Officer William Porter has participated in more than 150 arrests in his time as a Baltimore police officer. Not one was seat belted in a police transport.
That admission came in testimony from Porter himself, who took the stand in his own defense Wednesday as the second witness his attorneys called to the stand.
Porter is one of six Baltimore City Police officers charged in the April death of Freddie Gray, who died April 19, one week after suffering injuries in a police transport van following his arrest. Gray's death sparked a week of protests, riots, looting and a state of emergency in Baltimore City.
While a new mandatory seat belt policy was emailed to officers three days before Gray's fateful arrest, according to testimony from former police Commissioner Anthony Batts' chief of staff, Porter said he didn't have an app on his department-issued phone to allow him to check his email and would have had to come in early or stay late to read it. The policy was included in what was an 80 page email.
He said her spoke to Brandon Ross, who caught Gray's arrest on video, at the scene and told him to go to the media with it.
Later, Porter was asked why he was not more forceful and insistent at an earlier stop about Gray's need for medical attention in his exchange with Officer Caesar Goodson, who was driving the police van and faces the most serious charges in Gray's death.
"I could not order Goodson to do that," Porter said.
He said that at the van's fourth and fifth stops, he did not see anything wrong with Gray. At the sixth stop at Western District precinct, Gray was unresponsive. That's when medical attention was called.
In testimony, Porter admitted to not belting Gray in. The space in the van is cramped such that belting Gray in would briefly expose his firearm, Porter said, despite their cordial earlier relationship.
However, Porter later said things that conflicted with what Det. Syreeta Teel of internal affairs relayed in prosecution testimony about her interview with Porter. In cross examination, he said Porter never asked for an ambulance or to go to a hospital. He also said that at a stop where he helped Gray up, Gray was never heard to say he couldn't breathe, and that he could not identify the officers who arrested Gray. Those statements all conflict with a video interview Teel conducted with Porter that was shown in court.
When Porter spoke of a "no snitching" code in Gilmor Homes, prosecutor Michael Schatzow created the most heated exchange of Porter's time on the stand when he asked if there was such a code in Baltimore police.
"Absolutely no," Porter said. "I'm offended you asked that."
The first defense witness was Dr. Vincent Di Maio, the former chief medical examiner in Dallas and San Antonio. Di Maio was previously used as an expert witness in the murder trials of Phil Spector, Scott Peterson and Drew Peterson. He said the autopsy on Gray's body was thorough, but disagreed with the finding of homicide as Gray's cause of death. He believed the fatal spinal injury happened later in Gray's trip in a police van than the medical examiner who performed the autopsy believed.
"Freddie Gray's death was an accident," Di Maio said. "There was no intent to cause harm... Accidents happen."
After Porter, Officer Zachary Novak testified. Novak was one of the officers at Western District who tried to remove Gray from the police van along with Sgt. Alicia White, who was charged in Gray's death. Novak was not.
Novak said of the arrests he's been involved in, 90 percent of had detainees who were not belted, though he always seat belts those he puts in transports he's driving in a patrol car. Echoing Porter, he said the primary responsibility for the detainee's safety rest with the person transporting them (in Gray's case, Goodson). Elaborating on Porter's explanation, he said there were only four computers at the precinct that would allow officers to check work email.
Source WBAL
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