Posted on 05/06/2015 2:35:08 PM PDT by Kaslin
When the cops chasing Freddie Gray caught up with him, they had a problem: He had not done anything illegal. They solved that problem the way cops often do: They plucked a charge out of thin air.
The cops probably would not have gotten into trouble for making an illegal arrest if Gray had not died due to a spinal injury he suffered in the back of a police van. Gray's death has shined a light on the way police officers abuse their arrest powers to impose arbitrary punishment, a practice that helps explain the anger on display in Baltimore last week.
Of the various criminal charges that Marilyn Mosby, the state's attorney for Baltimore, announced on Friday in connection with Gray's death, the most unusual and revealing was false imprisonment. Mosby said Lt. Brian Rice, together with Officers Edward Nero and Garrett Miller, "failed to establish probable cause for Mr. Gray's arrest as no crime had been committed."
Rice, Nero and Miller arrested Gray for carrying a switchblade, which Maryland defines as a knife with "a blade that opens automatically by hand pressure applied to a button, spring or other device in the handle of the knife." Since Gray's perfectly legal folding knife did not fit that description, he plainly was not guilty of the crime that was the pretext for hauling him away in handcuffs.
Baltimore has a history of such trumped-up charges. A 2006 class-action lawsuit backed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) cited "a pattern and practice" of bogus arrests for minor, often vaguely defined offenses such as loitering, trespassing, impeding pedestrian traffic, disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace and failure to obey a police command.
Of the 76,497 people arrested by Baltimore police without warrants in 2005, the lawsuit noted, prosecutors declined to charge 25,293 -- nearly one out of three. According to the state's attorney, those cases were "legally insufficient."
The arrests nevertheless had real consequences for people who were publicly kidnapped by armed agents of the state, strip-searched and placed in "small, filthy and overcrowded cells" for hours or days. In addition to the humiliation, degradation and loss of liberty inflicted by this process, the ACLU and NAACP noted, victims of illegal arrests "may lose their jobs or be denied job opportunities in the future as a result of the permanent stigma of having a criminal charge on their record."
The named plaintiffs in the case included Tyrone Braxton and Evan Howard, two friends who spent 36 and 54 hours behind bars, respectively, after police accused them of loitering and impeding traffic; Donald Wilson, who was strip-searched and held for five hours, although he was never told what crime he had supposedly committed; and Aaron Stoner and Robert Lowery, two visitors from Pennsylvania who were arrested for failure to obey an order to stop loitering, strip-searched and locked up for 17 hours. "For innocent victims of these arrest practices," the lawsuit observed, "being unlawfully arrested can be a life-changing event."
Under a settlement reached in 2010, the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) agreed to change performance evaluation policies that encouraged false arrests and introduce safeguards aimed at ensuring that cops have probable cause when they take people into custody. Two years later, the ACLU complained that the BPD was "failing to comply" with the agreement. It noted that "BPD officers did not or could not justify arrests for quality of life offenses in at least 35 percent of the cases examined" by an independent auditor.
As demonstrated by Austin cops who arrest activists for recording police encounters and New York cops who arrest pot smokers for publicly displaying marijuana after tricking them into revealing it, this problem is not limited to Baltimore. But given the city's history of hassling young black men for imaginary offenses, it is not hard to understand why Freddie Gray ran when he saw the cops.
Convulsions in the back of a van and an injury the medical examiner said was consistent with a bolt in the back of the van. Have you ever seen anyone have convulsions? They are extremely forceful. Hitting the back of a van with force, not unlike that in a car accident, can certainly break your neck. Even whiplash can.
It can’t be ruled out at this point that the neck injury was not caused by EMTs trying to clear his airway and intubate him. Those things happen from time to time.
We just don’t know all the facts yet and the experts who will analyze it have not all had an opportunity to do so. What’s clear to me by all the video, nothing that the officers did directly to Gray caused his injury. Even if they had buckled him in, there were no shoulder harnesses and with convulsions he could have still been injured.
I will admit that I wasn’t there and I haven’t seen the knife, but: “So when I see big-city cops arresting someone for an apparently legal knife, it tells me they just wanted to slap some charge on him...” apparently you have.
You are making an assumption based on your pre-conceived notions. You have no more knowledge of the legality of the knife than I do.
