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.
I wouldn’t trust anything AARP says.
False.
The knife was found after the suspect was detained and frisked in what is known as a Terry Stop , for the legal case which upholds the lawfulness of the police action.
I wonder how long the State will drag their feet on releasing the toxicology report.
Good info. Thanks.
Then they killed him.
You mean forfeited their rights to a firearm, right? Since when do you lose your right to carry a pocket knife if you are a felon?
“They simply detained him.”
You still need probable cause to detain someone.
Bingo, you can’t claim probable cause based on something you found after you searched a person you detained, because you needed the probable cause BEFORE you detained them in the first place.
“They didn’t find the knife until after they decided to arrest him.”
Probably true...but the sequence of events was they saw Freddie, and he ran.
Now SCOTUS has determined that merely running from police is cause for the police to give chase. People may or may not agree with that, buts its the current interpretation, and that is important when it comes to prosecuting the cops. And, its likely the cops then yelled ‘stop’...and when Freddie kept running, he was violating their commands - further cause for them to pursue him.
Now you are right that they probably had their minds set on arresting him for something, around half way through the chase. But looking at the technical progression of events, they did absolutely nothing wrong when they chased and tackled him, under the law.
The knife...the code ( http://lawofselfdefense.com/statute/md-baltimore-code-%C2%A7-59-22-switch-blade-knives/ ) seems to expand the definition of a switch blade beyond ‘automatic spring’ and also includes ‘or other device for opening and/or closing the blade’. The wording is sloppy...but if that knife has any type of spring assist that allows you to open it with one hand, the cops aren’t guilty of wrongful imprisonment. They are allowed to make reasonable mistakes on the job, without being criminally prosecuted - and the sloppy wording leaves a lot of room for mistakes.
The officer's charging report filed with the court said the knife was a "spring-assisted, one hand operated knife."
“Then they killed him”.
Yeah, while simultaneously calling for medical assistance several times enroute as shown in the dispatch audio tapes.
Maybe you should wait for the autopsy and toxicology reports. Every symptom Gray exhibited is consistent with heroin overdose: difficulty breathing, convulsions, heart attack, loss of consciousneess, coma. I don’t tink the officers are responsible for the heroin he ingested.
Correct, at least as I understand it.
That simply is not the device “commonly known as a switchblade knife.”
Severed spine?
That’s fine. Just as long as the knife is not used as the probable cause.
The probable cause for the search was a known drug dealer fleeing from police. A dealer who had just been observed making a hand to hand transaction.
Wonder if anyone else has been successfully prosecuted under that statue for possession of the same type of knife Gray had. Kind of hard to believe he's the first person ever to run afoul of that.
With a wound that was consistent with a bolt in the back of the van. Heroin induced convulsions in a confined space can kill you.
The bolt and wound correspondence is not, at this point, evidence. It’s speculation.
Possibly accurate speculation, of course.
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