St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner, the city’s prosecutor, tweeted out her resignation on Thursday after months of bipartisan calls for her exit.
Gardner was one of the first candidates backed by the Open Society Foundation — a group of far-left organizations hell-bent on remaking the criminal justice system in America and around the world. The Open Society Foundation was one of the first to realize that the key to “social justice” was in attacking the criminal justice system at its most vulnerable spot: local prosecutors.
Open Society elected up to 16 prosecutors who have tried to “reform” bail laws by eliminating cash bail for most offenses, reducing sentences in the name of “racial justice,” forcing police not to enforce many crimes against property, and generally making the streets of the cities they work in a nightmare — except for the criminals, of course.
Gardner got a lot of pushback for her radical policies but in the end, it was old-fashioned incompetence that did her in. A teenage volleyball player visiting St. Louis with her team was struck by a car and lost both of her legs. The car was driven by the poster boy for Gardner’s lax policies.
A man was charged in the crash with assault, armed criminal action and operating a motor vehicle without a valid license. He was out on bond awaiting trial for a separate armed robbery case despite violating the terms of his bond several dozen times.
Gardner argued that her office had tried to put the suspect back in jail but that a judge had denied their request. However, there are no court records of her office — which is responsible for monitoring compliance with bond conditions and revoking them when those terms are violated — asking for his bond to be revoked, according to local reports.
In the wake of the incident, Bailey filed a petition quo warranto, the legal mechanism under state statute that allows the attorney general to remove a prosecutor who neglects the job’s duties.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey was at his wit’s end with Gardner and her one-woman crusade to decriminalize the justice system. He called on her to resign immediately instead of waiting until June 1 as she tweeted in her resignation letter.
Bailey says that nearly 12,000 criminal cases have been dismissed by what he calls Gardner’s failures. He also says more than “9,000 cases have been thrown out as they had been about to go to trial, forcing judges to dismiss more than 2,000 cases due to what Bailey described as a failure to provide defendants with evidence and speedy trials.”
Meanwhile, Gardner’s office is facing two proceedings for contempt of court after prosecutors failed to appear for multiple court dates. In one contempt case, a Missouri judge said Gardner had “complete indifference and a conscious disregard for the judicial process” and called her office a “rudderless ship of chaos.”
It’s unclear if the contempt hearings will be dropped.
Several assistant prosecutors recently resigned from Garner’s long understaffed office, which has been plagued by persistent personnel issues creating low morale and a dysfunctional working environment.
“Amid high homicide figures, Gardner has declined more cases, issued fewer arrest warrants, charged fewer felonies, and prosecuted thousands of fewer cases overall than her predecessor. She has also deferred prison sentences for misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies as part of her reform initiatives,” says Fox News.
If I were George Soros and I wanted to destroy the concept of Western justice and accountability, I could do no better than to sic Kim Gardner on the unsuspecting people of St. Louis.