Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced Sunday night that she is dropping the criminal charges her office filed against Minnesota Trooper Ryan Londregan in the death of Ricky Cobb II.
“The question of whether we can prove a case at trial is different than clearing a person of any wrongdoing. There are so many points at which Mr. Londregan could have handled the situation differently, and if he had, Ricky Cobb might still be alive,” Moriarty said in a press release.
“But that is not the question before us as prosecutors; the only question is whether we can still prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime occurred given this new evidence. The answer to that question is no, and I would violate my ethical duties if I nonetheless continued with the case.”
In January, Moriarty brought three felony charges against Trooper Londregan, including second-degree unintentional murder. The charges were connected to a July 2023 incident where Londregan fatally shot Cobb after he began to flee in his vehicle during a traffic stop, briefly dragging another state trooper who was attempting to remove him.
Since then, an initial use-of-force expert left the prosecution, multiple State Patrol trainers issued sworn declarations that Londregan acted in accordance with his training, the lead prosecutor departed the case, and Moriarty hired an outside team of Washington, D.C. lawyers to manage the prosecution.
Moriarty’s prosecution has received criticism from politicians on both sides of the aisle and led to calls for Gov. Tim Walz to reassign the case to the attorney general’s office.
“It’s about g—damn time,” Londregan’s attorney, Chris Madel, told Alpha News Sunday night. “The reality is he’s (Walz) had the opportunity to do this for months. I don’t see the need for him or anyone to be taking a victory lap.”
According to Moriarty, Londregan planned to testify that he saw Cobb reach for the trooper’s firearm before Londregan discharged his gun. Additionally, a state patrol trainer provided a declaration in which he said he never instructed officers to refrain from shooting into a moving vehicle during an extraction.
Due to this evidence, Moriarty said she and the prosecutors working the case determined that “the State can no longer meet its burden of proof.”
Moriarty said she met with the Cobb family to inform them of her decision and plans to hold a press conference Monday to discuss the situation in more detail.
She also published an “open letter” accompanying her release in which she lamented how “people in power have played political games with this case while Ricky is dead.”
Brian Peters, executive director of the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, called for an end to the “open season on law enforcement.”
“The justice system is not a science experiment. Prosecutors are ministers of justice. This case was an example of an injustice that has been corrected, but the damage remains. This prosecutor divided our communities all in the name of politics. Shame on you, Mary Moriarty,” added MPPOA general counsel Imran Ali.
Minnesota’s Republican congressional delegation said in a joint statement that Moriarty “was abusing her position to wrongfully charge Trooper Londregan.”
“When she refused to listen to the facts of the case and the law, we asked Governor Walz to step in and remove the case from her jurisdiction,” they said. “Finally, after many months of unnecessary strife, Ms. Moriarty has come to the same conclusion that the experts did: that Trooper Londregan was completely justified in his use of force to protect his partner’s life.”
Anthony Gockowski
Anthony Gockowski is Editor-in-Chief of Alpha News. He previously worked as an editor for The Minnesota Sun and Campus Reform, and wrote for the Daily Caller.
