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Mistrial in first officer's trial in Freddie Gray case

 
A protester yells at members of the Baltimore City Sheriffs Department in front of the Baltimore City City Circuit Courthouse East, after a mistrial was declared in the trial of Baltimore police Officer William G. Porter, Wednesday in Baltimore. [Getty Images]
A protester yells at members of the Baltimore City Sheriffs Department in front of the Baltimore City City Circuit Courthouse East, after a mistrial was declared in the trial of Baltimore police Officer William G. Porter, Wednesday in Baltimore. [Getty Images]
Published Dec. 17, 2015

BALTIMORE

The trial of the first Baltimore police officer in the death of Freddie Gray ended in a hung jury on Wednesday, an unexpected twist that raised complex questions about the legal path forward for five other officers facing charges in the fatal police encounter that prompted a burst of violent unrest last spring.

Judge Barry G. Williams of Baltimore City Circuit Court formally declared a mistrial shortly after 3 p.m., after a weary-looking jury of seven women and five men filed into his wood-paneled courtroom. They had sent him a note after 16 hours of deliberations to inform him they were deadlocked on all four charges, including manslaughter.

The mistrial brought an irresolute end to a case that has gripped this city, where many legal experts expected an acquittal, at least on the manslaughter charge, and officials have for weeks been preparing for fresh unrest.

Instead, Wednesday evening, Baltimore was calm — albeit under a heavy presence of police officers, some in riot helmets — as residents, many disappointed by the lack of a verdict, absorbed the news. A decision on a new trial date could come today; the judge has scheduled a private conference to discuss it with lawyers.

In Gray's neighborhood, Sandtown, the streets were quiet, with few extra officers out on patrol. Downtown, several dozen demonstrators converged against the backdrop of City Hall; they began to march in the street but were swiftly funneled to the sidewalk by police officers.

"Mistrial?" said Tavon Haikns, 22. "Come on. They're going to let him go. They don't care about us." He went on: "We break laws, they break laws, but we get locked up. You know why? Because they're the police, and they've got a badge and a gun."

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and police Commissioner Kevin Davis, speaking at police headquarters, urged residents to peacefully accept the jury's decision — even if it was unsatisfying.

"Justice is not a verdict," the mayor said. "Justice is a process that we have to protect."

A lawyer for the Gray family, Billy Murphy, called the outcome "a bump on the road to justice."

The trial of the officer, William G. Porter, was to be the opening to — and a critical building block for — a six-part legal proceeding on the fatal encounter between police and Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died April 19 of a spinal cord injury suffered during a ride in a police van.

The mistrial could complicate the other prosecutions; Porter is considered a material witness in their case against the driver of the van, Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr., who is scheduled to go on trial Jan. 6 with the other cases to follow.

A big question now is whether the state will push back Goodson's trial, or decide to retry Porter after the other five officers — or perhaps not retry him at all. Williams, the judge, has barred prosecutors and defense lawyers from publicly discussing the case, and has summoned them to his chambers for a private conference this morning to set a new trial date.

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"There is no question now that the state can't just proceed against Officer Goodson with Officer Porter unless they try Officer Porter first," said David Jaros, an assistant professor of law at the University of Baltimore who has been following the case. Of a new trial, he said: "It's a do-over — with a preview of the evidence."

Porter, 26, who testified in his defense, was charged with manslaughter, assault and reckless endangerment and misconduct in office. The state accused him of "callous indifference" to Gray's life for failing to call a medic after Gray asked for one, and for not buckling Gray into a police transport van, where he suffered the fatal injury to his spinal cord.

The Porter trial was closely watched by Black Lives Matter activists across the country, yet its racial dynamics are complex. Porter is black; so are Williams, who made a career of prosecuting police officers as a lawyer with the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, and Marilyn J. Mosby, the state's attorney who brought charges against the six officers, three of whom are black. Seven of the 12 jurors were black.

The jury began its deliberations shortly after 2:30 p.m. Monday, and Tuesday announced it was deadlocked; Williams then sent jurors back for more deliberations. In instructing them, he had said that a manslaughter conviction required them to conclude that Porter showed a "reckless or wanton disregard for human life," and that his actions were a "gross departure" from those of a reasonable officer — a standard that also applied to the assault charge.

The jurors also had to consider counts of reckless endangerment and misconduct in office; the misconduct charge required them to find that he acted "with an evil motive in bad faith." When jurors sent a note to Williams during their deliberations asking him to define those words, he declined to do so.

Many legal experts, including Jaros, had predicted it would be difficult for the state to win convictions on the most serious charges of manslaughter and assault. Jaros predicted defense lawyers would "re-evaluate the strength of their case" after Wednesday's outcome, and credited the state with doing "a better job than we appreciated'' in persuading at least some jurors that Porter had ignored Gray when he was in distress.

But critics of Mosby — who has become a divisive figure here, especially among defenders of the police, who view her as an overzealous prosecutor — saw the lack of a verdict as a big loss for her.

In an impassioned closing argument to the jury Monday, a prosecutor, Janice Bledsoe, contrasted Porter's testimony on the stand — in particular his assertion that he never heard Gray say he could not breathe — with a videotaped interview he gave to the Police Department's internal affairs investigators.

"How long does it take?" Bledsoe asked. "How long does it take to click a seatbelt, and click a radio to ask for a medic? Two seconds? Three seconds? Maybe four seconds? Is two, three or four seconds worth a life?"

Gray's family was not in the courtroom Wednesday when the mistrial was announced. At one point during the trial, his mother, Gloria Darden, left in tears. Later Wednesday afternoon, in a short news conference outside the courthouse accompanied by Murphy, their lawyer, they said they were not upset by the mistrial.

The jury "did the best that they could," said Richard Shipley, Gray's stepfather, as Darden looked on. "We are calm. You should be calm, too."