Famed Civil Rights attorney: Charges against 6 officers “crowd control”

Noted defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, one of the most prominent scholars in the U.S. on constitutional law and criminal law, as well as a noted defender of civil liberties, wrote a piece for the Boston Globe

Dershowitz points out that no decision on charges should ever be made based on the desires of a violent mob. Charging six police officers with varying crimes simply to quell a riot may very well achieve that goal, but it does not, over the long term, provide the justice, guidance, and leadership that a State Attorney is charged with maintaining. In fact, as Dershowitz explains, it is a violation of the officers’ due process if that is indeed the case. Dershowitz stated, “crowd control is not a proper component of prosecutorial discretion and is inconsistent with due process.”

Page Croyder, a former deputy state’s attorney in Baltimore, claims that in the haste to charge these officers, Mosby has locked up two completely innocent people. In this article in the Baltimore Sun, Croyder explains that two arresting officers were arrested for “false imprisonment” based on the fact that the knife found on Freddie Gray was legal, meaning he couldn’t be arrested for carrying it. But the Police Task Force assigned to further investigate the case has found that the knife was illegal after all, rendering the “false imprisonment” charges null.