The family of Ricky Cobb II, the 33-year-old Black man fatally shot by a Minnesota state trooper during a traffic stop last year, spoke out on Monday against calls from elected officials and police unions to take the case from Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty.
In a statement from the attorneys representing Cobb’s family, they accused officials of politicizing the case to influence an active prosecution. The family asked Gov. Tim Walz not to reassign the case and to allow Moriarty to prosecute the case like any other murder.
“Reassigning this case would create a clear conflict of interests and removing it from the County Attorney should not be an option,” said the attorneys representing the family in a statement. “Mr. Cobb’s family has suffered enough. They don’t deserve this too.”
The charges came months after a lengthy investigation into the killing, which occurred in July on Interstate 94 when three troopers tried to pull Cobb II out of his vehicle. Cobb II appeared to attempt to pull off when trooper Ryan Londregan shot into the moving vehicle. Moriarty’s office charged Londregan with second degree unintentional murder, second degree manslaughter and first degree assault in January.
Earlier this month, court filings from Londregan’s defense claimed that Moriarty had hired a use of force expert to help the office determine whether to bring charges against the trooper. According to the filing, Jeffrey Noble, a national use of force expert, said during a meeting with the prosecution that Londregan had acted lawfully to save his partner.
The filings claim Moriarty’s office lied by omission by not divulging the expert’s finding and bringing charges anyway three months after the meeting with Noble that had occurred in October. That prompted groups like the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association (MPPOA) to accuse Moriarty – who ran and won her seat on a platform partly based on police accountability – of “lying by omission” and enacting an anti-police agenda.
“This is what happens in a political prosecution. Trooper Ryan is a hero who saved his partner’s life,” MPPOA executive director Brian Peters said in a statement. “Anyone who cares about the rule of law needs to care about this case – it’s an unjust prosecution.”
That was quickly followed by calls from Minnesota House Republicans in the state Legislature for Moriarty to resign and drop the charges against Londregan.
In response, Hennepin County Attorney’s Office spokesman Nick Kimball released a statement calling the claims that the use of force expert had come to any conclusions on Londregan’s conduct were false. Kimball said the expert had come in for a preliminary meeting to help the prosecution determine where there may be gaps in the office’s investigation, and that the hypotheticals discussed in that meeting were taken out of context by the defense.
The full discussion in that meeting was provided in discovery to the defense, who then selectively quoted from the document despite the expert acknowledging he did not have significant information related to the prosecution’s investigation nor did he know how to interpret the use of force legal standard in Minnesota, Kimball said in the statement.
“Once again the defense is abusing the legal process to initiate inaccurate pretrial publicity in this case,” the statement reads.
In the past week, the four Republican members of Minnesota’s congressional delegation – U.S. Reps. Michelle Fischbach, Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad and Pete Stauber – wrote a letter to Walz asking that he take the case from Moriarty’s office, and suggesting that an investigation into the matter could be conducted by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. The letter goes on to claim the charges brought by Moriarty’s office are political in nature and further illustrates the “denigration” of law enforcement as a profession.
“The split second that officers have to make life-and-death decisions has often been clouded by the fear of political persecution, like what is happening to Trooper Londregan right now,” the letter reads. “Enough is enough. The uncertainty that this frivolous case puts in officers’ minds could cost them their lives.”
Reps. Angie Craig and Dean Phillips, both Democrats, also came out in favor of having the case taken away from Moriarty’s office.
Related: D.C. Memo: Congress wades into the Trooper Londregan case
Walz has mused publicly about whether to reassign the case from Moriarty’s office, which he has the legal authority to do and has done once before last year with the high-profile murder case of Zaria McKeever.
University of St. Thomas School of Law Professor Rachel Moran, who founded the school’s Criminal and Juvenile Defense Clinic, said having the governor speculate about local prosecutors’ decisions adds an additional unfair pressure to a case that already has high stakes. Should Walz reassign the case it would be a very anti-democratic decision, she said.
“The people of Hennepin County elected Mary Moriarty. Some of the things she is doing are the things that she said she would do – it’s not as if she’s pulling a bait and switch on the voters,” Moran said. “It’s really problematic when the governor overrules the decision of the local voters and says, ‘I’m essentially not trusting your judgment on this.’”
Mohamed Ibrahim
Mohamed Ibrahim is MinnPost’s environment and public safety reporter. He can be reached at mibrahim@minnpost.com.
