Mosby claimed that some members of the Baltimore police department attempted to undermine the state’s case and said that there is “inherent bias” when “police police themselves”.
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Mosby says prosecutors do not believe that Gray killed himself when he was handcuffed and shackled in the back of a police van and stand by the medical examiner’s finding that his death was a homicide.
Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby (center) arrives for a news conference near the site where Freddie Gray, in the mural at right, was arrested, after her office dropped the remaining charges against three Baltimore police officers awaiting trial in Gray’s death, in Baltimore on July 27. Michelle Dickens, 55, comforted Gray’s mother, a distraught Gloria Darden, who was surrounded by friends and neighbors after Mosby spoke.
“We could try this case 100 times and cases just like it, and we would end up with the same result”, she said.
Authorities charged with pursuing justice in Gray’s death announced Wednesday that they were giving up, moving on, packing it in.
Along with Miller, Sgt. Alicia White still faced trial along with the retrial of Officer William Porter, noted NPR. Grand juries had declined to charge officers involved in the shooting of Michael Brown (18) in Ferguson, Missouri, and in the choking death of 43-year-old Garner in NY.
Prosecutors also sought to have the officers testify against each other, even though some of them had not yet been tried. The victim, judge, top prosecutor and mayor are African-American, as was the police chief at the time of Mr Gray’s death.
Gray suffered a severe injury to his spine while he was being held in a police van after his arrest on April 12, 2105, and he died a week later. Three other police officers – Officers Edward Nero and Caesar Goodson and Lt. Brian Rice – were each acquitted in individual bench trials in the last three months.
“This system is in need of reform when it comes to police accountability”, she said. Defense attorneys fought that idea before the Maryland Court of Appeals, where a panel of judges determined that the officers could be compelled to take the stand as long as a hearing was held to ensure a defendant’s comments as a witness were excluded from his or her trial. All officers will soon be equipped with body-worn cameras, and the U.S. Justice Department has launched an investigation into allegations of widespread abuse and unlawful arrests by police. “She did what she had to do”, said Tessa Hill-Aston, president of the Baltimore City branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
“I think (Mosby) made a wise decision, because the judge has found in the past that the cases were thin”, she said.
If the charges were not dropped for very specific legal reasons, there is a chance that the State Attorney’s office could recharge the officers at a later date – but that decision rests exclusively with the prosecutor’s office and isn’t up to Gray’s family’s lawyers.
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The death added fuel to the growing Black Lives Matter movement and caused turmoil in Baltimore, including large protests and the worst riots the city had seen in decades. This precluded the prosecution from using anything he said in that testimony, or anything derived from that testimony, in Miller’s own trial, creating a huge administrative nightmare for the prosecution to prove it had met this obligation.
