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Freddie Gray Tag

Posted by Mike LaChance on June 11, 2015 54 Comments
Baltimore is caught in a law enforcement conundrum. People rioted over what they claimed was police brutality and as a result, cops are doing less than they used to. Can you blame them? Public backlash and fear of prosecution have caused them to switch from proactive policing to a reactive mode. This chart from the Baltimore Sun illustrates the gravity of the situation by comparing arrests from 2014 and 2015: Allahpundit of Hot Air points out some grim statistics:
There were 23 homicides and 39 nonfatal shootings in Baltimore in May 2014. Through 29 days of May 2015, there were 42 homicides and 104 nonfatal shootings. Gulp.
Gulp indeed.

Posted by Andrew Branca on June 10, 2015 47 Comments
Once again information emerges that Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby is an integral actor in the circumstances surrounding Freddie Gray's arrest and death, rather than an objective prosecutor simply addressing a criminal case. Roughly three weeks before Baltimore police officers arrested Gray for possession of an illegal knife Mosby herself was strongly advocating for substantially increased policing in the very neighborhood where Gray would be taken into custody, according to a report by the Baltimore Sun. Lt. Kenneth Butler, a shift commander for more than a decade, and a representative for an advocacy group for women and minority officers, is quoted in the Sun report as saying that he had never before seen such orders come from the state's attorney's office.  Further, he expressed no uncertainty about what the consequences would be: "Once you're given an order, you have to carry it out. It's just that simple."  And in terms of the tactics that would necessarily be involved?
They want increased productivity, whether it be car stops, field interviews, arrests — that's what they mean by measurables. You have to use whatever tools you have — whether it be bike officers, cameras, foot officers, whatever you have — to abate that problem. So you're going to have to be aggressive. (emphasis added)

Posted by Andrew Branca on June 09, 2015 72 Comments
Once again, Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby seems to be having difficulty grasping fundamentals of the practice of law. Indeed, she's now reduced to making exactly the same errors she only recently accused opposing counsel of making. In this most current instance, Mosby's motion for a gag order on the Freddie Gray case has been rejected, reports the Baltimore Sun (h/t Conservative Treehouse). The reason?  She filed her motion in Circuit Court on May 14, but while the matter was still jurisdictionally in the lower District Court.  The matter was not moved into Circuit Court until May 21, a week later. Ironically, in Mosby's motion opposing defense counsel's efforts to have her recuse herself from the case the Prosecutor argued that it was improper of the defense to make that argument in District Court, where the matter then rested, knowing as they did that the case would end up in District Circuit Court.

Posted by Andrew Branca on June 05, 2015 38 Comments
We're all familiar with the proverb, rats flee a sinking ship. To see this in action on a human scale we need look no further than the offices of Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. In a story that's gotten remarkably little news coverage, the Baltimore Sun Times reports that four of the Mayor's highest ranking staff have quit since six Baltimore police officers were charged in the death of Freddie Gray. Among those who have resigned:

LeVar Michael, Head of the mayor's Office of Nonviolent Programs, resigned on Wednesday, May 20.

Angela Johnese, Director of the Criminal Justice Office, resigned on Friday, May 22.

Heather Brantner, Coordinator of the Mayor's Sexual Assault Response Team, also resigned on Friday, May 22. (Coincidence?)

Perhaps most shocking however, was the next resignation the following week:

Shannon Cosgrove, the Mayor's own Deputy Director, resigned Tuesday, May 26 (the day after Memorial Day.)

For those without a calendar in front of them, that's four high-level departures in a period of four business days.

Posted by Andrew Branca on June 04, 2015 127 Comments
State Attorney Marilyn Mosby, who raised eyebrows (understatement maximus) when she abruptly charged six Baltimore police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, has now sought to seal Gray's autopsy report from the public. This is based on reporting by the Baltimore Sun, as brought to my attention by Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller. As reported in the Daily Caller piece, Ivan Bates, the attorney for the only female officer charged by Mosby's office in the case, is quoted as saying:
[Th]ere is something in that autopsy report that they are trying to hide. . . . It’s as if she wants to do everything to make sure our clients do not get a fair trial. . . . Nobody would know anything but the state and the defense, so they would totally hide it from the public. . . .  If your case is as good as you said it was, why don’t you just show the evidence? . . . You can’t holler and say, ‘I’m about accountability for the citizens,’ and then run around filing for a protective order.

