ST. LOUIS — A new judge has been assigned to oversee the cases against Daniel Riley – one of which served as the tipping point that pushed Attorney General Andrew Bailey to try to remove St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner from office.
Editor's note: The above video aired on April 7.
Judge David Mason was originally assigned to oversee a 2020 armed robbery case against Riley along with the charges he is facing related to the crash he allegedly caused that left 17-year-old Janae Edmondson without both of her legs. She was in town for a volleyball tournament in February.
Riley’s lawyer, Dan Diemer, told 5 On Your Side his client hoped that asking for a change of judge – which is every defendant’s right – would buy more time until trial.
Presiding Judge Elizabeth Hogan kept the cases together, so the timeline for both cases remains the same. Now, Judge Michael Noble will oversee the cases, according to court records.
“Until this dust storm clears we thought we better try to keep it alive until the story about Kim Gardner is no longer about Daniel,” Diemer said. “Every time there’s a story about Kim Gardner, Daniel’s name is in it.”
Riley was charged in an armed robbery case in 2020.
He was put on house arrest with GPS monitoring and violated it dozens of times. In April 2022, Judge Bryan Hettenbach issued an order stating Riley could remain out on that bond after Riley appeared in court, and set a trial date for three months later.
The case never went to trial because the “state was not ready,” according to court documents.
Then Assistant Circuit Attorney Natalia Ogurkiewicz refiled the charges, which started the clock on another trial date over again.
Riley was allowed to remain on house arrest with GPS monitoring and continued to pile up violations for dead batteries on his ankle bracelet and repeated violations of the perimeter he was to stay within.
Gardner said her prosecutors asked a judge to revoke Riley’s bond in oral motions, but there is no record of any requests to revoke his bond.
Transcripts show Gardner’s prosecutors did not object when a judge asked them if they were opposed to Riley remaining on house arrest despite the multiple violations.
By the time Edmondson was struck in February, court records show Riley had violated the terms of his bond close to 90 times since he was originally charged with the robbery – about 50 of which occurred after the missed trial date in July 2022.
Not long after Edmondson was struck, Bailey filed a rare quo warranto petition seeking to remove Gardner from office. Gardner appeared for the first half of the first hearing before a judge in that case earlier this week.
On Wednesday, Judge John Torbitzky entered an order granting the attorney general’s request to schedule status conference hearings every first and third Tuesday of the month until the case goes to trial.
Torbitzky also quashed the attorney general’s subpoena seeking time sheets from Gardner. He set a trial date for Sept. 25, a date that will only become relevant should he decide the case has enough merit to proceed to trial.
Gardner’s legal team has argued the attorney general has not met the burden of proving Gardner is “willfully neglecting” her duties as a prosecutor, and therefore, the lawsuit must be dismissed outright.
Torbitzky gave Gardner’s legal team seven days to file additional responses to the attorney general’s allegations and said he plans to make a decision on whether the case should proceed to trial “very quickly” after that.
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