Inside a courtroom in downtown Baltimore, Assistant State’s Attorney Garret Mooney approached the witness stand, retrieved the exhibit and prepared to show the photo to the jury.

Mooney was prosecuting a 25-year-old man on charges stemming from a high-speed chase.

Last summer, the police helicopter, Foxtrot, trailed a stolen 2024 Acura Integra as it crisscrossed the city.

Baltimore Police arrested the man after they allege he ditched a gun in a pile of wood, took off his sweatshirt and sat on the front steps of a home on Cliftview Avenue in Darley Park to blend into the crowd.

Mooney slowly walked from right to left down the length of the jury box, holding up a photo of the stolen car.

“If you don’t see it,” Mooney told jurors, “just let me know.”

But Mooney could not see the photo himself.

Since 2024, Mooney, 31, has served as an assistant state’s attorney in the Misdemeanor Jury Trial Unit. He handles cases in Baltimore Circuit Court ranging from assault to burglary to drug possession. He started his career in the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office as a law clerk and views his role to achieve public safety while safeguarding the Constitution.

He also happens to be blind.

‘Thank God she chose Baltimore’

Though it’s unclear how many attorneys in the United States are blind or visually impaired because nobody tracks it, he’s likely not among a large number.

In Prince George’s County, there is one assistant state’s attorney who’s blind. David S. Tatel served for almost 30 years as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and wrote a memoir called “Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice.”

“The biggest misconception is we can’t do the work, whether it’s in office or in the courtroom,” said Dave Adams, treasurer of the American Association of Visually Impaired Attorneys, an international nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., that has about 50 members. “We are as capable as a sighted person to do whatever is necessary to provide the best for our clients or on the bench.”

Mooney grew up in Mesa, Arizona, and was born with cataracts, a cloudy area in the lens of the eye. His blindness is hereditary.

At 3, Mooney developed glaucoma. He experienced a retinal detachment at 5 or 6 and lost vision in his right eye. Then he endured another one at 7 in his left eye.

At 14, Mooney underwent a cornea transplant at the Doheny Eye Institute, which greatly improved his vision. But that would be short-lived.

One day, Mooney was leaving math class when he ran into a student who suddenly stopped in front of him. A blood vessel in his left eye burst. He experienced a retinal detachment and, from various operations, developed scar tissue.

Now, although he has light perception, for all intents and purposes, he’s totally blind.

To Mooney, it was not a “big emotional thing.” He accepted what happened. Instead, he pivoted his interests, finding speech and debate and Model United Nations.

As a student at Mountain View High School, Mooney thought about various careers. Lawyer. Foreign affairs officer. International relations professor.

Mooney decided to become an attorney, and he earned his bachelor’s degree in political science in 2017 from Arizona State University.

He found the law interesting. It’s history and government wrapped into one, and it’s always complex.

But he took the Law School Admission Test, or LSAT, and did not score well. So he researched where he could get accepted. The University of Baltimore School of Law was on the list.

“I gave my wife a list of schools and said, ‘I don’t care where we go. I just want the degree,’” Mooney said. “She picked the school. She chose Baltimore. And I was like, ‘Thank God she chose Baltimore.’”

His wife, Brittany Bomboy, who’s also blind, was a military child and wanted to be closer to family in Virginia and Pennsylvania. He didn’t like the hot weather in Arizona, anyway. They met in 2013 at the Colorado Center for the Blind.

In law school, Mooney said, he was one of two students who were blind in his class. He participated in the Bronfein Family Law Clinic and completed internships at the Maryland Office of the Public Defender and with a solo practitioner in Baltimore, Phillip Corey Levin.

Levin recalled that he received a call from one of his former interns, Kate Anderson, who worked at the law school and was having trouble placing a student.

During the call, Levin asked Anderson to come clean. That’s when she told him the student was blind.

“That’s it. Send him my way,” Levin said he told Anderson. “Not a problem.”

In the wrong hands, Levin thought, Mooney might not get off to a successful start in his legal career.

Levin learned that Mooney lived near his law office and had access to software to help him do the job. He uses a screen reader called Job Access With Speech, or JAWS, which allows him to read through text-to-speech or a refreshable Braille display that connects to his laptop.

During his internship, Mooney worked on a case in Harford County in which law enforcement had pulled over a woman for a wellness check and then arrested her on a charge of driving under the influence of narcotics.

“‘I don’t see a problem with the police pulling over someone from a wellness check,’” Levin remembers Mooney telling him.

“‘What side are you on?’” Levin said he replied.

He explained they were being paid to protect people against overzealous prosecution and needed to research the issue. Their client had been experiencing a medical issue earlier outside a drugstore, but she was not impaired.

Mooney conducted research, he said, and came to a realization: Law enforcement had performed an illegal traffic stop.

Prosecutors dropped the case.

Mooney, he said, helped him become a better explainer. Levin said he now views people and the world in a different light.

“Garret may have been blind, but in a lot of ways, I think I was blinder,” Levin said. “Garret taught me how to see in this process. I think I’m a better lawyer because of this experience.”

When Mooney earned his law degree in 2021, Levin suggested he apply to the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office.

