Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced Wednesday she will not be running for reelection next year.

Moriarty says she will instead focus on "creating enduring change in the system" during the final months of her administration.

"We've become accustomed to elected officials who don't deliver results and end up more invested in clinging to power than doing the work of the people. That is not me," Moriarty said. "As I have weighed whether I wanted to spend the last year and a half of my term focused primarily on campaigning or continuing to transform this office, the choice became clear. I want to focus on running the office, rather than running for office."  

Moriarty is vowing to pursue and promote the policies she's championed, including with young adult offenders, for the remainder of her term.

"One of my goals coming into this office is to help the public understand how the system works, what's working, what isn't working and what are the things we're working on," Moriarty told WCCO on Friday. "I firmly believe that this office needs someone at the lead of it who's not making decisions based on politics or what will help them get elected."

Moriarty sat down with WCCO for a wide-ranging interview after her announcement.

"I've always been authentic in what I'm doing, and I think that I will have more of an opportunity to do that instead of campaigning," she said.

As Hennepin County attorney, Moriarty established the Conviction Integrity Unit to review past cases for mistakes and unjustified convictions and supported the exoneration of two men wrongfully convicted of murder, Marvin Haynes and Edgar Barrientos-Quintana.

At the start of the year, Moriarty's office began accepting applications for expungement in youth criminal offense cases, allowing individuals under the age of 18 to apply for expungement at no cost through the Help Seal My Record portal.

However, Moriarty's tenure as county attorney has not been without controversy. In her first couple of months on the job, she offered a controversial plea deal to a 15-year-old accused of killing Zaria McKeever in 2022. Moriarty's decision was criticized by not just the family of the murder victim, but Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, the state's largest police association and some community leaders. In response, Gov. Tim Walz became the first governor in decades to reassign a case from a county attorney when he transferred the murder case from Moriarty to Ellison.

"The narrative has been they're getting caught and we're doing nothing. That is not the case at all," Moriarty asserted. "There are going to be 18- to 25-year-olds who are going to go to prison, continue to go to prison because of their behavior, but there is also a group we're talking about with presumptive probation cases and other effective approaches. Punishment is very different from public safety. Punishment is not a deterrent. Long sentences are not a deterrent. "

The Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association last year filed a formal complaint against Moriarty, alleging she acted unethically in prosecuting a state trooper who shot and killed a driver during a traffic stop. Her office charged Ryan Londregan with second-degree unintentional murder, first-degree assault and second-degree manslaughter in January 2023. In June 2023, the charges were dropped after Moriarty said her office learned new information about Londregan's planned testimony and state patrol training that would "make it impossible" to prove the case against him. 

In May, the U.S. Department of Justice announced its intent to open a racial discrimination investigation into the Hennepin County Attorney's Office for a new policy that would take an individual's race into consideration when making plea deals. The attorney's office announced the new policy change at the end of April via memo. 

In the memo, Moriarty's office said that "proposed resolutions should consider the person charged as a whole person, including their racial identity and age." A spokesperson for the Hennepin County Attorney's Office said in a statement they are trying to address longstanding racial disparities. 

Moriarty was elected Hennepin County attorney in a 16-point margin landslide in 2022, and previously served as the county's chief public defender. She ran a campaign promising transparency and criminal justice reforms that she hopes would diminish racial disparities within the system.