RadioOnFire.com - The day after State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby dropped charges against the six officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray, the two lead prosecutors in the trials to this point sat down with reporters to discuss the case publicly for the first time.
Janice Bledsoe and Michael Schatzow shed light on the timing of the decision, moves made during the case, and certain claims made by Mosby during her statement Wednesday in Sandtown-Winchester, the Baltimore neighborhood where Gray's fateful arrest took place.
Much was made in the wake of
Mosby's public statement about her effectively accusing individual detectives of sabotage and fabricating notes. Schatzow confirmed one of those detectives was Dawnyell Taylor, the lead detective on the case who was later
called as a defense witness in the trial of Officer Caesar Goodson.
Taylor testified about two interviews with Dr. Carol Allan, the assistant medical examiner who performed Gray's autopsy, in which Allan, as Taylor wrote in her notes, called Gray's death a "freakish accident that no human hands could cause." That contradicted Allan's own testimony.
"She was doing things without notifying us and doing things that were counter to what a primary detective should be doing on a case and she was doing them on her own, so we brought this to the attention of the police department," Schatzow said.
Furthermore, they said police neglected to execute warrants for text exchanges from the officers' cell phones.
"The Baltimore Police Department did not execute those warrants in the correct amount of time and they expired," Bledsoe said. "There was an explanation given as to why, which was not given by command. It was sort of more by lower command."
"We will not engage in public banter with our criminal justice system partners, nor will we entertain media requests that seek responses to remarks made by persons now offering retrospective opinions," Jackson said in an email.
The charges were dropped at the start of what's called a Kastigar hearing in the case against Officer Garrett Miller. Miller was compelled to testify in other cases under a form of limited immunity, as a result of
a ruling affirmed by the state Court of Appeals. The state would have had to prove no evidence from Miller's prior testimony would be used against him in his own trial. However, Schatzow said the timing of the move to drop charges had nothing to do with any worries about clearing that high bar, and that one of the remaining trials, that of Sgt. Alicia White, didn't involve such a hearing.
He said the state's attorney's office had a "clean team" that was not exposed to the immunized testimony and a "filter team" ensuring the former wasn't exposed to any evidence derived from that testimony.
"We need to talk to them and we do talk to them, but no immunized testimony was ever disclosed to the clean team by the filter team, by us or by anybody else," Schatzow said.
"One of the things to keep in mind is that the police investigation prior to the death of Mr Gray was done by the [Force Investigation] Team," Schatzow said. "This big task force they put together, they did not put together until after Gray's death."
Rather, Schatzow and Bledsoe said, they began meeting with police as early as the day after Gray's April 12, 2015 arrest and injury, and continued to work with the force investigation team and review evidence through the week that followed. Many critics of Mosby have said the charges were rushed after Gray's death, but Schatzow disputed that.
"I don't think that we felt that we were rushing," Schatzow said. "I don't think we felt that there was material that was overlooked. I think much of the evidence was in the statements of officers who gave statements and much of that was in by Apr 17," two days before Gray died, Schatzow said.
He also talked about the knife in Gray's possession and the questions of whether it was legal or illegal and, therefore, whether Gray's arrest was legal or illegal. They sent out an investigator to find out.
"She came back with this advertisement in the police headquarters," he said. "They were advertising with a BPD insignia on it, the very knife that Freddie Gray had in his possession. Our theory is that Freddie Gray was arrested before the knife was found. The defendants filed motions to keep out of evidence whether the knife was legal or illegal."
He said their theory to file charges for involuntary manslaughter and, in Goodson's case, second-degree murder, was based on footage of Gray at the van's prior stops that showed Gray bearing his weight. Schatzow said that indicated, in consultation with Allan and an outside neurosurgeon, something happened to Gray after that point. He said that while court precedent bars charging police for violating standing orders, police are still responsible for the safety of those in their custody, and actions taken and not taken on Gray's behalf constituted violations.
He said he and Bledsoe were ready to continue pursuing the cases, but that Mosby "correctly determined" it would have been a fruitless endeavor with little new evidence to present to Judge Barry Williams, and defendants likely set to opt for bench trials in front of the same judge who has already acquitted three in the same case.
"If this was his view, and I''m not questioning the propriety of the view...he had every right to find the verdicts that he found, and he found them," Schatzow said.
Schatzow also acknowledged there are those who want to know definitively what happened to Gray, but said that a criminal trial may not be the ideal venue for that as he echoed Mosby's call for changes to police policy.
"We can't know what happened to Freddie Gray unless the people involved tell us what happened to Freddie Gray," he said. "Now they have told us some things and maybe they have told us everything they know. The trial is not about answering broad questions...The fact that people have lingering concerns and lingering questions simply reflects a limitation on the process to answer those questions.
Source WBAL