So I ask you, what was the brand and model of knife that Freddie was carrying. Please tell me so I can look it up and decide for myself. Fact is...you can’t
As for the “drug deal” an officer who says he saw the crime report and also the preliminary toxicology report stated on Hannity’s show that two undercover officers observed Freddie doing a possible drug deal. He also stated the preliminary toxicology report said there was heroin and marijuana in Freddie’s system. Is this gospel? I don’t know. Obviously, the identity of the cop was concealed.
As for the police reports, I haven’t seen all of them. Just for your information, not all information goes on the General Offense report. In some jurisdictions, they generate what is called a “Supplemental Crime Report”. It is part of the case file but is not released to the public.
So there may be additional information that no one but the prosecutor and investigators are privy to.
I say all this only because the only people who KNOW THE FACTS of the case are the police and the prosecutor. The rest of us are speculating based on media reports and personal bias. At the end of the day, the facts will come out. Some of us will be right, some of us will be wrong. But until that time, forget the anecdotal stuff.
You’ve stated in most of your posts the knife was “obviously legal” OK...prove it.
Sullum writes leftist crap. Period. Dissecting his wrongful “assumptions” that he make as “facts” would take all night. I’ve got more important things to do, like take a healthy whiz. More satisfying than reading his wet dreams in print.
Good question. Probably alot of plea deals and not many people rolling the dice in court?
Interesting video. If Freddie ducked into the building, he could have dumped whatever he had on him. This certainly could be exculpatory if there was drug activity.
Unfortunately, it still doesn’t answer the WHY of how Freddie died.
If anything, the prosecution could claim that Freddie fleeing on foot so enraged the officers that they administered some “street justice”.
Again, there is a lot more that will come out as the case progresses. Regardless of the outcome, Baltimore is going to have a very hot summer.
Could be. But even if they dropped the charges, they wouldn't have returned the knives. There should be at least some record of them being held as evidence.
>> Most commenters on this site probably have WEAPONS.
A few of us aren’t convicted felons on probation, though. :-)
This is my last post on this topic.
Since everyone is reading the Statute so closely and are saying that because there is no button to “spring open” the knife, therefore it is not a switchblade and legal...
Answer me this...the Statute also says “and/or closing the blade”. Can anyone tell me where the button is on a switch-blade to spring-assist the closure of the blade?
In over 20 years of law enforcement I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a knife “commonly known as a switch-blade knife” have a spring-assist to CLOSE the blade.
Yet if you follow the Statute literally, to be an illegal knife in Baltimore, the knife must have a spring-assist or other device to open AND close...OR closing the blade.
Obviously, taken literally, the Statute is “less than perfect” which is why the Court will probably resort to case law to see what is the common definition of a spring-assisted knife.
The NYC cop who was killed over the weekend focused on his murderer because he “adjusted his waist band in a suspicious manner.” By taking the bullet in the face, he very probably and tragically aborted the shooting of a future victim. But was “adjusting a waist band” probable cause? By the way , his name was Brian Moore. The same media that has done such a great job of teaching us the names of Freddy Gray, Michael Brown and Eric garner would much prefer that Brian Moore’s name be forgotten before the first shovel of dirt thuds onto his casket.
“You are making an assumption based on your pre-conceived notions. You have no more knowledge of the legality of the knife than I do.”
No, I’m judging off the description of the knife that the police gave.
“As for the “drug deal” an officer who says he saw the crime report and also the preliminary toxicology report stated on Hannity’s show that two undercover officers observed Freddie doing a possible drug deal.”
So it’s hearsay based on anonymous, unverifiable sources.
“You’ve stated in most of your posts the knife was “obviously legal””
No I don’t believe I have. I did say “apparently legal”, because a spring assisted knife is not a switchblade and doesn’t fit the description in the ordinance.
They’re anonymous to all of us, and therefore unverifiable, which is all that really matters when judging how to weigh the information. We have no way, at this point, of establishing any veracity of such information, so it’s worthless, at least for now.
The fact is, Baltimore police ROUTINELY arrest people for carrying knives with ANY springs in them, and they get routinely convicted.
I will bow to your, presumably local, knowledge.
An entirely separate question, of course, is whether these laws are good ones.
Sullum cannot be considered leftist in any logical sense of the word.
He is a very consistent libertarian, which means he pisses off conservatives about as much as he does liberals.
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