Rodricks: Time to pull the plug?

Irealize that former President George W. Bush, who brought us war, death and chronic instability in Iraq, rendered the expression “Mission accomplished” a national joke. But that does not prohibit the rest of us, including Marilyn Mosby, from using it.

Bush famously stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier on May 1, 2003, with the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner as backdrop to a live telecast. The president triumphantly declared the end of combat operations in Iraq.

Of course, the war dragged on for another eight years, and Iraq remains a hornet’s nest. Bush later admitted that hanging the banner was a mistake. (He never, however, said as much about the decision to launch the war.)

“Mission accomplished” is thus forever fraught. Anyone who invokes it now risks conjuring up Bush-era overstatement, overconfidence and underachievement.

Still, Mosby, the state’s attorney of Baltimore, could use it. She won’t listen to me, but I’ll say it anyway: Before the next trial begins, Mosby could quit the remaining Freddie Gray cop cases while she’s behind — the score, so far, is three trials, no convictions — and, with the judge’s gag order lifted, she could declare, “Mission accomplished.” Here are the grounds for that: The prosecutions of officers charged in Gray’s arrest and death have been futile; the state has failed to prove criminality on the part of the cops. Still, Mosby has served notice that Baltimore’s top prosecutor is willing to pursue charges against police. That alone seems to have satisfied many citizens who believed such a thing would never happen.

Mosby could go a step further and own up to another motivation for announcing the charges in a big, public way on May 1, 2015 — that she knew the announcement would reduce tension in the city following the disturbances that broke out five days earlier, on April 27, after Gray’s funeral in West Baltimore.

That’s not mere columnist conjecture.

One year ago, in a court filing, Mosby’s top deputy, Michael Schatzow, argued that his boss’s widely televised announcement of charges from the steps of the War Memorial was appropriate in a shocked city fearful of more trouble. It helped restore order “before the entire city became an armed camp or was burned to the ground.”

Schatzow’s remarks were in response to defense claims that Mosby’s public comments had tainted the potential jury pool for the trials ahead.

“Mrs. Mosby was trying to calm the crowd, not incite it,” Schatzow answered: “Her repeated pleas for peace while the criminal justice system does its work served a legitimate law enforcement function.”

I find this notion interesting — that crowd control might be among the duties of a state’s attorney, and that, under certain conditions, filing criminal charges in the name of restoring or keeping the peace might be an acceptable pursuit.

I have to stand back and think about that. I can’t imagine legal ethicists agreeing with it. A prosecutor does not charge cops, or anyone, with crimes just to appease a crowd.

I’m not saying that’s all Mosby was thinking last year. But the suspicion was there from the start, that charging the cops was as much about quelling unrest as about seeing justice done. Schatzow’s statements pretty much confirmed it.

Mosby has been criticized for pursuing politics over justice.

Many others cheer for and root for Mosby; they applaud what she did.

Others, including me, did not cheer. Nor did we boo. We were just shocked that, after such a relatively short investigation, the state’s attorney’s office could file charges, including one of second-degree murder against Officer Caesar Goodson Jr., the driver of the police van in which Gray suffered fatal injuries. The case seemed to be slapped together in haste.

Mosby raised expectations that a cop might go to prison for giving Gray a “rough ride.” But now that Goodson has been acquitted of all counts after a bench trial, there’s real doubt about getting any convictions at all.

And now we’re hearing calls for Mosby’s resignation and her disbarment.

Neither of those things is going to happen anytime soon, if at all. She runs for re-election in 2018.

At this point, with another cop trial approaching, I’m standing here, looking up at the courthouses on either side of Calvert Street, wondering how and when this ends. We have shootings, homicides and funerals of young men every week across the city and a homicide clearance rate of just 32 percent.

Given that, and the smashing defeat for the state in the Goodson case, I’m questioning the continued pursuit of the Freddie Gray cases when Baltimoreans need and deserve fullthrottle cooperation between cops and prosecutors in pursuit of violent criminals who destroy lives.