New Hennepin County Attorney candidates promises major change in priorities

Matt Pelikan, a progressive lawyer with a history of working on political campaigns from Paul Wellstone to Hillary Clinton, will announce his candidacy Wednesday to replace Mary Moriarty as Hennepin County Attorney.

Pelikan enters the race with lengthy ties to the DFL: He worked for Wellstone’s Senate campaign; served as finance director for the Ohio Democratic Party during Barack Obama’s presidential run; was a voter-protection lawyer for Clinton’s presidential campaign; and earned the 2018 Democratic endorsement for Minnesota attorney general.

He is also the first candidate in the race to directly criticize Moriarty, saying he views her tenure as a “disaster” for progress and reform.

In an interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune this week ahead of his official announcement, Pelikan said the reasons for that criticism were multiform and included “the unjustified attacks on law enforcement, the real lapses in judgement on specific prosecutions.”

He argued that Moriarty no longer works with law enforcement leaders in any meaningful way and even Democratic Party members like Attorney General Keith Ellison and Gov. Tim Walz are not at the table. He said her recent policies, like stopping felony charges stemming from most low-level traffic stops, has essentially defunded criminal prosecution.

Pelikan works at Madel PA in Minneapolis. Earlier this year, he helped secure a $6.4 million award in a legal malpractice lawsuit for the family of a University of Minnesota student who died after a series of fatal missteps from first responders. His boss, attorney Chris Madel, has been a vocal critic of Moriarty’s tenure and has been rumored to be considering a run at governor.

Pelikan has lived in downtown Minneapolis for most of the last 20 years and said anyone denying there is a problem with vagrancy and criminality in the city is willfully ignoring drug addiction and mental illness on the streets.

“Lots of people in the city, unfortunately, are impacted by adversity, by poverty, by poor parenting, only a subsect of them become criminals,” Pelikan said. “It’s not necessarily that circumstance that’s driving them there. You want to be humane about how you’re responding to the life circumstances someone has been through, but I don’t think that excuses the conduct.”

The race to replace Moriarty, who announced in August she would not seek re-election, now includes Pelikan, three-term state Rep. Cedrick Frazier from New Hope, and Senior Ramsey County Attorney Hao Nguyen. Rumors continue to circulate that additional candidates are coming.

They will all have to position themselves in relation to Moriarty, one of the most visible public figures in the state. She has often relied on data to institute policies and make charging decisions that have received praise from social justice advocates and wide-ranging criticism from advocates of traditional modes of prosecution and criminal justice.

Frazier and Nguyen both received endorsements from Ellison. Frazier has been endorsed by Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan. Nguyen has the backing of Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt and Ramsey County Attorney John Choi.

Pelikan grew up in Northfield and fell in love with politics after attending a precinct caucus when he was 14. His backyard neighbors, Mike and Nancy Casper, took him there. Mike was Wellstone’s policy adviser.

That sensation of community-based advocacy has steered his career. He worked as a political fundraiser, door-knocked for campaigns and received a law degree at the University of Minnesota, where he was editor-in-chief of the Minnesota Law Review. After graduating he served as a law clerk on the Minnesota Supreme Court, first for Justice Paul Anderson and then for Justice David Lillehaug.

In 2018, Pelikan shook up the political landscape in Minnesota when he challenged then-Attorney General Lori Swanson, a longtime incumbent, for the DFL nomination and she dropped out of the nomination process after a tight first ballot at the DFL convention.

The shocking outcome led a number of prominent politicians to alter their election plans, including Ellison, who decided to not seek re-election to Congress and eventually won the race for attorney general.

Pelikan said he knows there might be others with more experience to lead the 500 staffers who work in the County Attorney’s Office, but there’s “always going to be someone with more experience than you.”

He knows it will be weighty, but he’s excited by the idea of working with experienced prosecutors and to be a transparent leader on criminal justice.