Appeals court overturns Mosby’s mortgage fraud conviction, upholds perjury charges

by Sam Gauntt and Danielle J. Brown, Maryland Matters
July 12, 2025

A federal appeals court gave former Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby a partial win Friday, overturning her 2024 conviction for mortgage fraud but upholding perjury convictions in connection with the purchase of two Florida homes.

A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also reversed a lower court’s order that Mosby forfeit a Florida condo as a result of the mortgage fraud conviction, noting that with the conviction now overturned, the forfeiture was improper.

Neither Mosby’s attorneys nor prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Maryland immediately responded to requests for comment on the case Friday.

Friday’s ruling is the latest turn in the legal trials of Mosby, who served two terms as Baltimore’s top prosecutor, from 2015-2023.

She was indicted in 2022 by a federal grand jury on two counts of perjury, for falsely claiming a COVID-19 hardship on an application to withdraw $90,000 from her retirement account, and two counts of mortgage fraud, on charges she made false statements on mortgage applications for the two vacation homes in Florida that she bought in 2021.

Her trials on the charges were held separately. At her perjury trial, Mosby argued that questions on the form that was the basis of her perjury conviction were “fundamentally ambiguous.” The form asked if she had suffrered “adverse financial consequences” during the COVID-19 pandemic that justified allowing her to withdraw retirement funds early without penalty; she said she feared the pandemic could affect Mahogany Elite, a travel firm she had founded.

Former prosecutor Mosby gets probation for perjury, false claims convictions

But prosecutors argued that Mahogany Elite could not have suffered financial consequences because it was brand new — she had “not yet started the company, earned any revenue, or incurred any costs.” Jurors apparently agreed, convicting her on Nov. 9, 2023, of both perjury counts.

At her mortgage fraud trial, Mosby argued that prosecutors never established that she was in Maryland when the alleged crimes occurred, but an overbroad jury instruction allowed them to determine she was, even in the absence of evidence. That jury convicted her on Feb. 7, 2024, of a single fraud count.

Federal prosecutors sought 20 months in jail for Mosby, in addition to supervised release and the forfeiture of her Longboat Key vacation condo. But U.S. District Judge Lydia Kay Griggsby sentenced Mosby to three years supervised release, with one of those years under home confinement, along with the forfeiture of the condo.

On appeal, the circuit court rejected her claims on the “ambiguous” form, saying it was without merit. It was “adequately clear” on the form what “adverse financial consequences” meant, Circuit Judge Stephanie Thacker wrote in the ruling.

But the court agreed with Mosby on the jury instruction, saying the trial court’s instruction to jurors regarding the mortgage fraud case’s venue was indeed “erroneously overbroad.” Thacker’s opinion said those instructions “went so far as to say that the Government did not need to ‘prove that the crime itself was committed in this district,’”only that acts leading up to the crime were done in Maryland. That was wrong, Thacker wrote.

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After vacating the mortage fraud conviction, Thacker wrote, the court had to vacate the forfeiture of Mosby’s condo in Longboat Key, what had originally been ordered because the condo was believed to be “the fruit of the alleged mortgage fraud.”

In a partial dissent, Judge Paul Niemeyer said he would have upheld the mortgage fraud conviction along with the perjury convictions. He wrote that the evidence at her trial “amply and clearly demonstrated that venue was proper in Maryland by a preponderance of the evidence.”

“It showed that Mosby made the false statement in Maryland by obtaining and signing the false gift letter in Maryland and that she transmitted the statement from Maryland by uploading it to the Internet for use at the closing in Florida,” Niemeyer wrote. “She also engaged her husband to wire the funds from Maryland in support of the gift letter. ”

Those were all elements of the crime, which justfied its trial in Maryland, he wrote.

Maryland Matters is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: editor@marylandmatters.org.