Alan Dershowitz lets fly at Marilyn Mosby

Good day all. As you should be aware, six Baltimore police officers were charged in the death of convicted felon Freddie Gray. There have been a number of questions regarding these charges, primarily due to the suddenness of the arrests.

Normally, you don’t see the “system” move like this unless there is overwhelming evidence, such as seeing a suspect actually committing the crime. In the normal course of events, you would expect to see an investigation into these officers taking several months. A competent prosecutor would want all the “I’s” dotted and all the “T’s” crossed. In this case, Mosby bypassed all of this and brought charges in a week.

This has attracted the attention of Alan Dershowitz. Deshowitz is a well regarded defense attorney and legal scholar. He recently retired as a professor after many years at Harvard Law school. To be honest, there isn’t a lot that Dershowitz and I would agree on, since we are on the opposite ends of the political world. However, when we do agree, we’re almost in lockstep.

The last time we agreed on something, besides Israel, was the George Zimmerman trial. Dershowitz wasn’t involved with the Zimmerman case, but he did let fly at the prosecutors, saying they should be disbarred for their actions. As we saw, he was correct regarding the blatant abuse of the legal process by Angela Corey. Now, Dershowitz is going after Marilyn Mosby. Here are the details from The Daily Caller:

Famed defense attorney and legal scholar Alan Dershowitz had harsh words for Maryland state attorney Marilyn Mosby, who on Friday announced stiff charges against six Baltimore police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray. “This is a show trial,” Dershowitz said during an interview Friday with Newsmax TV’s Steve Malzberg.

Aaaand We’re OFF!

“Today had nothing to do with justice. Today was crowd control. Everything today was motivated by a threat of riots and a desire to prevent riots.”

Of that, there is no doubt. As soon as the charges were announced, the riots wound down.

Officer Caesar Goodson Jr. was hit with the worst charges. He was the driver of the police van that picked Gray up at the scene of his arrest. Mosby maintains that Gray, 25, was illegally arrested on April 12. She said that officers failed to properly restrain him in the police van and that they did not give him medical attention even though he asked for it several times. He died on April 19. Mosby said the medical examiner determined Gray’s neck was broken and ruled his death a homicide.

I’ve heard a number of different things about how Gray had his neck broken. One rumor said he was bashing his head against the inside of the van. Another said his spine was weakened from surgery the previous week. Frankly, I have not seen the autopsy report and I can’t offer any comment on how his neck was broken. However, Dershowitz, among others, has some serious questions regarding these charges.

Dershowitz said that none of the evidence presented so far by Mosby and through the media warrants a second-degree murder charge against Goodson Jr. “There’s no plausible, hypothetical, conceivable case for murder under the facts as we now know them,” Dershowitz said.

I will have to defer to Mr. Dershowitz here. I’m sure he’s familiar with the statutes regarding murder in Maryland. Even I, unschooled in the law, think this was way overboard.

“You might say that conceivably there’s a case for manslaughter. Plainly nobody wanted this guy to die. Nobody set out to kill him. Nobody intentionally murdered him.”

One of the things no one has done, is explain how Gray’s spine was broken. Breaking a spine is not the easiest thing in the world. It takes either a great deal of force, or careful leverage and applied leverage. In the latter case, that would be murder. Snapping a spine is not as easy as it looks on TV.

He also said that the because of the attention the Gray case has received, the six defendants “are presumed guilty.” “The mayor and the state attorney have made it virtually impossible for these defendants to get a fair trial,” Dershowitz said.

He added that the officers will probably file for a motion to change the venue of the trial and will ask for Mosby to recuse herself from the case.

Which is beginning to happen. The request for Mosby to be removed from the case are being made as I write this. And it gets better.

Allegations of a conflict of interest have surfaced. Mosby’s husband, Nick Mosby, is a city councilman who represents the district where Gray was arrested. Mosby also received $5,000 during her state attorney campaign last year from Billy Murphy Jr., an attorney who represents the Gray family. Mosby appointed Murphy Jr. to her transition team, though she has denied that any conflict of interest exists.

“My prediction,” Dershowitz offered, “I think they’ve overplayed their hand, I think it’s unlikely they’ll get any convictions in this case as a result of this. And if they do there’s a good possibility it will be reversed on appeal. And we’ll just postpone the riots until months ahead.”

Recent reports coming out of Baltimore are showing the cracks in this case. Mosby was in such a hurry to arrest the officers that the warrants issued on two of them named the wrong people. Here are a few details on that fiasco from the Baltimore Sun:

When charges were announced Friday against Alicia White for the death of Freddie Gray, her phone started buzzing from journalists and bail bondsmen. The problem was, they were calling the wrong Alicia White. The elementary school cafeteria manager from East Baltimore was not the Baltimore Police sergeant charged with manslaughter in the high-profile police custody death – even though court records listed her.

“The middle initial was off. Her address, her height, her weight, her driver’s license number – all of the information was my client’s information,” said Jeremy Eldridge, an attorney who says he has been hired by the resident.

The incompetence and utter stupidity by Mosby and the Mayor of Baltimore in first telling the police to stand down and let the vermin loot, pillage and burn, and now moving so fast against the officers that they accidentally accused two people who had nothing to do with what happened. Because of the mess Mosby has made of the case, and the overcharging she did, many legal scholars are saying that there is a good chance the charges will be dismissed before they even go to trial. In a related story by the Daily Caller:

Charges filed against the six Baltimore police officers for their involvement in the death of Freddie Grey will be dismissed, a George Washington University law professor predicted in an interview with The Daily Caller. John Banzhaf, who teaches public interest law, says that the charges announced by Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby on Friday “go too far.” “I think a prosecutor is going to have a hard time proving that the actions did in fact cause death, since they seem to have no theory as to how it occurred,” Banzhaf said in a phone interview.

And the reason they don’t have a theory on what might have happened is the complete lack of any sort of an investigation. Mr. Banzhaf goes on to say that many prosecutors overcharge defendants as a prosecutorial technique to get defendants to take a plea. This case is so weak that according to the legal experts, if it gets to trial, we could see the charges being dismissed, or if it goes to trial, the officers could be acquitted. Even with a railroad job and a conviction, there is an excellent chance of the case being overturned on appeal.

It will be interesting to see what happens. There may be crimes that did occur here, but now, thanks to Mosby’s stupidity, there is a good chance that this thing is going to blow up in her face, and the defendants walking away free and clear. Then we will see some real nasty rioting begin. In any case, two people sure to be finished in their political careers are the mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and the prosecutor Marilyn Mosby.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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****UPDATE****

I screwed up. I forgot to add the letter “S” to “Mosby.” I’ve made the required edits. I will now go to the nearest blackboard and write:

“Mosby is the Baltimore prosecutor. Moby is the Great Black Whale.”