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 29, 2015 53 Comments
Fox host Megyn Kelly had a segment on last night in which she played video of public statements made by Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby regarding the Freddy Gray case In the video clip Mosby calls for "Justice, by any and all means necessary," echoing Malcolm X. And here's a few seconds of discussion of the subject between Kelly and Fox contributor Judge Napolitano:

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 23, 2015 33 Comments
This past Thursday Prosecutor Mosby announced that the Grand Jury had formally returned indictments against the six Baltimore officers charged in the death of Freddy Gray. In our post that afternoon (Freddie Gray Case: Baltimore Grand Jury Issues Indictments, published 5:50PM), we noted that there were some subtle differences between the charges returned by the Grand Jury and the charges originally publicly announced by Mosby on May 1. In particular, we made the two following observations (in bold-italic, emphasis added here):
Mosby’s May 1 charges had also included “False imprisonment (8th Amendment)”, and that has been dropped.  I see this as an implicit concession that Gray’s arrest was lawful, for the reasons we’ve previously espoused here Freddie Gray Case: Prosecutor Doubles Down On Wrong Law and here Confirmed – Freddie Gray’s Knife WAS Illegal and here Freddie Gray’s Knife – Why is Prosecutor Claiming Unlawful Arrest? Similarly, every one of the officers who was charged with “False imprisonment” by Mosby on May 1–meaning Rice, Nero, and Miller, the three arresting officers–has had that charge dropped by the Grand Jury. In its place has been added “Reckless endangerment (5 years), which I interpret as Mosby’s new “safe charge”–that is, the charge on which she hopes to get a conviction even after her case otherwise implodes for lack of evidence. It is notable that this “Reckless endangerment (5 years) has been added as a charge against each and every one of the six officers, none of whom were previously charged with this offense.

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 22, 2015 77 Comments
It doesn't look like I'm going to run out of "white cop shoots unarmed black man" stories to write about any time soon---except this time it was two black men. As always, please note the caveat that this shooting event is still developing, and all the "facts" in my possession are sourced from "journalists" and thus may have only a tenuous relationship to the truth. The reporting comes from The Olympian newspaper out of Washington.  It seems that an officer with the Olympia police department, 35-year-old Ryan Donald, scored multiple hits on two robbery suspects who decided they'd rather attack the officer than comply with lawful orders. Indeed, the two men---reportedly brothers---were apparently so determined to tangle with Officer Donald that even after he'd shot one of them and they'd both managed to successfully flee, they came back.  The second man was "shot multiple times in the torso." The police department reports that Donald immediately set about providing first aid and called for emergency medical response.

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 21, 2015 92 Comments
UPDATE: We have additional information on the specific charges specified in the Grand Jury indictments, and how they differ from the charges announced by Prosecutor Mosby on May 1. Here's video of Mosby's press statement on the charges, at which she took  no questions: Clarification on changes to "false imprisonment" charges: Below we note that the "False imprisonment (8th Amendment)" charges are not present on a written list of the Grand Jury's charges (embedded below), and we speculate that this may be an implicit concession that the arrest of Gray was lawful. Shortly thereafter I were provided with the video of Mosby reading the charges, above. In the video the "False imprisonment" charges she specified in her May 1 allegations against the officers are also gone. It seems however, based on her verbal reading, that she has replaced that "False imprisonment (8th Amendment)" charge with a "Misconduct in office for illegal arrest (8th Amendment)". It's unclear if this represents a substantive alteration in the charges. For purposes of transparency I'll leave my earlier speculation intact below, but flag it with reference to this clarification. The officers are now scheduled to be arraigned on July 2, according to Mosby's read press statement.

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 21, 2015 118 Comments
This past Monday the office of Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby filed a motion in opposition to an earlier defense motion (oofah, lawyers) requesting that charges against six Baltimore police officers be dismissed, or alternatively, that Mosby recuse herself from the case. We covered the defense motion for dismissal/recusal in detail in a previous post, here:  Freddie Gray Case: Detailed Analysis of Motion to Recuse Prosecutor. Mosby's motion in opposition (embedded at the bottom of this post) is remarkable for a number of reasons, most substantially for it's epic levels of projection. In the motion's second sentence it claims that the defense motion is "born of desperation" and "the desire for publicity," and in the third sentence that the defense motion is "spewing invective" and "casting aspersions," ultimately concluding that the defense motion "bounces from one ridiculous allegation to another, like a pinball on a machine far past 'TILT.'"

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 13, 2015 55 Comments
The Baltimore Sun is reporting that defense counsel for the six officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray anticipate that they will receive formal grand jury indictments within the next two weeks. At present the officers are charged in District Court, which is a lower-level court not suited to the severity of the charges (which include second-degree depraved-heart murder.)  Accordingly, it has always been anticipated that the charges would be moved to the Circuit Court, where jury trials are held, and where a probable cause hearing on those charges is already scheduled for May 27. In the usual course of events an indictment would occur before that probable cause hearing, thus the expectation that the indictments will be handed down within the next two weeks. The Grand Jury will hear evidence presented only by the prosecution, as is normally the case.  Although the defense can challenge the evidence presented by the State, it may not present any evidence of its own.  All parties therefore expect that the Grand Jury will, indeed, indict the officers.

