Five of the six officers have filed a lawsuit against Marilyn Mosby and Assistant Sheriff Samuel Cogen for malicious prosecution in the Freddie Gray case. Mosby has tried to have the suit tossed twice unsuccessfully as the judge believed they had an excellant chance of winning the case. Those odds have now gone up significantly, after the DOJ decided there was not enough evidence to get a conviction against any of the six officers. The DOJ also found that witness statements about Gray being tasered and/or beaten were false by overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
This decision is especially damaging to the case against Mosby and Cogen. It proves that there was no probable cause to go after the officers and certainly not at the level charged by Mosby. Although six officers were charged in Gray’s death, two were exonerated in court and then Mosby dropped the charges on the other four defendants.
But as to add ridiculousness to incompetence, the city of Baltimore is going to try the officers departmentally in order to punish them for crimes that were never committed as were held up by two criminal trials and an extensive DOJ investigation. I believe it’s because the city of Baltimore and it’s leaders are racist, considering most of the six officers are people of color.
The six officers had charges ranging from second-degree depraved-heart murder to manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and misconduct in office. The most severe charges centered around the officers failing to seatbelt Gray in the back of the transport van, which is likely the policy violation which Officer Caesar Goodson, Lt. Brian Rice, and Sgt Alicia White are set to be fired for.
“To the extent that the officers violated department policy in failing to seatbelt Gray, those failures suggest civil negligence rather than the high standard of deliberate indifference,” the DOJ said in its report.
The state’s entire criminal case was built on the theory that officers could not assist each other with any part of an arrest without fully reviewing the other officer’s evidence and probable cause and making their own independent determination that the arrest was lawful. Impractical at any time, impossible with a violent or resisting suspect.
Leave a Comment