There two other charges dismissed before the case went to the jury. He was not convicted of anything.
Thanks. So, one mistrial and three acquittals. IOW it’s been a rough ride for the prosecution.
Regards,
Shodan
The prosecutor was driven entirely by crowd-pleasing and ambition and things worked out just the way any half-decent lawyer could have told her they would had she not been deaf to all but the voice of the mobile vulgus.
So who is responsible for Freddie Grays death?
Now we see why BLACKLIVESMATTER exists.
Freddie Gray.
That broken-neck bastard!
How so? He broke his own neck in a vehicle with his hands and legs shackled huh?
My next donation is off to BLACKLIVESMATTER
Yes, black lives matter. What also matters is the integrity of the court system, that people should not be convicted when evidence is sparse or non-existent, that we should never convict by public fiat. This stuff is pretty damned important too.
In our “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” legal system, it’s entirely possible that people could be the cause of something terrible, like the death of someone, and the state may lack enough evidence to convict. It’s an acceptable outcome to me.
Is there an exception if the person has a badge?
My thing with this case, how is it OK to not buckle this guy up? In my department, it’s a big deal to buckle up the person we have arrested. I can see how how in actual practice, it was a rule that was allowed to slip and that these officers not be criminally convicted because of it, but administratively, something should be done. Hopefully the 6.4 million civil suit will get this department to enforce their own policy.
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the other person taken into custody said it was a smooth ride and he heard the other person banging around for 4 seconds.
If it’s a smooth ride and his hands and legs are cuffed then he is in no position to bang about the van without endangering himself.
The crime here is that the police didn’t hog tie him to the seat so he couldn’t move. That’s something that can be worked into future police procedures.
No.
Well, something like that. When the police seize and bind and transport a person, surely they are at the very least responsible for seeing that he is not further injured in the process.
Good to see that you acknowledge it was a crime.
I’m willing to accept not-guilty verdicts on the police, but it seems like the charges do not fit the actions. Please fight my ignorance.
Aren’t there any “conspiracy”-type charges that can be filed against the police officers involved? Or some other way to judge the actions of the group and ascertain guilt as a group?
For example, if a bunch of people rob a store and one of them shoots and kills the clerk, all of them, even the guy driving the get-away car, can be charged and convicted of murder. Why is that not possible here?
Conspiracy requires people to actually conspire. If the officers did not conspire and acted independently then a charge of conspiracy would not be supportable. Felony murder would not be supportable absent a felony being committed, and…a murder.
The police surely weren’t operating independently. They were on the job together, with a formal chain of command, a procedural doctrine, ostensibly shared objectives.
Will any of them face anything from the police department? The guy who is supposed to put a seat belt on him surely was at fault.
They worked together to arrest him, which is not illegal and to transport him to the precinct which is not illegal. If it was negligent not to buckle him in then that can only fall on the officer whose decision it was not to buckle him in. Unless the allegation is that there was a meeting where they decided as a group to not buckle him in.
My understanding is that it recently became Baltimore policy to always buckle a suspect in, unless the officer felt that doing so endangered the arresting officers. Apparently there was a dispute as to whether the officer in charge knew about the change in policy. A policeman acting in line with a reasonable understanding of departmental policy can not be found criminally negligent since it is not his job to create policy. If it was found that the people who created the policy of allowing policemen to exercise discretion did so in order to harm people, then those people could be held criminally liable.
Because it was up to the police department as a whole to ensure that departmental policy is safe and to train officers on that policy, the department as a whole could be liable in a civil claim of negligence. The city kept that from happening by settling out of court for over 6 million which is a very large settlement given the facts of the case.
A conspiracy is an agreement amongst two or more people to commit a crime.
The evidence here doesn’t show the existence of any such agreement.
Here there is no initial felony.
The reason the guy driving the getaway car is guilty in your example is that he agreed to commit a felony, and there’s a rule often called the “felony murder” rule: during the commission of certain felonies, a death is imputed to all those who agreed to assist and did assist in the felony, even if they did not directly cause it.
What’s missing in this case is any evidence that the officers intended to commit a felony, or agreed with each other to commit a felony.