Mosby gained national attention after she brought charges on the officers. “Justice has been done”, Bates said.
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“I recognize the emotional nature of this case”, she said.
The decision by prosecutors comes after a judge had already acquitted three of the six officers charged in the case, including the van driver who the state considered the most responsible and another officer who was the highest-ranking of the group.
“There’s a point at which you recognize doing the same thing over and over is not an effective strategy”, Ruther said.
All charges were dropped as pretrial motions were set to begin for Officer Garrett Miller (right). When a crowd gathered around the police wagon where officers were attempting to place an “uncooperative” Gray, Rice “directed other officers to move the wagon approximately one block south in order to complete paperwork and otherwise effectuate Mr”.
Freddie Gray died in April of a year ago, a week after his neck was broken in the back of a police wagon. We can not allow the ongoing targeting and murdering of black people in the hands of police to continue. She said she was sad, but expected that none of the officers would be held accountable after observing how the previous trials have gone. Officers callously ignored Gray’s cries for medical help. Darden says police “lied, I know they lied, and they killed him”. And it turns out that an officer charged with illegally arresting Gray never laid a hand on him during his initial detainment. They are still subject to internal investigations.
When Officer William Porter’s trial ended in a hung jury, it was the next step backward because the prosecution had to make some hard calls on the fly: Should it seek to retrial Porter before proceeding with the other cases?
While praising the police officers for persevering through four trials in seven months, he’s called Ms Mosby “a disgrace to the world of prosecutors”.
Still, the challenges for the state appeared increasingly overwhelming as Miller’s trial approached. Trials for Officers Alicia White and William Porter had been scheduled for the fall.
Callan said he thinks the plaintiffs will argue that Mosby, an elected official, did become an investigator because of her belief that police were not properly pursuing the case and her desire to appease her political constituency.
“Clearly they had given up on that pretense that they were keeping the trials separate”, Pipkin said. And I give a lot of respect and a lot of credit to those police officers who probably could’ve made a deal; they stuck it out and she had no chance. Each sought a separate trial. Mosby’s remarks, Rice alleges, broke the state’s code of professional conduct, which forbids lawyers from making “an extrajudicial statement” they know will prejudice a court proceeding.
He said the state’s attorney’s office had a “clean team” that was not exposed to the immunized testimony and a “filter team” ensuring the former wasn’t exposed to any evidence derived from that testimony. “That all the officers were tried separately, that definitely weakens the state’s case”. Mosby defended her cases, her office, herself.
Ultimately, Mosby and her staff felt dropping the charges would still be the best way to continue reforms within the police department despite not getting a conviction.
Charges against the last three police officers accused over the death of detainee Freddie Gray have been dropped. “This case was always a hard one to prove and certainly beyond a reasonable doubt”, said David Jaros, a law professor at the University of Baltimore who closely followed the trials.
“There was a reluctance and an obvious bias consistently exemplified, not by the entire Baltimore police force, but by individuals within the Baltimore Police Department at every stage of the investigation”, Mosby said. This led the judge to believe there was no sign of malintent.
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There are some who will undoubtedly blame Mosby for the lack of results but that would be tremendously short-sighted on their part.
