With an unexpectedly speedy and sweeping announcement on Friday of charges against six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, Baltimore’s chief prosecutor sent an unmistakable signal that the days when police misconduct drew a wrist slap are over.
It was a bold gesture, experts say — and a risky one. For the pledge may be an empty gesture unless prosecutors secure convictions in Mr. Gray’s death.
Both history and the circumstances of the case unveiled on Friday hint that it will be anything but easy. Brutality cases against police officers are notoriously difficult to win, and much about the case, including the evidence against the officers and their defense, remains unknown.
The state’s attorney for Baltimore City, Marilyn J. Mosby, is expected to seek an indictment, the next step toward a trial. Her chronology of Mr. Gray’s arrest on April 12 argued that he had been wrongly arrested, was placed inside a police van without being properly restrained by a seatbelt and, after suffering a severe spinal injury during transport, was repeatedly ignored despite pleading for medical help.
Coverage From Baltimore
Reporters for The New York Times are covering the events.
The six Baltimore Police Department officers face charges ranging from second-degree murder to manslaughter, assault, false imprisonment and misconduct in office. Ms. Mosby’s inquiry — “comprehensive, thorough and independent,” she said Friday — was completed in 18 days, less than a fourth of the time that Missouri prosecutors spent investigating the death of Michael Brown, which triggered riots and protests in Ferguson, Mo., last year.
That speed and confidence belie the difficulty that prosecutors may encounter in convincing a jury or juries that the six officers broke the law.
The bar for a manslaughter conviction is comparatively low; a jury must find that a defendant knew his or her actions could lead to a death, but recklessly disregarded that risk.
TIMELINE
The Timeline of Freddie Gray’s Arrest and the Charges Filed
A timeline of the events that preceded his death.
“The prosecution would simply have to demonstrate that the police were aware that someone might die because they didn’t properly transport him,” said Jens D. Ohlin, a criminal law professor at Cornell Law School. “They don’t have to show that they wanted him to die.”
Second-degree murder is more serious, implying that a defendant either wanted to cause a death or intentionally caused an injury that he or she knew could lead to death. Only one officer — the driver of the van, Officer Caesar Goodson — was accused of murder. While Ms. Mosby has not explained the charge, some have speculated that prosecutors will say Mr. Gray was deliberately given a so-called rough ride that slammed him against the van’s metal walls.
In Mr. Gray’s case, a Police Department general order required officers to restrain prisoners with seatbelts during transport to prevent injuries. But that order, in effect at least since 1997 and updated nine days before Mr. Gray’s death, appears to have been loosely followed by Baltimore officers.
While Ms. Mosby offered a detailed timeline of the events surrounding Mr. Gray’s death, she did not reveal any of the evidence supporting it. Nor did she say any of the officers personally caused the spinal injury that killed him.
But whatever case prosecutors make will have to overcome the inherent deference to police officers that most jurors take with them to the courtroom, experts said.
“It’s always difficult to get a guilty verdict against a police officer except in the worst and strongest cases,” said David A. Harris, a University of Pittsburgh professor who is a leading expert on racial profiling in law enforcement. “A police officer comes into a courtroom not just presumed to be innocent, but presumed to be the good guy.”
GRAPHIC
A Portrait of the Sandtown Neighborhood in Baltimore
Freddie Gray lived in Sandtown-Winchester, a crime-ridden Baltimore neighborhood that has been depressed for decades.
Behavior that might land some defendants in jail, such as beating or even shooting another person, are not just permitted for police officers but are assumed to be part of their work. Jurors are inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, Mr. Harris and others said, particularly if officers can show that they were merely doing their jobs as they always had.
The prosecutors face other hurdles. The witnesses and cellphone videos that have clarified a number of recent police-brutality incidents are largely absent in Mr. Gray’s case. Although one video shows Mr. Gray being loaded into the police wagon, much of what happened to him occurred either in the presence of the officers who have been charged or while he was alone in the back of the police wagon.
The prosecutors’ case would be strengthened should one or more of the six defendants decide to cooperate, or should they try to shift blame for the death. In practice, that happens only infrequently. Mr. Harris said it was even less likely with the police because of the loyalty among fellow police officers.
And even prosecutors with seemingly strong cases frequently lose. In 2010, jurors acquitted a Baltimore officer who had stopped a man he thought looked suspicious, searched him, then shot him twice in the back after he broke way and fled. The officer’s lawyer argued, and jurors agreed, that he had feared for his life because he thought the man was reaching for a gun as he ran away.
A year later, a Baltimore judge acquitted three officers charged with kidnapping and false imprisonment after they picked up two teenagers, drove them miles from their homes and abandoned them, leaving one in another county after taking his shoes and socks. The judge, who convicted two officers on lesser misconduct charges, said that even legal police work involves detaining and threatening suspects.
Both the swiftness and the scope of the charges brought on Friday carry weight in a city where, critics say, poor, mostly black neighborhoods have boiled for years with resentment over police officers’ tactics.
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