In a press release issued late Tuesday the Justice Department announced its decision not to prosecute six officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray in 2015:
After an extensive review of this tragic event, conducted by career prosecutors and investigators, the Justice Department concluded that the evidence is insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Officer Caesar Goodson, Officer William Porter, Officer Garrett Miller, Officer Edward Nero, Lieutenant Brian Rice, or Sergeant Alicia White willfully violated Gray’s civil rights. Accordingly, the investigation into this incident has been closed without prosecution.
What remains is what was originally intended: the effective de facto turning of the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) into a federal police department.
Freddie Gray’s death in the back of a police van was seized by radicals and Marxists as a cause célèbre against the local police department, burning Baltimore and causing millions of dollars in damages while they ravaged the city for a week after Gray died.
Predictably, almost eerily, left-leaning Marilyn Mosby, the state’s attorney, almost immediately charged the six officers with reckless endangerment, involuntary manslaughter, and second-degree depraved heart murder (extreme indifference).
A federal investigation into the incident by the Marxist Obama’s Justice Department followed with, again predictably, a conclusion that the BPD in general was out of control and needed federal intervention to remedy the situation. The result was a consent decree that bound the city of Baltimore and its police department with federal fetters to be enforced by a federal judge.
That 227-page decree included new policies in every area of police work including “requirements for conducting stops, searches and arrests, and robust supervisory review of [them by a federal judge] to ensure that officers apply proper [defined now by the Justice Department] standards when taking these actions.” (Emphasis added.)
That agreement was put into place during the last days of the Obama administration, and efforts by the new administration to stall or delay its implementation fell on deaf ears. Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked U.S. District Judge James Bredar, an Obama appointee, to delay the decree’s implementation by 90 days so it could be reviewed under the Trump administration’s new guidelines.
No way, said the Obama appointee. After hearing days of testimonies from citizens no doubt enlisted by Marxists and BLM activists about how their “trust” in the local police had been “shattered” thanks to the “outrageous actions” of the officers involved in Gray’s death, Judge Bredar wrote:
It would be extraordinary for the court to permit one side [the new attorney general] to unilaterally amend an agreement already jointly reached and signed. Now is the time to enter the decree and thereby require all involved to get to work on repairing the many fractures so poignantly revealed [by those citizens].
Judge Bredar failed to mention that those fractures had been deliberately and intentionally caused by BLM activists and useful idiots with the goal of turning the BPD into a branch of the federal government. He failed to mention Marilyn Mosby’s excessive zeal in overcharging those officers long before all the evidence was in. Nor did he mention anything about her support of those BLM thugs in encouraging them during their week of destruction.
The best that Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department could do, following Bredar’s tossing of the request for a delay, was to declare that the agreement would make Baltimore “a less safe city” which is “plagued by a rash of violent crime that shows no signs of letting up.”
So far this year (thanks no doubt to the “Ferguson Effect”), 245 residents of Baltimore have been murdered, compared to 214 at the same time last year — nearly a 15-percent increase.
As far as the other 25 “investigations” that the Obama Justice Department left open are concerned, they’ll be buried, according to Ian Prior, a DOJ spokesman:
One thing should be eminently clear: the Department of Justice under this administration will never negotiate or sign a consent decree [in the future] that would reduce the lawful powers of the [local] police department and result in a less safe city.
The DOJ added that the Baltimore consent decree will require a “highly-paid monitor to govern every detail of how the Baltimore Police Department functions” with costs of implementation of the new federal rules and mandates estimated to be $10 million a year.
Naturally, local far-left liberals and communists infesting Baltimore were dismayed when the present administration’s decision not to prosecute was announced. Baltimore’s delegation to Congress — Senators Ben Cardin (Freedom Index, [which shows how closely senators and congressmen adhere to the Constitution] only 15) and Chris Van Hollen (FI 19) were joined by Representatives Elijah Cummings (FI 21), John Sarbanes (FI 19), and Dutch Ruppersberger (FI 15), all Democrats — said in a statement that they were “disappointed by reports that [Trump’s] DOJ will not seek justice for Freddie Gray, but we are not surprised.”
Another far-left enabler, Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, still thinks the police were responsible for the death of Gray, no matter what the investigation concluded:
We know that spines do not break without cause, and the DOJ and BPD’s credibility to make change a reality in Baltimore hinges not just on their ability to institute much needed reforms to police training, policies and practices, but also on their success in bringing to justice officers who abuse their power and take the lives of innocent residents.
Still in place is Marilyn Mosby. It was hoped that the lawsuit brought by the six officers against her for malicious prosecution, defamation of character, and invasion of privacy would lead to discovery of her connections to the radicals responsible for inciting the riots following Gray’s death. She would be asked why she failed to use a grand jury to investigate the incident and then bring charges only if the jury agreed. She would be asked why she failed to use the skills and abilities of a highly trained member of her staff to help with her investigation, rather the relying solely on a medical examiner’s report. She would likely be asked about inflammatory remarks she made to the rioters: “I heard your call for ‘No Justice, No Peace!’ Your peace is sincerely needed as I work to deliver justice on behalf of this young man.… Our time has come!” She would no doubt be asked just “whose time has come” exactly.
But Mosby is claiming immunity, and oral arguments over her claim aren’t to be heard until December.
The unfortunate death of Freddie Gray will soon be forgotten. The officers will fade into history as well, taking with them falsely but deliberately damaged résumés. But the consent agreement — which was the goal sought from the beginning by those whose goal is to emasculate local police and turn them into agents of a federal police force — remains in place. The only untidy bit of business left to be dealt with is Mosby.
Photo: Department of Justice
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
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