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Gardner would acknowledge that she didn’t do things perfectly, said Miriam Krinsky, executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, which advocates for sensible prosecution. Still, Gardner and other reform prosecutors — specifically Black women — have faced a level of scrutiny over cases and administrative issues that has not been applied to prosecutors pushing “tough-on-crime” policies.
“The former president put a target on her back,” Krinsky said, referring to attacks by then-President Donald Trump on Gardner’s decision to charge the couple that brandished guns at protesters. “The fact that she was a woman, and a woman of color, led to a particularly hostile, hateful, racist, and sexist nature for many of the attacks that she faced. She’s not alone.”
Krinsky said that, whatever people think of the job Gardner did in office, her constituents have the right to decide whether to keep her in the job or not. “We haven’t seen more traditional prosecutors,” she said, “and certainly traditional white male prosecutors in the past, put under the kind of microscope that has been applied.”
Prior to 2016, when Gardner, Foxx, and Ayala were first elected, there were no comparable campaigns against prosecutors, who at the time typically took tough-on-crime stances, Foxx said. Today, she said, prosecutors are punished for making data-driven policy fixes.
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“You are disincentivized now from saying, ‘Listen, that didn’t work,’” Foxx said. “You are disincentivized from looking at the data to prove and demonstrate that increased incarceration rates didn’t make us safer. You are disincentivized from saying that the current methods that we have used and sold as public safety failed. You are disincentivized from talking about the racial inequities in our justice systems, disincentivized from talking about the lack of trust that communities of color have with law enforcement and prosecutors and saying that we have a role in that.”
Gardner’s resignation comes seven years after she was first elected in 2016. She faced heightened public scrutiny before she even took office, not least for her support for certain criminal justice reforms like ending cash bail. She campaigned on prioritizing violent crime and gang violence, expanding mental health treatment options, and holding police accountable for misconduct. The police accountability measures included recommendations from the Ferguson Commission that investigated the root causes of the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr. by former police Officer Darren Wilson, who was never charged.
In generally blue St. Louis, Gardner won the 2016 Democratic primary with 10,000 more votes than the next candidate and ran unopposed in the general election with 98 percent of the vote. She was reelected in 2020 with 61 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary and 70 percent in the general election — beating police-backed opponents in both races.
“For the entirety of her tenure, she was constantly being scrutinized, criticized, and marginalized in a way that felt very unprecedented.”
“Calls for her resignation are not new,” said Foxx, who has been the target of preemption bills in Illinois introduced by legislators in rural areas hundreds of miles from Chicago. “For the entirety of her tenure, she was constantly being scrutinized, criticized, and marginalized in a way that felt very unprecedented. And that’s saying a lot coming from me.”
Foxx said she also faced pushback before being sworn in. The head of the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police labeled her as “anti-law enforcement” before Foxx swore her oath of office. She said her address was released on police blogs along with commentary that since she apparently didn’t care about fighting crime, criminals should show up at her house and meet her daughters.
In 2020, a group of Black women prosecutors flew to St. Louis to rally alongside Gardner as she announced a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city and the St. Louis Police Officers Association, claiming that they were involved in a racist conspiracy to push her out of office. (Gardner’s suit was dismissed without prejudice later that year.) Foxx was among those who signed a statement in support of Gardner.
“The vitriol was sharp and loud,” Foxx said. “As we tried to implement policies — whether it was our retail theft policy or our policy on bail — it was met with a level of scrutiny and vitriol that I hadn’t seen in other policymakers’ decisions, ever.”
Foxx also faced criticism for actions in high-profile cases. Her handling of the Jussie Smollett case — in which her office dropped charges against the actor after he was revealed to have faked being the victim of a hate crime — revived the attacks and calls for her resignation. A special prosecutor was appointed to take over the case, and his 2021 report said her office exhibited “abuses of discretion and operational mistakes.”
