How to take bias and politics out of police cases

In acknowledging her failed prosecution of the six officers she boldly accused of criminality in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray last year, Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby alleged Wednesday that members of the Baltimore Police Department had worked against her at every stage.

In so many words: It wasn’t her fault she could not get a conviction, it was the cops’.

Mosby might have reminded us that she comes from a law enforcement family, that she is not “anti-police,” that she finds the present police commissioner, Kevin Davis, to be “extremely accommodating,” and that her indictment of the Freddie Gray Six was not an indictment of the entire department. Indeed, Mosby offered all those pleasantries.

But in the next breath, she bitterly accused police investigators of “inherent bias” and “consistent bias,” and asserted that police cannot police themselves.

Mosby’s statement to the news media seemed to echo what one of her lead prosecutors had suggested during the June trial of Officer Caesar Goodson Jr., the driver of the police van in which Gray suffered a fatal spinal injury: that a detective had tried to sabotage the state’s case. Mosby insinuated that others wearing a badge had also been saboteurs. Let me parse some of Mosby’s statement:

Excuse me, but didn’t Mosby insist last year that her office had conducted an independent investigation before she announced the charges?

And didn’t the Police Department assemble a task force of more than 30 to investigate Gray’s death, led by a two-time homicide commander and Davis, then a deputy commissioner?

Was it assumed that “inherent bias” would infect all 30 investigators to the point that Mosby’s office had to conduct an independent, parallel investigation?

If the police task force — Baltimore police investigating Baltimore police — was, in Mosby’s words, “problematic,” why didn’t she ask for help from an outside investigative agency, perhaps the state police, or a police department from a Maryland county? Why didn’t she ask the Maryland attorney general for help, or refer the case to a state special prosecutor?

This part of Mosby’s statement — that her office needed the help of an independent agency — supports the argument, proffered by numerous critics, that her investigation of Gray’s death was hasty, cobbled together during one of the worst weeks in Baltimore history and announced just four days after the looting, arson and vandalism that hit Baltimore.

Those of us familiar with complex criminal cases involving more than one defendant thought all along that a longer investigation was needed, and that the pressure wrought by the April 27 unrest had forced Mosby to act too soon.

Here Mosby seemed to suggest that the criminal justice system was rigged against the state because all but one of the officers she accused of criminality in Gray’s arrest and death had opted to be tried by a judge instead of a jury.

Excuse me, but that doesn’t fly. All criminal defendants have this right in Maryland. It’s not like the cops enjoyed some exclusive advantage.

Again, it sounds like Mosby thinks the entire system, presumably even the judge, was set against convictions of the Freddie Gray Six.

She maintained her belief in the charges — she has to, of course — though it was clear from the rulings of Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry G. Williams that the state didn’t have much. In three trials, the prosecution failed to prove to Williams that the officers’ treatment of Gray rose to criminality. (A fourth trial, of Officer William Porter, ended in a mistrial after the jury wasunable to reach a unanimous verdict on any of the four charges.)

If what Mosby said about police investigators is true, it sounds like there should be an obstruction-of-justice investigation.

Beyond that, she should, as she pledged Wednesday afternoon in an interview with The Baltimore Sun, take her complaints to the Maryland attorney general, the governor and the General Assembly, and settle this with new law — that, in cases of suspected criminality by police officers (excessive force, negligence), the departments that employ them be prohibited from investigating them. Cop cases should go to agencies from other jurisdictions.

And, further, a special prosecutor — not the local elected state’s attorney — should take any such case to a grand jury.

That would remove any hint of “inherent bias” or grandstanding politics — and it would keep the local state’s attorney’s office out of a bitter battle with the unionized police force it must work with to make a community safe.