Time ran out on George Soros-backed St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner at noon on Thursday. Missouri’s Attorney General Andrew Bailey gave her until 12 noon to resign or he would file a petition to remove her.
At 12:01 p.m. yesterday, he filed.
Gardner is a prime example of what George Soros wants: a compliant attorney with little respect for the law, the Constitution, or her oath of office, and who instead is committed to overthrowing the existing judicial system, claiming it to be unfair, biased, and prejudiced against black people. The people of St. Louis bought the lie in 2016, and repeated the error in 2020 when they voted overwhelmingly to keep her in office, giving her 74 percent of the vote.
St. Louis citizens have been paying the price ever since. Under fire from all sides, including some Democrats, Gardner has racked up multiple examples of injustice at DiscoverTheNetworks, and a long list at the leftist-friendly Wikipedia.
Bailey filed a “petition in quo warranto,” which is used to challenge Gardner’s right to hold her office. The petition opens with the most recent and perhaps most egregious example, that of Janae Edmonson. That story begins:
Janae Edmonson, a teenage athlete, was walking back to her hotel in downtown St. Louis on Saturday, February 18. Ms. Edmonson, who was in town for a volleyball tournament, had just verbally committed to play sports for a college in Tennessee.
As Ms. Edmonson and her family walked down the sidewalk, a speeding car driven by Daniel Riley crashed into another car and struck Ms. Edmonson, severing one of her legs and maiming the other.
Her father, thanks to his quick thinking and military service, applied two belts as tourniquets as he watched the life drain from her face.
Thankfully, Ms. Edmonson survived, although both of her legs were amputated.
The petition failed to mention that Janae is an outstanding student-athlete at Smyrna High School in Tennessee. She is a member of the National Honor Society, plays a number of sports, and plays the violin in the school’s music program, all the while double-enrolling in college courses.
And just who is this Daniel Riley? He was out on bail, thanks to Gardner’s “enlightened” view of law enforcement in The Gateway City. From the petition:
Daniel Riley never should have been driving that car. In 2020, the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office charged Riley with First Degree Robbery and Armed Criminal Action for stealing a firearm from [a] victim at gunpoint.
The Circuit Attorney [Gardner] dismissed and refiled that case on July 18, 2022, but not before Riley—who was out on bond—earned 54 separate violations for failing to comply with the pre-trial bond conditions.
After the Circuit Attorney refiled the case, Riley earned 50 more violations. The Circuit Attorney never filed a motion to revoke Riley’s bond. [Emphasis in original.]
For this reason alone Gardner should be reprimanded severely. The petition continued:
Ms. Edmonson’s injuries are the direct result of years of willful neglect from Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner. As the Circuit Attorney, [Gardner] is morally, ethically, and legally responsible for the conduct of her office.
But the history of her malfeasance goes back to the very beginning of her position, starting in 2016:
For years, the Circuit Attorney’s Office has failed to prosecute cases to resolution, has failed to inform and confer with victims, and has failed to even review and file cases submitted by the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.
[Gardner] has, therefore, forfeited her office.
The blame for Edmonson’s injuries is squarely on Gardner:
[Gardner] willfully neglected her official duty or knowingly or willfully failed or refused to timely move to revoke bond and prosecute Riley, and as a result, Riley was not in custody on February 18, 2023, when he drove his car into Ms. Edmonson, resulting in the loss of both of her legs.
On September 4, 2020, [Gardner’s] office charged Riley with First Degree Robbery and Armed Criminal Action for stealing a firearm from a victim at gunpoint.
Between September 4, 2020, and February 18, 2023, Riley earned at least 94 bond violations for his misconduct, and [Gardner’s] office dismissed and refiled the criminal charges against Riley because the State “was not ready to proceed.”
The petition reviews another example of her malfeasance:
Over the course of about three months, and concluding on July 14, 2021, [Gardner] repeatedly failed to fulfill her discovery obligations and failed to appear in court and to prosecute the charges that had been brought against the defendant in State of Missouri v. Brandon Campbell … resulting in the dismissal of the charges, which included a charge of murder in the first degree.
The trial court found that [Gardner’s] office failed to appear despite having been served with an order to show cause.
It gets worse. The petition notes that in Gardner’s determination not to prosecute, she “has a backlog of at least 3,000 cases that she has failed to review for charges, including some number of violent crimes.”
In another example, Gardner refused even to file charges in a B&E (breaking and entering) case until a video of the incident appeared on TikTok! She and her office, now staffed with lawyers of a similar stripe, have refused to prosecute cases brought by the St. Louis Police Department:
For instance, police referred charges on a case where a family was terrorized in their home by a woman who was attempting to break in.…
According to news reports, [Gardner] failed to review the case until the victims gained notoriety on TikTok by [posting] video footage of the woman attempting to break into their home.
All of which, according to the petition, means that Gardner “has forfeited her office and is a usurper who must be removed from office.”
Evidence of her destruction of the judicial and law-enforcement system in St. Louis appears everywhere. In 2019, for example, St. Louis police filed 7,045 felony cases with her office, but she prosecuted only 1,641 of them. She claimed that police hadn’t provided her office with “enough evidence” to prosecute them.
The turnover rate of attorneys in her office is atrocious, with their replacements suffering from the same liberal mindset and thus being incapable and unwilling to bring charges in even the most egregious (i.e., first degree murder) cases.
And those they do file, they deliberately delay by using the grand jury process, resulting in an average wait between filing and trial of more than 340 days. Even after the state’s Supreme Court saw what she was doing and modified the rule to greatly shorten that wait time, Gardner ignored the new rule.
She was also involved in prosecuting Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who protected their property during the George Floyd riots by displaying firearms. The judge in that case saw what she was doing and disqualified her from continuing, writing that it was “a criminal prosecution for political purposes.”
All of Gardner’s behavior is according to the Soros script. He has funded her election and reelection campaigns with hundreds of thousands of dollars through various political action committees — and the crime rate in St. Louis has skyrocketed. The 264 homicides the city recorded in 2020 was more than 36 percent higher than the year before. Neighborhood Scout reports that property crime in St. Louis is more than four times the national average, while the murder rate is more than eight times the national average! The service puts St. Louis at the very bottom of its crime index.