“It was more or less: I need a job. You get great trial experience as a prosecutor. Why not?” Mooney said. “Then I can go do family law and be done with it.”

Instead, he found his calling.

‘He is a public servant at heart’

In 2021, Mooney started as a law clerk in the Conviction Integrity Unit. He reviewed trial transcripts and drafted responses for attorneys.

He later applied to work in the District Court of Maryland for Baltimore City and started in 2022 as an assistant state’s attorney at the Edward F. Borgerding Court Building on Wabash Avenue in Northwest Baltimore.

Mooney said his first trial involved a man whom police had arrested after spotting a bulge, patting him down and finding a gun. A judge gave him two years in jail.

“I remember sitting there, standing there as a prosecutor, and I’m like, ‘I just sent this man to jail for two years. Holy s---,’” Mooney said. “That’s a big deal.”

The outcome stuck with him all night.

To this day, Mooney still thinks about that case and the importance of ensuring that police follow the law. He said he talks with new officers about their immense power and reminds them that, whenever they conduct a traffic stop, they’re “going on a date with the Constitution.”

“You need to be both respectful and nervous,” Mooney said, “because you want to ensure you don’t violate their rights.”

His most memorable trial, though, was “the cat one.”

A woman alleged that a neighbor violated a peace order by hissing at her cat named Trouble. “That,” Mooney said, “was a fat not guilty.”

Assistant State’s Attorney Justin Dickman, chief of district court for the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office, served as Mooney’s direct supervisor at the time and recounted that his confidence level was “light-years ahead of some of his colleagues.”

So much so in the beginning that in court he almost came off as too aggressive.

At first, there were a lot of people who doubted him because of his blindness: judges, defense attorneys and even other assistant state’s attorneys, Dickman said.

“He, very quickly, shut them all up with his skill, his acumen and, really, his hard work,” Dickman said.

Mooney, he said, is relentless and holds his own.

His passion and dedication to justice are infectious, said Assistant State’s Attorney Doug Vey, building chief of the Borgerding Court Building.

Vey said Mooney served as an “amazing role model for the new prosecutors.”

“Whether you were a brand-new prosecutor or someone like me who’s been doing this for 20-plus years, he inspired us all to do better,” Vey said. “He really had that curiosity, kept that dedication, for justice.”

In 2024, Mooney moved to the Misdemeanor Jury Trial Unit, where he carries about 40 to 60 cases.

“He is a public servant at heart,” said Assistant State’s Attorney Michelle Battle, one of his supervisors.

Because he perceives the world differently than people who can see, Mooney said, he can tell a lot about what’s happening in body camera video from the sound alone.

He said he will call officers, ask them what they observed and take notes. Then he will confer with a paralegal, Stacey Small, to see if that matches up with the footage.

If a case is going to trial, Mooney arrives early on the first day to figure out where the jury box and witness stand are located. He said he wants to smoothly present his case.

The jury commissioner provides him with a USB drive containing questionnaires potential jurors fill out online so he can read them.

Mooney said he does not view himself as an inspiration.

He said he tells his colleagues that, if they went blind, they’d figure it out. How he lives is just different.

“If a blind person has the proper tools and techniques,” he said, “blindness is reduced to a mere nuisance.”

‘He seems to be inherently understanding of the role of a prosecutor’

Defense attorneys who’ve had cases with Mooney describe him as a diligent, accessible and open-minded prosecutor.

Shimon Kafka, a defense attorney in Baltimore, said Mooney consistently reaches out weeks ahead of trial.

Though Mooney certainly is not an “easy prosecutor,” Kafka described him as a reasonable assistant state’s attorney who takes the time to listen.

Kafka said he represented a man who worked at Coca-Cola and faced a charge of driving on a suspended license. He was driving to work because he’d fallen behind on child support.

Mooney asked for pay stubs to verify that account, he said, and dropped the case.

“He talks to me about my clients with a human edge to it,” Kafka said. “He cared about my client. It wasn’t just, ‘He shouldn’t have been driving without a license.’”

William Buie III said he’s had only one case with Mooney, and it involved a woman accused of committing a stabbing on The Block.

Buie said he thought law enforcement overcharged his client. Three or four people attacked her, he claimed, and she used a pocketknife in self-defense.

Mooney was thoughtful and took all information into consideration. He changed the plea offer from jail to probation, Buie said.

“We need more prosecutors like that, in my opinion, that are able to look at both sides of the case and come up with a fair resolution,” Buie said. “We can’t throw away everyone in a city that’s already broken.”

Sometimes, assistant state’s attorneys “can’t see the forest through the trees,” said Michael Tomko, a defense attorney in Baltimore.

Mooney, he said, is “incredibly conscientious” and “overwhelmingly fair.”

“He’s not looking at just, ‘Can I win this case?’ but the greater good,” Tomko said. “He seems to be inherently understanding of the role of a prosecutor: It’s not just to put everyone in jail.”

Mooney is a married father of two. His daughter, Braylee, is 10 and son, Matthew, is 1.

Today, Mooney no longer wants to go into family law.

He wants to be a career prosecutor.