The Patriot Post® · Baltimore Moves to Strip Cops of Due Process
When you can’t win a single one of the criminal cases against the six Baltimore police officers who were allegedly to blame for the death of criminal Freddie Gray, how should a prosecutor respond? That there was insufficient evidence to press charges — affirmed by the fact that none of the officers was found guilty — should have compelled Marilyn Mosby to either resign or be forced to step down. Or at the very least it should have persuaded her to re-evaluate the real underlying motives for why the cops were charged and publicly tried in the first place. But the result has been neither of those.
Mosby has had nearly three months since the remaining cases were dropped to do some soul searching. However, rather than responding in a dignified manner — in other words, admit it was wrong to press charges and pledge to do better — she’s doubling down on the “racist police” narrative by blaming the legal system and demanding reforms. Only the reforms would severely undermine our legal system and the rights of defendants.
The Baltimore Sun reports, “Mosby proposed a slate of reforms Thursday for investigating and prosecuting police officers accused of misconduct, citing her failure to convict a single officer in the Freddie Gray case as her motivation. ‘Equality must be a felt reality’ in Baltimore, said Mosby, adding that her proposed reforms — including giving investigators in her office police powers and prosecutors the right to reject a criminal defendant’s request for a bench trial — would go a long way toward leveling the playing field between regular citizens and police officers accused of similar offenses [emphasis added].”
Simply stated, Mosby is launching an all-out assault on due process — in this case by attempting to regulate it by stripping an officer’s right to a bench trial — simply because she failed to get the results she wanted. She claims, “Having learned the hard way through firsthand experience, when allegations of police misconduct arise, prosecutors are seen too often as protective of police and unlikely to prosecute cases of wrongdoing.” Except police officers were charged — she did send six of them to trial, didn’t she? What she’s really perturbed by is that none of them ended up being found guilty, a conclusion she had reached prematurely.
The reason most officers end up being exonerated is because the facts don’t corroborate the false message from leftists who portray law enforcement personnel as inherently racist. It’s true, some officers are guilty of crimes. But to argue they are never held accountable isn’t true. Just recently Virginia officer Stephen Rankin was sentenced for unjustifiably killing a black man last year. By endeavoring to satiate a personal vendetta, Mosby risks doing much more harm than her rhetoric already is.