This officer’s sole action was sitting in the van that transported Freddie Gray. For that he was charged with assault, reckless endangerment and misconduct. Judge: No credible facts to show he was even involved in arrest.
Via NRO:
The officer should not have been charged in the first place.
The second officer to be tried in the Baltimore prosecutions arising out of Freddie Gray’s death in April 2015 has been acquitted in a bench trial.
The case against the officer, Edward Nero, was among the most inane brought by the incompetent, race-baiting prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby. As we’ve previously recounted, Gray died after suffering a severe spinal injury while in custody in a police van. Back in December, the first officer to be tried, William G. Porter, got a mistrial after a hung jury and is to be retried later this year.
Gray, a 25-year-old African-American man with a police record involving drug charges and minor crimes, was apprehended while acting suspiciously during a police crackdown in a high-crime area of Baltimore. Upon making eye contact with an officer he fled, leading police to chase and stop him, and to find a knife on his person. He was thus arrested. When placed in the van, Gray was wildly uncooperative with police, who did not belt him into his seat.
The medical examiner eventually concluded that police had no intent to harm Gray, and that the deceased would not have sustained his severe injury had he remained in the prone position in which police attempted to place him. Prosecutors reportedly concealed from the defense at Porter’s trial not only that Gray was found to be under the influence of narcotics at the time of his arrest, but also that he had claimed prior back injuries in the weeks prior to his death. Yet Mosby proceeded to charge six police officers, notwithstanding that a competent homicide investigation was not close to being completed. In a demagogic speech announcing the charges, she claimed she was responding to mob cries of “no justice, no peace.”