Patterico's Pontifications

5/6/2015

Former Baltimore Deputy State’s Attorney On Mosby’s Quick Decision Making: Either “Incompetence” Or “Unethical Recklessness”

Filed under: General — Dana @ 9:59 pm



[guest post by Dana]

Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby has come under fire by a former deputy state’s attorney, Page Croyder, who was with the Baltimore State’s Attorney office for 21 years.

In a damning op-ed, Croyder observes the quickness with which Mosby leveled charges at the six officers and attributes her “quick” and “decisive” action to either “incompetence” or “unethical recklessness”.

Croyder examines Mosby’s choice not to utilize every resource available to her in order to make a more informed decision:

Any prosecutor interested in the truth and in justice would have used all the tools at her disposal to find them. Ms. Mosby ignored them. She has one of the most experienced homicide prosecutors in the state of Maryland as chief of her homicide unit, but did not ask him to investigate. She had the police report all of one day before filing charges, her mind already made up. And she failed to make use of the grand jury to gather, probe and test the evidence before a group of average citizens.

In fact, Ms. Mosby was so hasty it appears she locked up two completely innocent officers. She charged Freddie Gray’s arresting officers with “false imprisonment” because she said the knife that Gray had on him was legal. In fact, as The Sun reported, the Police Task Force found it to be illegal after all. It was Ms. Mosby who had no probable cause to lock the arresting officers up, an injustice she could have easily avoided by taking her time.

If truth and justice had been the goal, then it would also seem that taking the necessary time to thoroughly investigate would be essential. However, it appeared Mosby believed time was something she could not spare, and that speed was of the essence.

Croyder likens Mosby’s rush to judgement as “a calculated push to the spotlight, filing charges after a mere two weeks.”

Additionally,

She conducted her own “parallel” investigation using her police integrity unit (the only unit listed on her published staffing tree missing the name of a supervisor.) She had no time to evaluate the crucial autopsy report, or consult with experts about its implications. In her haste to step into the national limelight, she circumvented normal charging procedures by grabbing a member of the sheriff’s office to swear to their truth and file them for her. She calculated her actions for surprise and maximum effect, and she got it.

Croyder ends with a warning to those subject to Mosby’s leadership:

[S]he has created a new expectation in the city: that police officers who arrest without what she considers to be probable cause (a subjective standard) are subject not just to civil action (the current norm) but criminal action. Mere mistakes, or judgments exercised under duress, can land them in the pokey.

If I were a Baltimore police officer, I’d be looking for another job immediately. And as a Baltimore citizen, I may start looking for someplace else to live. When the police cannot depend upon the state’s attorney to be as thorough, competent, non-political and fair with them as she is supposed to be with all citizens, none of us will be safe.

While some are tooting Mosby’s horn as a rising political star, legal experts besides Croyder are expressing serious misgivings about the rapid decision making by Baltimore’s new state’s attorney. The new state’s attorney that so many have pinned their hopes upon in their quest for justice.

–Dana

9 Responses to “Former Baltimore Deputy State’s Attorney On Mosby’s Quick Decision Making: Either “Incompetence” Or “Unethical Recklessness””

  1. Hello.

    Dana (86e864)

  2. Looks like she shot herself in her Manolo Blahniks. But the real price to pay will come when the jury acquits most if not all of these six officers. Don’t charge the crime if you haven’t taken the time to get it right.

    Comanche Voter (1d5c8b)

  3. Rosa Parks wasn’t lynched; she was incarcerated.

    Why were six charged? Because the most culpable were Black and Ms. Mosby desperately wanted White defendants.

    If a White prosecutor indicted under analogous circumstances to placate an angry White mob, would the Page Croyders of this world limit their criticisms to “reckless” and “incompetent”?

    Today, Alan Dershowitz also excused Ms. Mosby: “(T)he appearance of crowd influence flows inexorably from (Mosby’s) ill-chosen words, and the appearance of injustice must be avoided as studiously as the reality of injustice if our legal system is the maintain its credibility.” If there is one thing about Ms. Mosby’s comments that seems beyond dispute, it is that they were disarmingly honest and well chosen. She meant what she said.

    Hate is alive and well in this country and we can’t even talk about it.

