St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner made no move to resign before the Thursday-at-noon deadline set by Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R-MO), prompting the AG’s office to move forward with plans to remove her from office by legal means instead.
Bailey delivered the ultimatum on Wednesday evening — resign by noon on Thursday or be removed from office — claiming that Gardner had repeatedly failed to perform her sworn duties as a prosecutor and had made the city of St. Louis less safe in the process.
When the deadline lapsed on Thursday — with no response from Gardner’s office — Bailey held a brief press conference explaining his prescribed course of action.
WATCH:
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey's press conference on St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner
https://t.co/P6CfpQMVvN— FOX2now (@FOX2now) February 23, 2023
“My office has filed a petition for a quo warranto,” Bailey confirmed, citing a provision in Missouri law that allows the Attorney General to take steps to remove a public official who is not performing the duties required by his or her elected office.
Bailey laid out three reasons for the filing, saying first that Gardner “has failed to prosecute cases that are pending in her jurisdiction.” That failure, he explained, resulted in justice going by the wayside as pending cases sometimes were dismissed when they were not handled in a timely fashion.
“The second claim is that she has failed to confer and inform victims of the procedural posture and ultimate disposition in criminal cases,” Bailey continued, noting that Gardner’s office had not just a moral but a constitutional and legal obligation to inform the victims of crimes of the status and eventual outcome of their cases.
“Finally, she has neglected her duties by failing to charge new cases referred to her by the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department,” he concluded. “These three behaviors constitute a continued pattern of failure to discharge her duties in office, and represent neglect under the statutes and warrant removal. At the end of the day, this is about the rule of law, and about justice.”
According to a report from the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Gardner plans to hold her own news conference later on Thursday afternoon.