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 10, 2015 120 Comments
One of the interesting facets of the charges brought in the Freddie Gray case is that even at the earliest stages it appears that Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby was running an independent investigation in parallel with that of the Baltimore Police Department. Naturally, any investigation has a lead, and so it seems worthwhile to ask who Mosby assigned to that sensitive and responsibility-burdened position for her own investigative team. This is, after all, the man who generated the evidence presumably used by Mosby in bringing her 26 charges--including second-degree depraved-heart murder and manslaughter--against six Baltimore officers associated with the death of street-level drug dealer Freddie Gray. Legal Insurrection, I introduce you to Avon Mackel. Let's roll the video tape from Anderson Cooper on CNN:

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 09, 2015 74 Comments
One week ago yesterday Maryland State Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby brought a plethora of charges--including second-degree depraved-heart murder, manslaughter, and assault--against six Baltimore police officers accused in the death of Freddie Gray. Yesterday, one week to the day after the charges were brought, the defense lawyers collectively filed a motion to dismiss these charges and/or force the recusal of Mosby and her entire office from the case.  We addressed the motion as a news item briefly last night, Freddie Gray case: Defense files motion to remove prosecutor. Now we dig deeper into the motion. The motion, consisting of just over 20 substantive pages and about 80 pages of exhibits, is embedded at the bottom of this post. The substantive pages are well worth reading in their entirety.  Here we'll highlight some of the key points and arguments made, relying as much as possible on selected quotes from the motion itself. Caveat: This is, of course, a defense motion, and thus should be expected to possess all the biases that would naturally be found in such a document from that source. Nevertheless, unless many of the claims are simply factually incorrect, the motion is a devastating critique of Mosby's legal ethics in this case in particular and the practices of her office generally.

Mosby's Public Reading of Charges, and her "Message" to the World

The motion begins by recalling Mosby's public reading of the charges against the officers on May 1, 2015.  Unusually, Mosby didn't simply make a generalized statement to the gathered media, but read the Statement of Probable Cause aloud, word-for-word.

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 08, 2015 53 Comments
CNN reports that attorneys for the six Baltimore police officers charged by Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby in the death of Freddie Gray have filed a lengthy motion in Baltimore City District Court to have Mosby removed from the case--either by her recusal or by court order. The motion--which I have not yet seen, but hope to soon--purportedly sets out at least five conflicts of interest as the basis for recusal, including:
  • Both Mosby and her husband, a Baltimore City Council member, are positioned for personal financial and political gain from the case.
  • Mosby has existing personal relationships with potential witnesses.
  • Mosby's office took the unusual step of establishing it's own investigation run parallel with that of the Baltimore Police Department, and lead by a former officer with a considerably checkered past.
  • The existence of a pending civil suit against Mosby's office (the relevance of this is unclear to me).
  • The Gray family attorney William (Bill) Murphy (in featured image, above), is a close friend, supporter, and indeed a lawyer for Marilyn Mosby; in particular, he has contributed at least $5,000 to Mosby's political campaigns.
More here, from CNN:

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 07, 2015 59 Comments
Legal Insurrection, I'd like to introduce you to Page Croyder. Page, Legal Insurrection. The most interesting thing about Ms. Croyder to my eye is that she's a retired commander and commissioned officer of the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve.  I thank you for your service, ma'am. What brings Ms. Croyder to our attention today, however, is not her military service, but her 21-year career with the Baltimore State's Attorney's Office.  That experience provides here with a rather unique perspective from which to view and evaluate the recent conduct of Maryland State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby in the matter of the death of Freddie Gray. And what Ms. Croyder sees, she does not like. Not. At. All. The Baltimore Sun has published a lengthy op-ed piece by Ms. Croyder in which she expresses her views on the Mosby prosecution of six Baltimore police officers following the death of Freddie Gray, following upon similar sentiments expressed by Ms. Croyder in her personal blog, Baltimore Criminal Justice Blogger:
The Fraternal Office of Police called Mosby’s charges an “egregious rush to judgment.” It smacks more of a calculated push to the spotlight, filing charges after a mere two weeks. She conducted her own “parallel” investigation using her police integrity unit (the only unit for which she fails to list a supervisor on her website.) She received the autopsy report the same day as her press conference announcing the charges. In her haste to step into the national limelight, she circumvented normal charging procedures by grabbing a member of the sheriff’s office to file them for her. Her actions appeared calculated for maximum surprise and effect, and she got it. But she was so hasty she drew up warrants for the wrong people. And her arrest of two of the officers for making an illegal arrest was itself "illegal." Had she taken the time to discuss it with the police department, she'd have avoided an embarrassing and unjust result.
I recommend you "read the whole thing," as the saying goes, at both the Baltimore Sun piece and Ms. Croyder's blog. https://youtu.be/v7B7IVgZdAw To prepare your cognitive palette I'll simply bullet her main points from her op-ed:

