dollars to Trump’s net worth, but investors have since soured on the company and shares by Friday were down more than 50% from their peak.

The former president is also on the hook for $542 million due to legal judgments in a civil fraud case and penalties owed to the writer E. Jean Carroll because of statements made by Trump that damaged her reputation after she accused him of sexual assault.

In the civil fraud case, New York Judge Arthur Engoron looked at the financial records of the Trump Organization and concluded after looking at the inflated assets that “the frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience.”

Colvin reported from Palm Beach, Florida.