“We believe that a combination of training and [general] orders would’ve alerted the defendant that the conduct he engaged in was not within the scope” of proper officer conduct, said Chief Deputy State’s Attorney Michael Schatzow, according to the Sun. A grand jury indicted the officers on all of the original charges except false arrest and illegal imprisonment.
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Rice, the highest-ranking officer involved in Gray’s apprehension and arrest, has pleaded not guilty to charges including involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault, reckless endangerment, and two counts of misconduct in office. The actual trial will begin on Thursday. Prosecutors have said in some cases police didn’t give them the documents in question.
Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry Williams ruled Tuesday that prosecutors can’t enter into evidence 4,000 pages of documents involving the training of Lt. Brian Rice, the fourth of six officers – three black, three white – to be tried in the young black man’s death…
Williams’ order means the documentation of Rice’s training will not be admissible as evidence in court.
It sounds like it’s certainly possible that the prosecutors had trouble getting the documents, but that’s not the judge’s problem nor is it the responsibility of the defense. Two officers were acquitted on all charges in bench trials before Williams; the trial of a third ended in a hung jury.
The state has yet to secure a conviction in any of the cases that went to trial.
Lt. Rice ordered the bike patrol officer to chase Gray and later helped load him into the police van. In a motion filed late last month, they asked Williams to dismiss the charges, arguing that “defects” in the prosecution violated Rice’s due process rights. In one, a sheriff’s major said in a sworn affidavit that he recommended charges against Rice and other officers despite having no role in investigating Gray’s death. Rice is now out on $350,000 bail.
Gray’s neck was broken after cops did not put the shackled Gray, 25, in a seat belt in a metal transport compartment. Rice’s lawyers said Tuesday that he has chosen to be tried instead by a judge, the same one who acquitted two fellow officers in Freddie Gray’s death. The discovery violations are symptomatic of the struggles plaguing the Gray prosecution.
Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby vowed to bring justice to an aggrieved citizenry when she announced the charges previous year.
Defense attorneys argue that two recent disclosures in the case revealed prosecutorial misconduct.
Brian Rice, center, arrives at Courthouse East Tuesday, July 5, 2016 in Baltimore for a pretrial hearing related to the arrest and death of Freddie Gray. It is unclear if Lt. Rice’s higher rank will be the difference between an acquittal and a guilty verdict.
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“The judge wants to hear an independent expert say, ‘This is the way a prisoner must be treated when taken into police custody, ‘ ” Colbert said. Mosby’s office had claimed Cogen led independent investigation for their office, but Cogen in his affidavit said he only signed off on the investigation completed by the state’s attorney’s office. Nilson said the state made no additional request for Rice’s documents until June 18, and said the city provided those documents on June 27 and June 28. He cited the testimony of a police trainer and defense witness in the Goodson trial, whose testimony prosecutors successfully had stricken because she couldn’t say for sure whether she had trained Goodson.
