Experts have said the prosecution’s inability to net a conviction in the previous trials highlighted State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s overreach in charging the six officers in the death of Gray, who died of injuries sustained in the back of a police van past year.
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Prosecutors claimed Gray was not secured with a seat belt in the van and said police did not provide aid when he asked to be taken to a hospital.
Despite the lack of convictions, Gray’s case drew more attention to the Black Lives Matter movement, especially in Baltimore, and highlighted the unsafe way black men are often treated by law enforcement even when guns aren’t involved.
A retrial against Porter had been scheduled after a jury deadlocked in the case against him in December.
“Without real substantive reforms to the criminal justice system, we could try this case a hundred times, and cases just like it, and still end up with the same result”, she said.
Darden said police “lied, I know they lied, and they killed him” during a press conference Wednesday morning.
The request to dismiss charges was made by Baltimore Chief Deputy State’s Attorney Michael Schatzow in court Wednesday.
“The decision to prosecute six police officers was not and has never been an indictment of the whole Baltimore police department”.
But, as Alperstein noted, it’s tough to see how Judge Barry Williams, who presided over the bench trials of Officer Nero, Sergeant Caesar Goodson and Lieutenant Brian Rice, would find Miller guilty. Their attorneys have said they acted reasonably and professionally, and that Gray’s death was the result of a tragic accident.
Mosby, 35, comes from a long line of police officers, including her grandfather, four uncles and her mother, assumed a key role in a case that again draw national attention to the issue of relations between police officers and the communities they’re sworn to serve.
Miller faces a list of charges including manslaughter, assault, misconduct in office and reckless endangerment. 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. Officer William Porter was to set be retried in September, and Sgt. Alicia White was scheduled for trial in October.
Davis says those same detectives investigated and criminally charged a Baltimore police officer who is presently on trial for attempted murder.
She told critics that had called her anti-police that she is only “anti-police brutality” and maintained that her professional role was to seek justice on behalf an innocent man who died after being unreasonably taken in to custody by police.
Within days, Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby charged six officers in his arrest and death. He says they are more than willing to hold people who commit crimes accountable for their actions.
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The charges were dropped Wednesday at a pretrial hearing for Officer Garrett Miller.
