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So Long to the False Arrest Charges

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Apparently the Baltimore State's Attorney read Crime and Consequences before she met with the grand jury. Very good. It might have been better, though, if she had read it before her earlier, courthouse steps carnival announcing charges against six city police officers.  

Although she originally made a point of the supposed illegality of Freddie's Gray's arrest, we now see that false arrest (or false imprisonment, as it is put) charges against the arresting officers have disappeared.  The prosecutor gives no explanation. But this Reason article does:

Of the criminal charges proposed by Marilyn Mosby, the state's attorney for Baltimore, in connection with the death of Freddie Gray, three are notably missing from the indictments approved by a grand jury today. The Washington Post reports that "charges of false imprisonment against three of the officers are no longer part of the case." That change presumably reflects the dispute over whether the knife Gray was carrying, which was the official justification for his arrest, qualified as an illegal switchblade.


Judging from the way police described Gray's knife ("a spring-assisted, one-hand-operated knife"), it did not fit the state's definition of a switchblade (as Mosby noted) and probably did not fit the city's definition either. But the latter point--which Mosby did not publicly address, even though Gray was charged with violating the city ordinance--is open to debate, which suggests that the officers who arrested him might reasonably have believed the knife was illegal. If so, they could not be convicted of false imprisonment, since to arrest Gray they needed only probable cause to believe he had broken the law.



2 Comments

She's an idiot.

To initially announce false arrest charges on these facts was amazing. How can a person in that position fail to understand the idea of probable cause? Yikes.

But the worst part isn't ignorance. It isn't even impetuosity or publicity seeking. It's using the power of prosecution in the service of an ideological agenda and, still worse, an ideological agenda with an unmistakable racial tinge.

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