Texas firm bills taxpayers $578k for Moriarty’s ill-fated trooper prosecution

The law firm that Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty hired to prosecute a Minnesota state trooper has sent county taxpayers a bill for more than half a million dollars.

In January, Moriarty charged trooper Ryan Londregan with murder in the fatal shooting of Ricky Cobb II as he tried to flee a traffic stop on Interstate 94 last summer. She later got the county board’s approval to spend up to $1 million to pay the Houston law firm Steptoe to prosecute Londregan. Moriarty had said a team of private attorneys was necessary so that staff attorneys could focus on prosecuting other violent crimes.

The outside lawyers concluded that the stop was “horribly executed,” but said that they were unlikely to overcome defense arguments that the shooting was justified. Moriarty dismissed the charges last month.

In a June 2 statement announcing her decision to drop the case, Moriarty said that during a hearing, “the defense revealed the substance of Mr. Londregan’s prospective testimony, claiming he saw Ricky Cobb II reach for the trooper’s firearm shortly before Londregan fired the shots that killed Mr. Cobb.”

At a news conference the next morning, Moriarty added that prosecutors could not ethically proceed with the case and that an acquittal would sow distrust in the criminal justice system.

Moriarty made public the 858-page case file and the law firm’s invoices on Friday, a promise that she made when she dismissed the case.

Those invoices total more than $578,000 for 734 hours of work. The firm’s attorneys billed the county $850 per hour, and paralegals working with them charged $250 per hour.

County Commissioner Kevin Anderson was the only member of the board who voted in April against hiring the firm. In an interview with MPR News on Sunday, Anderson said that the expenditure was a waste.

“It was a shocking number,” Anderson said. “And I really think that it was incredibly disappointing how we spent the money. This is our taxpayer or property tax dollars, and I think it needs additional scrutiny on on what we got for it.”

In a separate interview, Londregan’s defense attorney Christopher Madel called on Morarity to apologize for filing the charges.

“It’d be nice at some point if she just said, you know what, I screwed up. And I’m sorry,” Madel said. “But instead what she just wants to do over and over again is just keep making excuses for what she did.”

In a statement that accompanied the document release, Moriarty said that the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office filed motions to release grand jury transcripts from the case as well as a declaration from a law enforcement officer that a judge had sealed. Moriarty added that following defense objections, the court unsealed the declaration but denied the motion to unseal the grand jury transcripts.

“When we dismissed the case against Mr. Londregan because of new evidence, I promised to release this report and the grand jury transcript as soon as possible,” Moriarty said in her Friday statement. “While the court denied our request to make the grand jury transcript public, I believe it’s still important to release as much of this information as we can. Such transparency is key to creating community trust. The family of Ricky Cobb II deserves this transparency, as does the larger community.”

In an email to MPR News on Tuesday, Madel disputed Moriarty’s contention that the defense had objected to the release of grand jury materials from the case. Madel pointed to a July 12 court filing in which he and fellow defense attorney Peter Wold called on the court to “release everything without restriction.”

“Trooper Londregan supports the notion to permit the sun to shine on literally everything in this case — but not the cherry-picked, dishonest narrative that the HCAO has unsuccessfully peddled since January 2024,” the attorneys wrote in the filing.

In his email, Madel noted that after Moriarty dismissed the charges, the defense team said it would agree to the release of the entire grand jury transcript if the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office would allow for the full release of the case file.

Judge Mark Kappelhoff, in a July 19 order, denied the state’s request to unseal the grand jury transcript because the state’s rules of criminal procedure allow the release of grand jury materials only “in connection with a judicial proceeding,” and Kappelhoff noted that the state voluntarily dismissed its case, bringing the proceeding to a halt.

Cobb’s family has filed a federal lawsuit against Londregan and another trooper, Brett Seide, who made the initial traffic stop. The lawsuit alleges the troopers used excessive force and violated Cobb’s civil rights.

Editor’s note: This story was updated on July 30, 2024 to include defense attorneys’ comments regarding the release of grand jury transcripts.

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