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 06, 2015 150 Comments
[NOTE: This post has been updated with a relevant statement released yesterday from Prosecutor Mosby's office, and embedded at the bottom of this post.] As Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby continues her efforts to convict six police officers of serious felonies--including depraved-heart second degree murder and multiple counts of manslaughter--in the death of Freddie Gray continue, those charges are already being subject to challenge, and looking increasingly vulnerable. The Baltimore Sun reports that the defense attorney for Edward Nero, one of the officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray, has filed a motion for an independent inspection of Gray's knife, which formed the basis for the probable cause underpinning Gray's arrest. (h/t commenter MouseTheLuckyDog) The motion is embedded at the bottom of this post.

Arrest Timeline: Charges Against Officer Nero, In Context

It is perhaps worth stepping through the timeline of Officer Nero's participation in the arrest and transport of Freddie Gray, and juxtapose that against the five criminal charges brought against him. (Note: we're recounting the timeline "facts" as reported by the New York Times.)  All events occur on April 12, 2015 8:39:12 AM Officer Nero, Lieutenant Brian Rice, and Officer Miller are on bike patrol in a high-crime/drug area of Baltimore, and spot Freddie Gray--a known convict and career street-level drug dealer--acting suspiciously. This raises the reasonable suspicion needed to justify a "Terry stop," (commonly known as stop-and-frisk), and the officers seek to do so with Freddie Gray. (For more details on a "Terry stop," see Was Freddie Gray’s Arrest Lawful? Almost Certainly.) Gray observes the officers approaching and flees their lawful stop, further establishing reasonable suspicion. The officers pursue. 8:39:52 AM Freddie's flight from the lawful Terry stop lasts only 40 seconds before the officers bring him to a halt. (Humorously, the New York Times describes the end of this flight and pursuit as Gray "surrendering to" the pursuing officers.  I guess the NYT forgot how to spell "captured by.") 8:40 AM The officers prone out Gray and handcuff him, all perfectly lawful and consistent with securing the safety of a Terry stop. Prosecutor Mosby claims that at this point Gray requested an inhaler, and was not provided one.  She does not indicate her evidence for this claim, nor whether the officers or Gray even had an inhaler in their possession that they could have offered Gray, nor whether the officers have a legal duty--or are even medically qualified--to provide medical assistance to a suspect.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on May 05, 2015 20 Comments
Harvard Professor Emeritus, Alan Dershowitz, joined Fox News' Megyn Kelly last night to discuss charges filed against Baltimore law enforcement officers in the Freddie Gray case. Kelly addressed speculation about bias in prosecutor Marilyn Mosby's public statements and then gave the floor to Dershowitz. "If you're the prosecutor, you have to be concerned about doing justice for everybody -- not just for the victim, not just for the family of the victim, not just for the youth of Baltimore, but also for the accused, for the policemen who have been accused and may have been scapegoated," Dershowitz explained. Recognizing Mosby's intent was likely to "quell the riots," something she did with relative success, Derschowitz said, "but you can't sacrifice individual defendants to the need to stop riots. Imagine jurors who are going to sit now in Baltimore and say, if we acquit these defendants, our houses might get burned down, our stores will be attacked, our children won't be safe."

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 05, 2015 218 Comments
Last Friday, while Prosecutor Mosby was announcing her poorly supported tsunami of charges against the six police officers involved in arresting and transporting the ill-fated Freddie Gray, Mosby also remarked that Gray's knife--claimed by police to be the probable cause for his arrest--was in fact lawful under Maryland law. As reported by the New York Times:

Ms. Mosby faulted the police conduct at every turn. The officers who arrested him “failed to establish probable cause for Mr. Gray’s arrest, as no crime had been committed,” she said, describing the arrest as illegal. Officers accused him of possession of a switchblade, but Ms. Mosby said, “The knife was not a switchblade and is lawful under Maryland law.

This rather perfunctory statement certainly raised my eyebrows, for several reasons.

Whether Knife Was Actually Unlawful Is Irrelevant to Probable Cause

First, whether the knife was actually lawful under Maryland law is largely irrelevant for purposes of probable cause. Probable cause is based on whether a reasonable police officer under the circumstances would have genuinely believed the knife to have been unlawful.  If so, the fact that the knife might later be determined to be lawful would certainly be cause to discontinue efforts to prosecute, but it wouldn't retroactively make the officer's conduct in making the initial arrest unlawful. When making an assessment of probable cause for an arrest, the officer is not tasked with making an absolute determination of whether the conduct in question is unlawful.  After all, that can ultimately only be done by a jury, necessarily a decision that occurs many steps downstream from the street arrest.
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