A federal appeals court has delivered a partial legal victory to former Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby by overturning one of three of her federal convictions.

In a 2-1 decision issued on July 11, the panel ruled the jury was given the wrong instructions regarding the mortgage fraud case. The panel upheld her two perjury convictions.

After testifying in her own defense, Mosby was convicted by a jury in February 2024 for falsely claiming financial hardship during the pandemic in order to withdraw $50,000 from her own retirement account. She used the funds to purchase a condo in Longboat Key, Florida, in 2021.

Capital B has reached out to Mosby for comment. She has declined to comment, a spokeswoman for Mosby told Capital B. The appellate court kicked Mosby’s case back to the district court for further proceedings. A date has not been set.

In the 48-page decision out of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the judges cited the lack of “evidence solidifying what actually happened, where, or when” Mosby finalized a mortgage application that was the root to the allegations of the indictment. She had been traveling between Maryland and Florida at the time.

“This error could have been remedied by direction from the district court that the jury could establish venue by finding that an element of the crime was committed in Maryland,” Judge Stephanie D. Thacker wrote in the decision. “But that is not what the jury was told. Instead, both the district court and the government told the jury, ‘The government need not prove that the crime itself was committed in this district [to establish venue].’”

Because the jury wasn’t shown how any part of the crime was carried out, the court said, the judges couldn’t tell how the jurors decided where the case should be tried.

“We are thus left to conclude that the error was sufficiently prejudicial to warrant reversal,” Thacker wrote, and Judge G. Steven Agee concurred.

Mosby’s legal team argued her appeal in January 2025.

This ruling allows Mosby to keep the $476,000 condo the government tried to force her to forfeit after her conviction, according to the decision. 

In a dissenting opinion, U.S. Appeals Court Judge Paul V. Niemeyer said he would have upheld Mosby’s convictions. “There was ample evidence for the jury to conclude that Mosby both prepared and transmitted the false gift letter in Maryland and that venue in that forum was therefore proper,” he wrote.

When a federal grand jury indicted Mosby in 2022, she was known as the youngest person in the U.S. ever elected to lead a prosecutor’s office. That same year, she lost her bid for reelection. Mosby had held the position since 2014, gaining national attention after the police-custody death of Freddie Gray and the subsequent acquittals and case dismissals involving six Baltimore police officers.

Ahead of her sentencing in May 2024, Mosby faced up to 40 years in federal prison. In an interview with Capital B, she said that all she felt she had left were her two daughters and her grandmother, Marilyn Thompson, who raised her. The six-hour sentencing hearing, held in a packed Greenbelt, Maryland, courtroom, featured statements from Mosby’s supporters and the reading of prewritten appeals for leniency addressed to Judge Lydia K. Griggsby, who presided over the case.

Griggsby spared Mosby from prison, sentencing her to time served and ordering her to perform 100 hours of community service. With her two daughters at her side, Mosby walked out of the courthouse. Just a month into her court-ordered year of home confinement — which required wearing a location monitoring device — her grandmother, Thompson, who was in hospice care, passed away.