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The case dragged on for three years. “I can only surmise that it was not because of the subject matter, but it was because of me,” Foxx said. “The history books will look back at this time or that time and really question how we allowed for our criminal justice system to be so perverted in the supposed interest of justice to limit the discretion of one prosecutor.”
Foxx also said she faced a barrage of death threats laced with racism and sexism throughout her tenure. “When people threaten me, it’s not just that ‘I’m going to hurt you,’ it’s ‘I’m going to rape you.’ In a blog that was called ‘Second City Cop,’ my name was spelled F-O-X-X-X, three X’s. I was denigrated for my looks. It really was, ‘Maybe if she got fucked more, she would be better.’”
Last spring, a man was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for threatening to “rattle her head with bullets” if Foxx didn’t resign, along with threats to other political figures. “This isn’t a policy dispute,” she said.
At the time Foxx took office, less than 1 percent of elected prosecutors were women of color and 79 percent were white men. “Our mere presence as women of color, as Black women in cities with large Black populations, and being the first, drew fear and trepidation among those with racist and sexist ideologies who were used to a certain power dynamic,” she said. “That backlash, not just to the reforms, but who gets to enact them — I don’t think we’ve spoken enough about what Black women have had to endure here.”
John Pfaff, a law professor at Fordham University, agreed. “All politics are local, and it can be risky to try to tell a common story across different cities, but there is something genuinely concerning about the fact that the three most high-profile reform DAs to either step down or decide not to seek reelection — Gardner in St. Louis, Kim Foxx in Chicago, Aramis Ayala in Orlando — have all been Black women,” Pfaff said. “It certainly suggests that the intensity of the backlashes they faced went beyond policy disagreement to the well-documented toxic intersection of race and gender.”
In coverage of Gardner’s resignation, local media highlighted a high-profile case from February in which she faced criticism. A teenage girl was hit with a car, causing her to lose both of her legs. Gardner’s office had previously charged the driver, Daniel Riley, with first-degree robbery and armed criminal action in 2020. When he was set to go to trial in July 2022, her office was not ready and dismissed and refiled the case the same day.
Gardner said a judge denied multiple requests by her office to keep Riley in jail. Riley’s defense attorney, Terry Niehoff, said that while he wasn’t a fan of Gardner’s, she did ask the judge to consider Riley’s numerous bond violations and keep him in jail and that those requests were denied by the judge. Niehoff told The Intercept that Gardner was an “utter disaster” for the city and for Missouri. He added, “In any event, the prosecuting attorney cannot revoke a bond; only a judge can do that.”
“Circuit Attorney Gardner was elected and then reelected by an overwhelming majority of her constituents, and the coordinated efforts to remove her threaten our democracy.”
Gardner’s overwhelming reelection in 2020 is further evidence that her resignation is the culmination of years of attacks, not any individual case, said Rachel Marshall, executive director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College in New York City, who previously the communications director and a policy adviser for Boudin, the San Francisco prosecutor that was recalled.
“Circuit Attorney Gardner was elected and then reelected by an overwhelming majority of her constituents, and the coordinated efforts to remove her threaten our democracy,” Marshall said. “These attacks have never been about public safety but have always been about politics.”
The argument often deployed against prosecutors like Gardner, Foxx, and Boudin is that their policies fuel violence. While there’s no evidence supporting the claims, it can be persuasive in an environment where people are concerned about the recent spike in homicides. Election data shows, however, that communities most impacted by violence are the ones that overwhelmingly support efforts to reform the office of the elected prosecutor, Pfaff said.
“The concerted backlash against reform prosecutors by police unions and conservative legislators is always framed in terms of ‘respect for the victims’ — despite the fact that across multiple elections in multiple cities, the strongest support for reformers comes from the neighborhoods with the most violence, Black neighborhoods in particular,” Pfaff said. “The reform prosecutors, not the conservative legislators seeking to strip them of their authority, are the ones who are winning the votes of the victims.”
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