Juror says police hard to convict
Why is it hard to convict police officers of homicide? One reason, in the view of a juror in a prominent police case, is authority — officers display it, and jurors, more often than not, defer to it.
Ann Loar Brooks was forewoman of the only jury trial held for a police officer in the death of Freddie Gray, a 25yearold black man who was arrested on a street in Baltimore in April 2015 for allegedly possessing a knife. Some witnesses said an officer knelt on Gray’s neck and that police threw him headfirst into the back of a patrol van, testimony that the officers denied. When the van reached the police station a half hour later, Gray was removed and taken to a hospital in a coma. He died of spinal cord injuries a week later.
In the trial, Officer William Porter, who was also African American, was charged with involuntary manslaughter and three lesser counts, charges that were eventually dismissed after his jury deadlocked. According to testimony, Porter entered the van at a stop midway through the ride, lifted Gray from the floor where he was lying facedown, put him on a
bench and then sat in another section of the van where he could not see Gray.
Gray fell from the bench later in the ride. Prosecutors accused Porter of helping to cause his death by failing to secure him with a seat belt and by not summoning a medic when Gray pleaded with him for help when he first saw the officer. The defense said Gray had banged his own head into a wall of the van.
In some respects, Porter’s case differed from other highprofile prosecutions of police. There were no videos, as there were in the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles and the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis with an officer’s knee on his neck. Gray was fatally injured outside public view, and the cause, or causes, of his death remain in dispute.
But in the first known public comments by a juror in Porter’s case, Brooks told The Chronicle that Porter’s police colleagues played a crucial role for her fellow jurors. Although using seat belts while transporting suspects was common practice among Baltimore police, she said, a series of officers testified in Porter’s defense that they would not have used a belt on Gray, and “would not have stepped above their rank to call for a medic.”
“When somebody walks into a courtroom dressed in their uniform, they carry a certain weight,” said Brooks, who disagreed with jurors who voted to clear Porter. “They didn’t come in dressed as civilians. They dressed as officers.”
She said other jurors found the officers more credible than an expert witness on police conduct, who testified for the prosecution that police must use seat belts to protect passengers in vans in order to comply with standards of reasonable care. In fact, the Baltimore Police Department had ordered its officers to buckle passengers several days before Gray’s arrest, but Porter testified he had been unaware of the order.
It also made a difference, Brooks said, that Porter’s response when Gray asked for help was to consult the van’s driver, Caesar Goodson, who was in charge of the scene and did not call for a medic. Goodson was later acquitted of murder in a separate trial.
During deliberations, Brooks said, one juror, a firefighter, told the other panel members that he had been taught “if the person above you said to do this, that’s what you do . ... You never go above your rank.”
Brooks said she replied that “if I didn’t buckle somebody in the back seat of my car and they were injured, I would be held responsible,” but the other jurors were apparently unswayed.
The jury — seven blacks and five whites, seven women and five men — deliberated for about 15 hours over three days and then reported that it was deadlocked on all four counts.
Brooks said the final votes were 111 for acquittal on involuntary manslaughter; 82 for acquittal, with two undecided, on seconddegree assault; 73 for conviction, with two undecided, on reckless endangerment; and 101 for conviction, with one undecided, on misconduct in office.
Brooks said she was the only juror to vote to convict Porter on every charge. She is now writing a book about the trial and planning to move to the Bay Area to join her children.
“I don’t think justice was done,” said Brooks, a white woman who was in her early 60s at the time. “To me, what William Porter did in not calling for a medic and in not seatbelting Freddie Gray was a wanton disregard of Freddie Gray’s life,” one definition of manslaughter under the law.
She also got the impression that, to some of her fellow jurors, “Freddie Gray was, in their minds, a dangerous drug user from the projects, even though that morning he and his friends were looking for carpentry work.”
After the deadlock, Judge Barry Williams declared a mistrial. Goodson and another officer facing trial then opted for nonjury trials before Williams, who heard evidence and acquitted them of all charges. The city prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, then dropped charges against Porter and three others who never went to trial. Baltimore paid $6.4 million to settle a lawsuit by Gray’s family.
Brooks’ observations about police testimony are not unique.
“Jurors are hesitant to secondguess splitsecond decisions by officers when they use force, deadly or otherwise,” Terry White, a retired Los Angeles deputy district attorney, told
The Chronicle. White was the lead prosecutor of four officers charged with using excessive force against black motorist Rodney King, whose beating with clubs and boots in 1991 was recorded in excruciating detail, replayed for the jury and dissected by the officers’ attorneys.
An allwhite, suburban jury acquitted three officers and deadlocked on the fourth in 1992, triggering riots that killed 54 people. In a separate trial, a federal court jury later convicted two of the officers of violating King’s civil rights.
Police can also face a backlash when juror deference seems excessive, said Jim Newton, an author, longtime journalist and UCLA teacher who covered the federal trial in King’s case and O.J. Simpson’s trial in 1995 on charges of murdering his estranged wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. Newton said Simpson’s acquittal by a Los Angeles jury came at a time of widespread public sentiment that the first King jury had given officers far too much leeway.
“When the defense says Simpson is the victim of sloppy police work and possibly a frame, it didn’t sound as outlandish” as it might have a few years earlier, Newton said.
Brooks said Porter’s case was her second homicide trial as a juror. The first, a murder case in 2001, also ended in a hung jury.
“I will never be on a jury again,” she said.