The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
HOW CASE AGAINST OFFICERS IN BALTIMORE UNRAVELED
The state’s attorney in Baltimore on Wednesday dropped all remaining charges against three city police officers awaiting trial in the death of Freddie Gray, ending one of the most closely watched — and unsuccessful — police prosecutions in the nation.
The decision brought to a close a sweeping prosecution that began with criminal charges against six police officers in May 2015, announced with the city still in the grips of violent protest after the death of Gray, who was found unresponsive and not breathing after he bounced around, handcuffed, shackled and unsecured by a seatbelt, in a police transport wagon after his arrest in April 2015. Gray later died of a spinal cord injury.
But prosecutors were unable to secure a single conviction during the first four trials, the first of which, for Officer William G. Porter, began in December and ended in a mistrial that led to months of delays. Officer Edward M. Nero, who participated in the initial arrest, was acquitted in May; Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr., the driver of the vehicle in which Gray was transported, was acquitted in June; and another officer present early in the arrest, Lt. Brian Rice, was acquitted earlier this month.
The extraordinary turn of events put in sharp relief the wrenching national debate over race and policing — after a month of deadly shootings of African-American men and deadly retaliations that left President Barack Obama pleading for racial healing after five police officers in Dallas were gunned down by a black Army veteran.
In Baltimore, a majority black city, that debate is playing out with great nuance. The case featured a black victim, but it also had a black judge who once worked as a civil rights lawyer investigating police misconduct, and a black prosecutor. And three of the six officers are black, as is the defense lawyer who spoke on their behalf Wednesday.
At the end, there were no convictions, and there were more questions than answers, with still no clarity on how Gray died. There was anguish on all sides of the debate.
“We’re nowhere,” Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, said from Boston, where he was running a training session for police executives. “It just adds to the strong visceral feelings on both sides. Both sides walk away from this feeling like they didn’t get justice — the people who were concerned about Freddie Gray, and the people who are concerned about cops doing their job.”
“We haven’t gotten to the bottom of the Freddie Gray case,” he said.
State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby — released from the gag order that had kept her from commenting — fiercely defended the prosecutions.
“We do not believe Freddie Gray killed himself,” she said.
Mosby also said the prosecutions had led to changes to police practices and pushed the Baltimore Police Department, long plagued by accusations of racial bias and under investigation by the Department of Justice, “one step closer to equality.”
Mosby’s move caused ripples on the presidential campaign trial, as Donald Trump, who has cast himself as the law-and-order candidate, criticized her.
“I think she ought to prosecute herself,” Trump told reporters traveling with him. He added, “I think it was disgraceful what she did and the way she did it and the news conference that she had where they were guilty before anybody knew the facts.”
Critics of Mosby have long raised questions about whether she overcharged the officers. She insisted Wednesday that she had not.
Instead, appearing before television cameras in front of a mural in the West Baltimore neighborhood where Gray grew up, was arrested and died, she was every bit as passionate as she was when she first announced the prosecutions. And she issued an urgent call for criminal justice reform.
Mosby said the decision to drop the charges had been “agonizing.” But she said she had no choice given the realities of the case — including the lack of an independent investigatory agency to help prosecutors and the officers’ right to opt trial by judge instead of a jury. The judge, Barry G. Williams Jr., made clear he did not agree with prosecutors’ theory of the case.
“Without real substantive reforms to the current criminal justice system, we could try this case 100 times and cases just like it, and we would still end up with the same result,” Mosby said.
As she defended herself and her prosecution team, a starkly differing version of events emerged from the president of the police union — who branded Mosby’s criticisms of police as “outrageous” — and a lawyer for one of the officers, four of whom are back on the job.
“Baltimore, it’s time to heal,” attorney Ivan J. Bates, who represented Sgt. Alicia D. White, told reporters, speaking on behalf of all the other lawyers and defendants. He extended condolences to the Gray family and said, “None of these officers woke up wanting to do anything negative to anyone.”
Bates said Williams, who investigated police misconduct as a civil rights lawyer with the Justice Department, had followed the evidence — even if Mosby did not like where it led.
“You can get a conviction against the police, whether a bench trial or a jury trial, if you do an investigation,” the lawyer said. But, he said, if “you quickly want to automatically say that the officers are guilty because they’re the police, then you perpetrate that fear that’s already there and that’s dividing our country.”
Lt. Gene Ryan, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police Baltimore City Lodge 3, said that Mosby had refused to accept that an investigation by Baltimore police found that no crime had been committed.
“She had her own agenda,” he said.
All six officers face administrative hearings led by the police in Montgomery and Howard counties.
To Black Lives Matter activists, the outcome was a clear disappointment — though perhaps not a surprise. DeRay Mckesson, a leader of the movement who later ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Baltimore, echoed Mosby’s call for criminal justice reform, saying “someone should be held responsible” for Gray’s death.
“The dismissals are a reminder that the laws, practices and policies justify the actions of the police at all costs,” Mckesson said in a text message. “Freddie Gray should be alive today and someone should be held responsible for his death.”