Qiana Johnson leads the race for Clerk of the Circuit Court in Prince George’s County — the office that oversees the same land records system her fraud scheme exploited.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
The Clerk of the Circuit Court for Prince George’s County is the county’s official custodian of land records — deeds, mortgages, property transfers, the paper infrastructure that establishes who owns what and who doesn’t. It is, by design, one of the offices most dependent on the integrity of recorded documents.
The person leading the race to hold that office was convicted in 2015 of using forged real estate documents to fraudulently take possession of other people’s homes.
Qiana Johnson, founder of the reentry nonprofit Life After Release, unseated eight-year incumbent Mahasin El Amin in the June 23 Democratic primary for Clerk of the Circuit Court, winning with approximately 52 percent of the vote to El Amin’s 48 percent. With no Republican candidate on the ballot, Johnson is the next Clerk. The win was among the most unexpected outcomes of primary night — and the only race in Prince George’s County where an incumbent lost.
Johnson was endorsed by Progressive Maryland, CASA in Action, and the Blue Voter Guide, a coalition that helped her break through against a two-term incumbent despite her criminal history being publicly reported weeks before Election Day.
The structural irony is not subtle.
What the Clerk’s Office Actually Does
The Clerk of the Circuit Court is not a ceremonial post. The office files, processes, and maintains records for all civil and criminal legal actions in the county — and it is directly responsible for the land records division, which includes deeds, mortgages, liens, and property transfer documents.
This is the exact category of documents at the center of the fraud scheme for which Johnson was convicted.
In 2014, Johnson was indicted on ten counts related to a housing fraud scheme targeting vacant homes in Prince George’s County. Prosecutors alleged that she and co-conspirators used forged real estate documents to fraudulently claim ownership of properties they had no legal right to occupy or sell. In April 2015, a jury convicted her on two felony counts: theft of over $100,000, and conspiracy to commit theft of over $100,000. In June 2015, she was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison. She was released in August 2017 after serving two and a half years.
The scheme, according to police, ultimately targeted approximately 20 vacant homes across Prince George’s County.
Second chances are one question. Public trust is another.
The Home That Wasn’t Hers
Among the most documented cases in the scheme involved a home belonging to Donnie and David Small, who had moved to California in 2011 after a job change, leaving their Prince George’s County property vacant. They didn’t discover anyone was living there until they tried to sell.
“If a person came in and robbed a bank and they go to jail and now they’re reformed… I’m not going to go hire them as a teller.” — Donnie Small
“We were sending somebody over to do the appraisal so we could sell it, and they were like, ‘Somebody’s there. We can’t get in,'” Donnie Small told ABC7 News. According to prosecutors, Johnson had moved into the home and, using forged documents produced by a co-conspirator, claimed ownership of the property. Court records show that Johnson told the Smalls’ neighbors she was a relative of the family and that she hosted a cookout.
Small, who has since returned to Prince George’s County, told ABC7 she was unaware that Johnson had run for office until she was contacted by a reporter. “It was shocking,” she said. “She was bold enough to try and take our home from us. I think she’s bold enough to do whatever she thinks she can do.”
Small’s analogy for the situation was direct: “If a person came in and robbed a bank and they go to jail and now they’re reformed, they’re doing great things in the community, as a banker, I’m not going to go hire them as a teller.”
Johnson’s Account — and Her Defense
Johnson has not accepted the jury’s verdict as the full account of events. In a self-published book, she portrays herself as a victim of her co-conspirator, real estate agent Shannon Lee, describing Lee as having pitched the scheme to her as a legitimate way to acquire foreclosed properties. “Shannon told me the homes were foreclosed and abandoned, available for purchase at the amount owed in back taxes. She called it a realtor’s best-kept secret. What I saw as guidance, the state later defined as fraud,” the book reads.
Prosecutors told a different story at trial. Court records show that $126,000 from the fraudulent sale of one illegally obtained home was deposited directly into Johnson’s personal bank account.
Johnson has argued that the conviction shouldn’t define her eligibility for public service. “People are judging me without giving any context to anything before or anything that came after that,” she said in an interview earlier this year.
She has pointed to her eleven-plus years of federal government service with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs as evidence of her capacity to manage a public office.
Life After Release — and a Political Profile
Since her release from prison in 2017, Johnson has built a significant public profile in Prince George’s County criminal justice reform circles. She founded Life After Release, a nonprofit providing reentry services to formerly and currently incarcerated individuals in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia region, and she has co-founded CourtWatch PG, a court-monitoring program that deploys volunteers to observe judicial proceedings at the Prince George’s courthouse in Upper Marlboro — the same courthouse whose Clerk’s Office she is now positioned to lead.
She has testified before the Maryland General Assembly in favor of restoring voting rights to incarcerated people and co-authored a 2026 op-ed in Maryland Reporter advocating for restoration of jury service eligibility for people with prior convictions.
In that op-ed, Johnson wrote that Maryland’s exclusion of people with prior convictions from juries undermined the fairness of the justice system — an argument grounded in her own experience with what she describes as a flawed prosecution.
Her campaign website frames her candidacy in terms of accountability and equity. “Our community deserves a court system that is secure, efficient, and equitable,” it reads. The site did not disclose her conviction. According to the Baltimore Banner, Johnson did not respond to the voter guide questionnaire for this race.
What County Leadership Said
The outcome didn’t go unnoticed at the county level. Councilmember Edward Burroughs III, who publicly backed Johnson, acknowledged the result on election night even as the count remained incomplete. “She did very well. Very proud of her,” he told the Banner.
The race was called among the most surprising results of the night, alongside several other upset outcomes in Prince George’s primary contests.
The Second Chances Question — and Its Limits
There is a genuine public policy debate embedded in this story, and it deserves to be acknowledged directly.
Maryland law does not prohibit people with felony convictions from running for or holding the office of Clerk of the Circuit Court. Johnson is exercising a constitutional right, and her opponent acknowledged as much during the campaign. The argument for second chances in civic life — that people who have served their sentences should be able to fully reintegrate — is a serious one, and Johnson has been a credible voice for it.
The system she once exploited is now the system she’ll oversee.
But the question of second chances is distinct from the question of fit. The Clerk’s office is not just any elected position. It is the county’s official recordkeeper for property transactions — the institutional safeguard against exactly the kind of document fraud for which Johnson was convicted. The office’s credibility depends on public confidence in the integrity of the documents it maintains and certifies.
Property owners, title companies, attorneys, and courts across the region rely on those records. The land records division is, in practical terms, the system that the housing fraud scheme exploited and undermined.
That is not a tangential concern. It is, arguably, the whole question.
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Sources
This article drew on the ABC7/WJLA I-Team’s April 23, 2026, report “Candidate for Prince George’s County Clerk Confronts Criminal Past,” which provided the primary sourcing on Johnson’s conviction, sentencing, and the accounts of fraud victim Donnie Small. Election results and vote totals came from the Greenbelt News Review’s post-primary report and the Maryland State Board of Elections’ 2026 Gubernatorial Primary unofficial results. Election night context and the Banner’s June 24, 2026, piece “In Prince George’s, a Mandate Emerges in County Government” provided additional framing, as did the Banner’s May 2026 voter guide for the Clerk’s race and the Washington Informer’s primary night roundup. Johnson’s advocacy record was drawn from her April 8, 2026, op-ed in Maryland Reporter, co-authored with Heather Warnken, her February 2025 General Assembly testimony on HB710, and her nonprofit and campaign websites at lifeafterrelease.org, courtwatchpg.com, and qianaforclerk.com.
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