Commentary: St. Louis Prosecutor Who Charged McCloskeys May Soon Lose Her Law License

Few individuals that became famous in 2020 were simultaneously so loved and loathed as Mark and Patricia McCloskey — AKA “Ken and Karen,” the St. Louis residents who stood on their lawn with firearms as Black Lives Matter protesters broke into their luxury community on June 28 during a demonstration last summer.

The McCloskeys were originally charged by Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner in July on counts of unlawful use of a weapon and evidence tampering. The couple became lionized or demonized, depending on how you saw it, because of the immortal pictures of the two of them in front of their property, Mark McCloskey with an AR-15 and Patricia with a silver handgun.

While the protesters were heading to the home of St. Louis’ then-Mayor Lyda Krewson, Patricia McCloskey told Fox News the protesters said “that they were going to kill us.”

“They were going to come in there. They were going to burn down the house. They were going to be living in our house after I was dead, and they were pointing to different rooms and said, ‘That’s going to be my bedroom and that’s going to be the living room and I’m going to be taking a shower in that room,'” she said.

It’s easy to see how the couple became emblematic of the turbulence of the past year — which, apparently, is part of the reason why Gardner, a Democrat, went after them. That’s not me trying to adduce motives, but instead, the reason why she was taken off the case last December when a judge ruled she’d undertaken a “criminal prosecution for political purposes.”

That was just her being taken off of one case, though. Now, she could be taken off every case under her purview after an investigation found she was “guilty of professional misconduct,” the