    ThOR (a52560)

  4. More problems with Mosby’s “investigation”:

    The Baltimore police investigation into the death of Freddie Gray doesn’t support some of the charges, including the most serious, filed by the Baltimore City State’s Attorney, potentially allowing lawyers representing the police officers the opportunity to undercut the prosecution, according to officials briefed on the separate probes conducted by the State’s Attorney and police.

    Already, defense attorneys are filing motions seeking to exploit differences between the separate state attorney and police investigations.

    Another issue could arise from the team Mosby relied on to lead her case: one of her top investigators, Avon Mackel, is a former high-ranking Baltimore police officer who was stripped of his command post in 2009 for failing to follow through on a robbery investigation that two of his officers mishandled and did not report. A Baltimore Sun report said police in the district were accused of classifying serious crimes as lesser in order to log lower crime rates.

    In October 2009, four months after his demotion, Baltimore County police sent a SWAT team to Mackel’s home, responding a drunken incident in which he was seen holding a gun, according to a police report of the incident obtained by CNN.

    Officers said an intoxicated Mackel refused to cooperate and was visibly upset, according to the report provided in response to a public records request. An officer then “observed the barrel of Mackel’s handgun hanging over the edge of the molding at the top of the steps and saw Mackel pull the gun out of sight,” the report said.

    Police used a Taser on Mackel while he was on the phone with his father “crying and yelling,” before he barricaded himself in his bedroom. The report doesn’t say how the incident ended, but police said there was no arrest. A spokesman for the Baltimore County Police Department said “the [SWAT] tactical unit did assist with this incident, which ended peacefully.”

    Mackel didn’t respond to calls and emails seeking comment. No one answered at his home.

    Dana (86e864)

  5. http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/06/us/freddie-gray-knife/

    Was that knife illegal? It’s ambigious. It took close – and probably hypertechical inspection to declare it illegal under the city code (its legal under State law).

    Which is my problem with the arrest for the knife – it was arrest on pretext, brandishing or reveal of a knife in public is not why they were chasing him, or why they attempted a terry-stop.

    Laws like Maryland’s knife law should be repealed for more than one reason. There’s the main principle – free people should be able to possess and to carry defensive weapons in public so long as they don’t brandish them or threaten – punishing for illegal use is enough. But another is this use of “gray area” possession or even not so gray (pure mistake claimed to be in good faith) to add a charge or effect an arrest police want to make for some other purpose.

    I think police were wrong to attempt to detain this man or to carry out a “round up the usual suspects” raid in that neighborhood.

    They were certainly wrong not to call EMS to the scene when he was already complaining of neck pain and breathing difficulty and had trouble standing.

    The arrest they made is questionable, if it takes minute examination of the knife to find a reason to have arrested him in the first place.

    SarahW (6f3980)

  6. “Nifong of the North”

    Harcourt Fenton Mudd (5e0a82)

  7. SarahW,

    A lot of arrests seem minor, but police departments in big cities often focus on minor offense to minimize the big offenses. It’s called the broken windows theory of policing. to put it in a context that might resonate with you, it’s somewhat like preventive medical care. where the goal is to address illness before it becomes a medical crisis.

    DRJ (e80d46)

  8. SarahW

    Terry stop was legal re: Illinois v. Wardlow. Gray was at a well known drug corner.

    -Reasonable suspicion justifying a Terry stop is met in this situation. Determination of reasonable suspicion has to be based on commonsense inferences about human behavior, and officers are justified in suspecting that defendant was involved in criminal activity based on his flight and the fact that he was in a high crime area.

    -Officers are not required to ignore relevant characteristics of a location in determining whether further investigation is warranted.

    -Headlong flight is suggestive of wrongdoing.

    Hawkins (d36317)

  9. “… While some are tooting Mosby’s horn as a rising political star, {others express} serious misgivings about the rapid decision making by Baltimore’s new state’s attorney. The new state’s attorney that so many have pinned their hopes upon in their quest for justice. ”
    = = = = = = =

    Well, you see, that “quest for justice” thing means different things to different people.

    For one strong subset of Americans, it means that the laws as written will be applied equally to all who are accused of wrong-doing.

    For another, quite strong, subset of Americans, it means that –due to the “original sin of slavery” as one proponent of this view phrased it in 2008– members of certain “disadvantaged groups” (as determined by the Liberal Narrative at any given time) should be granted forbearance for “acting out” due to their “frustration” and “justified outrage” after generations of “historical oppression” and “inequality”.

    A_Nonny_Mouse (bea2b0)


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