Maryland – Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby stole the spotlight on Friday with her surprisingly swift decision to bring criminal charges against six police officers in the arrest and death in April of a 25-year-old black man.
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Only four months in the job, the city’s 35-year-old African-American state’s attorney, drew cheers from a crowd at the news conference where she announced the charges. But the city’s Fraternal Order of Police defended the officers and said Mosby’s marriage to Baltimore City Councilman Nick Mosby posed a conflict of interest.
Mosby said the dead man, Freddie Gray, had suffered a critical neck injury while riding in a police van. Prosecutors charged the driver of the police van with second-degree murder based on the allegation he showed callous indifference toward Gray after his arrest on April 12. Gray died a week later in hospital.
Mosby’s swift legal action stood in contrast to cases last year in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City where, after months of investigation, prosecutors said officers had not broken the law in killings of unarmed black men.
The daughter and granddaughter of police officers, Mosby promised during her election campaign last year to turn back years of violent crime in the predominantly black city of 620,000 and to rebuild the public’s trust in the criminal justice system.
“Police brutality is completely inexcusable. I’m going to apply justice fairly, even to those who wear a badge,” Mosby, a Democrat, told the Baltimore Sun newspaper last year.
In campaign commercials, Mosby said she was inspired to become a prosecutor by the way the district attorney dealt with her family while investigating the killing of her teenage cousin on the doorstep of her family’s Boston-area home in 1994.
Interviewed by Baltimore magazine before she took office in January, Mosby said she knew that the majority of police were hard-working officers who risked their lives everyday but that they should not be allowed to usurp their authority.
“They’re in place to protect and serve, and if they abuse that authority what it does is it exacerbates the distrust within the criminal justice system and then we end up where we are today,” she said then.
Her husband, with whom she has two daughters, this week told CNN: “She’s a strong woman. You know, she was built for this.”
80 PERCENT CONVICTION RATE
With a degree from Boston College Law School, Mosby began her legal career as a law clerk in the Baltimore City State’s Attorney office and worked her way up as an assistant state’s attorney to the general trial division. During her campaign she said she had an overall 80 percent conviction rate.
She left to work as an insurance company lawyer before seeking the state’s attorney’s job.
In the Democratic Party primary in June, Mosby defeated the incumbent with 54 percent of the vote. She went on to trounce her write-in opponent in the November election.
In her announcement on Friday, Mosby said Gray was in handcuffs and shackles but otherwise unrestrained inside the moving police van in violation of department policy. The officers failed to provide medical attention even though Gray asked for help on the way to a booking center, she said.
Minutes after her announcement, motorists honked their horns in approval on city streets.
Nearly as quickly, the city’s Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3 issued an open letter to Mosby, signed by lodge president Gene Ryan, asking that she appoint a special outside prosecutor to avoid any appearance of impropriety. It said her husband’s political future stood to gain or lose from the outcome of her investigation.
At the news conference, Mosby defended the independence of her office’s investigation, saying: “I thought it was very important to have an independent analysis as to what took place and transpired from the very beginning. We are an independent agency from the police department.”
this young DA has a lot to learn, there is a reason why 99% of the time prosecutors don’t charge cops, and that’s because 99% of the time they can’t win
how many time has the AG said they will look into crimes and nothing happened, the answer is only when their sure they can win, this case is now political she is gambling her career for it, because if she looses, which is what happens most of the time in cop cases …..she is done, the opponent will always be able to use it against her in an election
unless she has an open and shut case, she is playing a dangerous game, these cops are part of a union that will hire them the best lawyers money can buy ….best of luck
How disgraceful. Just as with the arabs, rioters and mobs of criminals are rewarded for their rioting, looting and criminality by this political points-seeker! Now a witch hunt for the cops begin, to appease the black rioting mobs. This will only encourage blacks to stay down in their status quo victim roles, and continue to commit crimes in order to claim racism and benefit from it.
The coroner said it was homicide.
When he was arrested, he was healthy. Healthy enough to run for a long distance.
Later, when still in police custody, he was a victim of homicide.
Nu?
What a disgrace. Decent honest policemen doing their job arresting a black lowlife with a rap sheet a mile long are now being unjustly pursued by a black prosecutor. According to many unbiased reports this piece of garbage was deliberately jogging about trying to cause an injury so that he could get into hospital instead of jail. He went to far. And for this outstanding officers are to be hounded?
“After reading so many posts like this one from #4 , I have to laugh (or cry) when our heimishe yidden deny, deny, deny that they are indeed some of the most primitive racists in America today.”
In the event that you haven’t as of yet had the pleasure, allow me to introduce you to our very own היימישער bigots, who, for the past six and a half years, have been foaming at the mouth on this very web site (and others), fulminating and bloviating against an African American who had the nerve to win the White House TWICE. As stated prior, racism is diligently taught in the ישיבה, encouraged at the שבת table, and drunk a לחיים to at קידושא רבה. But, as with so many other mindless racists, our היימישער bigots are too cowardly to admit to what they so pathetically are. Now then, when do they hand out the white sheets and hoods?