Baltimore Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby: Resign Your Office

As of Thursday morning, Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby is batting 0-3 in the Freddie Gray cases. If she had an ounce of decency and a smidgeon of professionalism she would ask that the three remaining prosecutions be dismissed and would resign her office.

Caesar Goodson, the Baltimore police officer who drove the van in which Freddie Gray was injured and subsequently died, was acquitted Thursday on seven felony counts and one misdemeanor. Add this to Officer Edward Nero’s acquittal on all counts a couple of weeks ago, and William Porter’s case ending in a hung jury last December and Mosby has more than a little egg on her face. Goodson’s case was the lynchpin of the misguided and politically-motivated prosecution of the six officers, and his acquittal throws Mosby’s effort in to complete disarray.

Judge Barry Williams, who has presided over each of the three cases tried so far, had no kind words for the prosecution of these officers as he rendered his not-guilty decision on Thursday. And to say that he offered no encouragement for a different result in the next three cases to come before him, and retrial of the hung jury case, would be an understatement. (Full disclosure: The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, of which I am chairman, is supporting the Baltimore officers financially).

But Mosby’s discomfort pales in comparison to what she has done to six hard-working and honorable police officers and their families, whose lives and careers she attempted to destroy for her own political gain.

And her discomfort pales in comparison to what she has done to the taxpayers of Baltimore for the expenses of her pandering to the radical black community — not to mention the $6 million of taxpayers’ money paid to Freddie Gray’s family.

And it gets worse, much worse.

The murder rate in Baltimore skyrocketed in the months following the Freddie Gray riots, up over 60 percent from 211 in 2014 to 344 last year. According to the Baltimore Sun, the victims were “mostly young, black men shot to death in a near-daily crush of violence.”

Statistics don’t tell us how many of the 2015 murder victims were the result of the so-called “Ferguson effect” and nobody will ever know. But we do know that pandering to the black rioters didn’t do much for those murder victims. Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute, one of the country’s noted experts on crime and policing, noted in a May 2016 article in the Wall Street Journal that because of the Ferguson effect “arrests were sharply down in cities like St. Louis and Baltimore because of the incessant drumbeat against the police; officers scale back on proactive policing under the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric.” Mosby’s discomfort cannot compare to that of the families of those murder victims.

Marilyn Mosby in an embarrassment to the City of Baltimore, to the legal profession, and to the people she thinks she represents. Resignation is the least she could do.