Developments in Freddie Gray case and Baltimore protests

Caesar Goodson Jr., the only police officer facing a murder charge in the death of 25-year-old Baltimore resident Freddie Gray last April, was acquitted of all charges Thursday.

“There has been no credible evidence presented at this trial that the defendant intended any crime to happen,” Judge Barry Williams said. “Seemingly the state wants this court to assume simply because Mr. Gray was injured … that the defendant intentionally gave Mr. Gray a rough ride.”

On Wednesday, hearings began in the trials of six Baltimore police officers accused of killing Freddie Gray. The case is a very big deal: It’s the most high-profile attempt at holding police legally accountable for a black man’s death since the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, led to nationwide protests over cops’ use of force.

The hearings on Wednesday focused on how the trial should proceed. The judge made three major decisions: Each of the six police officers will be tried separately, the charges against the cops won’t be dismissed at this point in the trial, and Baltimore City State Attorney Marilyn Mosby will stay on the case despite accusations of bias. The case will now proceed into six trials, which could result in decades of prison time for the officers if they are convicted.

Gray, a 25-year-old black man, died on April 19 from a spinal cord injury after an allegedly brutal arrest and being handcuffed in the back of a police van.

Mosby said the officers will be arraigned on July 2, on charges including manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and assault — as well as one charge that doesn’t sound as familiar: depraved heart murder. It’s listed under Officer Caesar Goodson’s name on the list of indictments, and it carries a sentence of up to 30 years.

Baltimore City State Attorney Marilyn Mosby on Thursday, May 21, announced a grand jury had indicted all six police officers involved in the arrest of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died of a spinal cord injury while under police custody.

Here’s the full list of the criminal charges, taken from a release handed out by Mosby’s office:

Freddie Gray shouldn’t have been arrested. Baltimore police accused him of possessing a switchblade during an altercation on April 12. But it turns out the knife wasn’t a switchblade and was, therefore, legal in Baltimore. Those facts are now publicly known, but only after the investigation into Gray’s death.

But what would have happened if Gray hadn’t died of a spinal cord injury he received while under police custody? It’s likely Gray’s unjust arrest, just like many others across the country, would have gone unnoticed by the public at large — and Gray could have served some jail time, or worse, for a crime he didn’t commit.

It’s big news that the six Baltimore police officers involved in Freddie Gray’s arrest and death will face criminal charges. And it follows a string of charges against police officers who were involved in the deaths of black men — in the past three months, officers were charged in the killing of Akai Gurley in New York City, Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, and Eric Harris in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

These prosecutions meet a major demand of the Black Lives Matter protest movement, which rose to prominence following the police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri, last August. One of the protesters’ major goals has been to get justice for victims of police killings by putting the officers involved on trial.

Little Italy and Canton are two nearby neighborhoods in Baltimore. It’s about 1.5 miles from one to the other, either seven minutes by car or a half-hour walk.

But for a newborn baby, the neighborhoods couldn’t be further apart. Kids born in Little Italy are more than 10 times as likely to die before their first birthday as those born in Canton.

Baltimore police officer Caesar Goodson Jr., 45, allegedly murdered Freddie Gray. Allen Bullock, 18, smashed a Baltimore police car with a traffic cone. Yet the police officer reportedly ended up with a much lower bail than Bullock — a difference that Baltimore protesters say is another sign of a criminal justice system that’s skewed in favor of police officers.

Bullock turned himself in after the April 25 Baltimore riots, and, according to the Guardian, his bail was set at $500,000 — a sum his family says they can’t afford. His family now says they regret convincing him to turn himself in.

The criminal charges brought against the six Baltimore police officers involved in Freddie Gray’s arrest are remarkable because police are almost never tried for killing people in Maryland.

The data in the chart above, from the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, shows that police were charged in less than 2 percent of police-involved killings between 2010 and 2014. In these killings, 69 percent of the victims were black, even though they make up 29 percent of Maryland’s population. About 41 percent of the victims were unarmed.

The 28 criminal charges against the six Baltimore police officers involved in the arrest of Freddie Gray suggest something important about the past week in the city: there’s significant evidence that the protesters were right. Gray shouldn’t have been arrested. And he shouldn’t have died in police custody. This was an instance of lethal brutality by police at worst and terrible negligence by the police at best.

Police claimed they arrested Gray because he had a switchblade, which is illegal in Baltimore. But on Friday, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby said the knife wasn’t a switchblade — it was a pocket knife, and was therefore legal. Police, in other words, shouldn’t have arrested Gray, according to Mosby.

On May 1st, Baltimore City state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby announced that six Baltimore police officers will face criminal charges — including second-degree murder and manslaughter — in the death of Freddie Gray in police custody on April 19.

