Taking into consideration that the trial won’t take place in Baltimore, and likely goes over to Rockville or some place further west in the state....the jury selection pool is mostly white and Latino. Different perception....no firm way to get a conviction...turbo-riots expected by the closure where there might be one single guy from the six with any convictions (minor in scoop). If I were a business owner in Baltimore....I’d start to think about selling out or closing down the operation. The worst is yet to come on riots.
Unfortunately, I believe you are correct.
I'd make the opposite argument. I don't think that one can serve on a jury in Maryland if one has a felony conviction. Among non-felon Baltimore residents, drug dealers are probably not loved and admired. (They likely believe that drug dealers' lives may have value -- but it's not a positive value.) Can twelve Baltimore jurors unanimously agree that Caesar Goodson is guilty of second-degree murder based on the evidence that we have heard so far (and are likely to hear)? I doubt it. I think the best possible outcome that the prosecution might hope for is a hung jury.
I expect that the chances of a conviction would be higher in the liberal DC suburbs than in Baltimore.
Good article on why no business will want to build in Baltimore.
My Baltimore Business Problem
What it’s like to operate a company 150 yards from the burned out liquor store—and why it’s hard to create jobs.
By Jay Steinmetz
May 3, 2015
Baltimore
The supply-chain management company I started in the late 1990s and lead today is in downtown Baltimore. On the night of the worst violence last month, there were more tempting targets than our cement, nondescript building, like the liquor store 150 yards away that was looted. Yet on any given day what takes place in this neighborhood is a slow-motion version of recent events. Graffiti, which anyone with experience in urban policing will affirm is the first sign of trouble, regularly appears on the exterior of our building. From there the range of crimes escalates to burglarizing cars in the parking lot, and breaking and entering our building.
City policies and procedures fail to help employers address these problems—and make them worse. When the building alarm goes off, the police charge us a fee. If the graffiti isn’t removed in a certain amount of time, we are fined. This penalize-first approach is of a piece with Baltimore’s legendary tax and regulatory burden. The real cost of these ill-conceived policies is to the community where we—and other local businesses in similar positions—might be able to hire more of those Baltimoreans who have lost hope of escaping poverty and government dependency.
Maryland still lags most states in its appeal to companies, according to well-documented business-climate comparisons put out by think tanks, financial-services firms, site-selection consultants and financial media. Baltimore fares even worse than other Maryland jurisdictions, having the highest individual income and property taxes at 3.2% and $2.25 for every $100 of assessed property value, respectively. New businesses organized as partnerships or limited-liability corporations are subject, unusually, to the local individual income tax, reducing startup activity.
The bottom line is that our modest 14,000-square-foot building is hit with $50,000 in annual property taxes. And when we refinanced our building loan in 2006, Maryland and Baltimore real-estate taxes drove up the cost of this routine financial transaction by $36,000.
State and city regulations overlap in a number of areas, most notably employment and hiring practices, where litigious employees can game the system and easily find an attorney to represent them in court. Building-permit requirements, sales-tax collection procedures for our multistate clients, workers’ compensation and unemployment trust-fund hearings add to the expensive distractions that impede hiring.
Read at:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/my-baltimore-business-problem-1430688970
none of the people who believed the officers should be charged, which was based upon their preconceived notion that the police beat up and killed that young man, have come around to admit to themselves that in essence this kid died from traffic accident injuries without there being a traffic accident. He fell over and hit his head and broke his neck in the back of a van because somebody didn’t seat belt him into his seat.
not exactly anything even closely resembling the biased assumptions made by those who wanted the officers charge from the beginning. so their calls for justice were based upon their own biases and I don’t see how they could feel good right now about the charges since they do not really validate their believes. But they have not yet stop to consider the actual facts and see where they support their belief system or in this case do not support their belief system.