Federal authorities said Wednesday that a former Democratic prosecutor in St. Louis admitted she shouldn’t have used public funds to pay herself back with thousands of dollars after getting fined for mistakes she made while trying a Republican governor.
After being voted as the city’s first Black circuit attorney in 2016, Kim Gardner quit last year under fire. As long as she pays the $5,004 back and follows the other rules of the pretrial diversion deal, she will not be charged with a federal crime for misusing public funds. The deal was finalized this month after she signed it over the summer.
Gardner was part of a group of progressive prosecutors who wanted to send people with low-level crimes to treatment for mental illness or drug abuse instead of jail. They also promised to hold police more responsible and free people who had been wrongly convicted.
Republican leaders often said bad things about her, citing issues like low conviction rates in murder cases, high office churn, and more. Before the end of her rough term in May 2023, she often got into fights with cops and conservatives.
In 2018, she charged former Gov. Eric Greitens, who was on the rise in the GOP at the time, with illegal invasion of privacy for allegedly taking a compromising picture of a woman while he was having an affair. The charge was dropped in the end. In June 2018, Greitens quit.
The case was carefully looked over, and Gardner’s investigator was found guilty. Gardner was also given a written warning by the Missouri Supreme Court for problems with how case papers were handled.
The warning kept her law license, but it came with a $750 fine and $4,254 in extra costs. At the time, her lawyer said that any mistakes were not meant to be made and were caused by having a lot of work to do during the Greitens probe.
Then, according to the diversion agreement, problems arose because Gardner told her employees to write her a number of checks for $5,004 from a contingency fund in the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office to repay her, even though she wasn’t entitled to the extra money. This is how the U.S. attorney’s office got involved: the city gets money from the federal government.
In a written statement, U.S. Attorney Sayler A. Fleming said, “This is a just and fair outcome for a case involving a former official and the misuse of public funds that just met the minimum required by the relevant federal criminal statute.”
The Associated Press tried to get Gardner’s lawyer, Harvard professor Ronald Sullivan Jr., to speak by email and phone, but he didn’t answer right away. In a written statement to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he said that Gardner wanted to save the court time and money by making the deal.
In an email, he said, “Ms. Gardner was ready to vigorously defend herself against any allegations that may have been made against her. She and the government agreed to end any dispute and terminate any investigation with the pre-charge diversion agreement.”
Gardner was being tried to be fired at the time she quit by Andrew Bailey, the Republican attorney general of Missouri. Republicans were thinking about a bill that would let Gov. Mike Parson hire a special prosecutor to handle serious crimes. This would take away most of Gardner’s duties.
Source: Ex-St. Louis prosecutor admits she misused public funds and avoids criminal charges