I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, but I do sometimes have common sense.
My common sense tells me that the it is likely that as the Baltimore DA was looking at prosecuting the police officers involved in the Gray case he would have wanted to try the strongest case first. It seems that given the chance of riots if "justice" is not done that they would have wanted to first trial to be their best shot at a conviction.
The fact that the first trial ended in a hung jury seems to indicate that there was not an overwhelming amount of evidence of the officers guilt. Or, it is all one big conspiracy designed to encourage other police officers to brutally murder unarmed innocent African American youths for doing nothing.
Anyway, if this continues I suspect that there will be increasing unrest from the pro-Freddie side of things. Up to and possibly inevitably more riots if "justice" doesn't happen.
The problems with this are twofold.
1. This is what is going to happen when prosecutions are driven by political considerations and not by evidence of guilt.
2. There are two many folks out there who define "justice" as seeing these cops get convicted with lengthy prison terms no matter what the evidence actually demonstrates.
I could be wrong, it is perfectly possible that they will find enough of these officers guilty to satisfy the mobs. It's perfectly possible that some of these cops are actually guilty and deserve to be punished. It's also perfectly possible that the mobs will realize that actual justice has nothing to do with their demands and that they will accept whatever verdicts are rendered.
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2 comments:
yeah, anything's possible.
I found it notable that this first cop is black. I think it may also be possible that they figured it best to try one of the black cops first (there are at least two, with one being a woman, if memory serves) so as to mitigate some of the reaction should the cop be found not guilty. That is, what would the BLM crowd do when the alleged police brutality perpetrated upon an innocent black man minding his own business was perpetrated by a black cop. How does that affect the narrative, which to this point, seems to focus on racism as the basis of all such incidents?
Just wonderin'.
I agree that they probably tried that black cop first for that very reason. My opinion is that if they would have gotten a guilty verdict on the first trial it would have mitigated any not guilty verdicts down the road. I suspect, that none of these cases is particularly strong and that a failure to convict in any further cases will set off some sort of reaction. Unfortunately trying to avoid riots is almost antithetical to actually having justice be done.
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