A Missouri couple who gained folk hero status in the conservative movement for wielding guns outside of their St. Louis home in 2020 to deter a group of trespassing left-wing protesters, including Black Lives Matter activists, are asking the Supreme Court to review law license sanctions imposed on them.
For defending their home on June 28, 2020, during nationwide organized protests, some of which turned into riots, by Black Lives Matter and Antifa, Mark and Patricia McCloskey were honored speakers at the 2020 Republican National Convention. Mark McCloskey is currently running for a U.S. Senate seat as a Republican. The primary election will take place in Missouri on Aug. 2.
The case, which involved prosecutorial misconduct, received national media attention. Kimberly Gardner, a Democrat and St. Louis’s first black chief prosecutor, who has accused local police of racism, was removed from the case in December 2020 by Circuit Judge Thomas Clark II for using the incident in inflammatory campaign fundraising emails. Clark ruled that Gardner’s behavior raised “the appearance of impropriety” and “jeopardized the defendants’ right to a fair trial.”
The McCloskeys state in their petition to the Supreme Court that after the incident at their home, they “received hundreds of letters of support from across the United States, including letters from President Donald J. Trump and a letter signed by 14 sitting members of the U.S. House of Representatives asking then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr to investigate the City of St. Louis Circuit Attorney for violating the McCloskeys’ civil rights in threatening criminal charges against the McCloskeys.”
The McCloskeys said they were justified in holding firearms outside of their home to dissuade the crowd, which they said meant them harm. However, Mark McCloskey entered a guilty plea to a class C misdemeanor of assault in the fourth degree and agreed to a $750 fine. His wife entered a guilty plea to a Class A misdemeanor of harassment in the second degree and accepted a $2,000 fine. The couple had originally been charged with felony-level unlawful use of a weapon, but prosecutors reached a plea deal with them to reduce the severity of the charges.
The McCloskeys were pardoned in July 2021 by Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican.
Former President Donald Trump praised Parson and the couple after the pardon.
The court should rule that “as a matter of constitutional law ... a lawyer does not engage in conduct involving ‘moral turpitude’ when undertaking actions protected by the United States Constitution, in particular the Second Amendment.”
The disciplinary body is claiming that an attorney must be punished for using “a firearm to defend the lawyer’s self, family, and home with the use of a firearm, even when the President of the United States commends the lawyers’ actions, the Governor of the applicable state pardons the lawyers, and the public broadly praises the lawyers for their conduct,” the petition reads.
The Epoch Times reached out to Leawood, Kansas-based lawyer Edward D. Robertson Jr., who is the counsel of record for the Missouri Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel, but didn’t receive a reply as of press time.