This is incredibly rare; many police misconduct cases never turn into criminal prosecutions. But even when police officers do get tried for misconduct, the outcomes look very different than they do when civilians are prosecuted.

The National Police Misconduct Reporting Project analyzed 3,238 criminal cases against police officers from April 2009 through December 2010. They found that only 33 percent were convicted. That’s about half the rate at which members of the public are convicted. Furthermore, only 36 percent of officers who were convicted ended up serving prison sentences — again, about half as often as members of the general public convicted of crimes were sent to prison.

Baltimore City state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby announced on May 1st that six Baltimore police officers would be prosecuted for the death of Freddie Gray in police custody on April 19.

This isn’t just a big deal for Baltimore, which has dealt with both peaceful and violent protests this week over residents’ anger at the police treatment of Gray and the Baltimore Police Department’s record of police brutality. It’s a big deal nationally because it’s incredibly rare for officers to ever go to trial for killing civilians — as seen in high-profile cases last year in Staten Island, New York and Ferguson, Missouri.

When Iraqis looted hospitals and businesses in Baghdad after the US invasion in 2003, the conservative secretary of defense at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, suggested that looting was a result of legitimate, pent-up anger — a comment that closely mirrors how many protesters feel about the rioting that erupted in Baltimore this week after Freddie Gray’s funeral.

Rumsfeld said, according to Pentagon correspondent Pamela Hess at UPI:

A Washington Post report on Wednesday night suggested that Freddie Gray purposely caused the spinal cord injury that killed him while in Baltimore police custody — but the witness at the center of that report now says he was misinterpreted.

Gray, a 25-year-old black man, died from a spinal cord injury that protesters suspect happened during a rough ride in a police van, in which he wasn’t wearing a seat belt, a violation of Baltimore Police Department protocol. But the Washington Post’s Peter Herman reported, based on a document leaked by an anonymous source, that another detainee in the van told investigators he thought Gray was trying to hurt himself by banging his head against the van.

The diversity of many cities is far from represented in their local police departments, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity’s Chris Zubak-Skees.

The analysis found big gaps in the racial makeup of Baltimore’s predominantly black community and its white-dominated police department, as thousands protest the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died of a spinal cord injury after an allegedly brutal arrest.

In Sandtown, the Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray lived and that is the epicenter of the riots and protests, more than half the population is unemployed. Nearly one-third of the residential properties are vacant. Almost one-third of families live below the poverty line.

There are massive racial disparities in Maryland (and Baltimore in particular) on everything from educational attainment to infant mortality rates to life expectancy. Sandtown is almost entirely black. Residents there are often faring even worse than black residents in the rest of the city. But they’re all part of a larger story about giant gaps between the experience of the city’s white residents and its black ones.

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart on Tuesday slammed the decades of neglect that led Baltimore to erupt in protests and violence over the past week, suggesting that the crisis was decades in the making but went ignored by media and public officials until rioting began.

“This seems to indicate the issue in our city emergency alert systems: there appear to be two points on the scale — ‘normal’ and ‘on fire,’” Stewart said. “Clearly, Baltimore was belching smoke far before Saturday.”

David Simon, creator of The Wire, a fictional drama that followed the Baltimore Police Department, told the Marshall Project’s Bill Keller that the protests in Baltimore aren’t just over the death of Freddie Gray, who died of a fatal spinal cord injury a week after an allegedly brutal arrest — but about the long history of a police department that’s built a reputation of abusing and tormenting local communities.

Simon, who was also a Baltimore crime reporter, told the Marshall Project:

Republican presidential candidates including Rand Paul are opining about last night’s violent unrest in Baltimore and continued protests over the death of Freddie Gray, who suffered a fatal spinal injury while in police custody earlier this month. But only one GOP presidential hopeful has spent time in the community protesting right now: surgeon turned likely Republican candidate Ben Carson, who began his medical career at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University Hospital.

Carson’s comments to GQ have attracted some scorn from the internet for comparing protests against police to protests against plumbers. That’s a dumb line that obscures a more nuanced argument. Carson acknowledges discrimination and problems with individual police officers in Baltimore, but says those problems can’t be fixed by tarring all police with a broad brush.

Obama condemned the rioters in strong term, and argued not only that they should be “treated as criminals,” but that their actions were counterproductive. “They’re destroying and undermining opportunities and businesses in their own communities,” he said. He further argued that the violence yesterday distracted from “multiple days of peaceful protests that were focused on entirely legitimate concerns.”

“That kind of political mobilization,” he concluded, “we haven’t seen in quite some time.”