A Maryland prosecutor has charged a Baltimore police officer with a major felony charge in the killing of an unarmed young black male who was not charged with any crime. The case has drawn intense media attention and stirred public rage. Prosecutors in bringing charges are confident that they can get a conviction. Why not? Many witnesses say the victim was not committing a crime. There was no provocation. He was unarmed. The coroner classified the killing as a homicide.
The Maryland prosecutor in the case is not Maryland State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby. The victim is not Freddie Gray. The officer charged with the killing was not the officers Ms. Mosby is charging with the slaying of Mr. Gray. The slaying did not happen last month.
It happened in 2008. The victim was Edward Lamont Hunt. He was shot dead by Baltimore police officer Tommy Sanders. The charge against Mr. Sanders was voluntary manslaughter. Mr. Hunt’s alleged offense was that he supposedly stared too hard at Mr. Sanders in a shopping center. When the officer tried to search him, he ran off. He opened fire when he thought he was reaching for something. The story was bogus. Mr. Sanders clearly told the tall tale to cover his wanton slaying of Mr. Hunt.
During the four-day trial, the prosecution called eight witnesses who testified that they never saw Mr. Hunt reach into his jacket as he fled or saw Mr. Hunt assault the officer. The defense called only three witnesses. Two were police experts. They said Mr. Sanders simply followed standard Baltimore police guidelines in the detaining of a possible suspect. The other witness was Mr. Sanders. He claimed he feared for his safety in the encounter.
That was enough for the jury. Mr. Sanders was acquitted. Seven years later, Baltimore police officers are back in a court docket on multiple charges. The Sanders case, and the handful of other similar cases, where cops are tried in the killings and assaults on unarmed civilians, once again raise the eternal and deeply troubling question:
Will a jury convict them?
In 2010, a Bureau of Justice Statistics report found racial discrimination in jury selection still is rampant. A Supreme Court ruling and other court rulings that ban all white or non-black juries have been in far too many cases no more than paper decisions that have had little effect in insuring a diverse jury in cases involving black defendants. The same holds true where blacks have been the victims, and whites or non-blacks the defendants. That’s even more the case when the defendants are police officers.
Ms. Mosby the prosecutor cleared the first colossal hurdle with the indictment of the cops. To get that far is in itself the rarest of rarities. Here is how rare. Police have killed thousands of unarmed civilians in the decade since 2005. But according to a survey by the Washington Post and researchers at Bowling Green State University, only 54 officers have been charged in the shootings. Virtually all have been acquitted if they ever get to trial.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics report gave a big clue why it is nearly impossible for juries to face the brutal reality that some cops do wantonly kill. It comes down to the racial makeup and the ingrained biases of the jurors, no matter what their color. On that point, it did find that a racially diverse jury weighed evidence and testimony longer and more carefully, brought different perspectives and life experiences to the deliberations, and made fewer factual errors. These are crucial factors in the rare cases where cops are charged with killing young blacks or Hispanics.
On the other hand, a jury with no blacks, composed of mostly older middle class whites and non-black ethnics, is much more likely to believe the testimony of police and prosecution witnesses than black witnesses, defendants, or even the victims. In the Sanders trial, Hunt family members were outraged that the jurors chose to believe the testimony of the shooter, Mr. Sanders, rather than eight witnesses who flatly contradicted his version of the killing.
Prosecutors know it is a tough hill to climb with jurors in police abuse cases. They have said as much in surveys and interviews. This is one of two big reasons they almost never bring charges against cops who kill even in the most blatant cases. A prosecutor’s first business is fighting crime. He or she must rely on and work in lockstep with police departments to have success. It still is the problem of convincing a jury that cops deserve jail time for deadly assaults and killings.
In three major racially charged cases in past years where blacks were the victims either beaten or killed by white cops — Rodney King, Oscar Grant and Sean Bell — defense attorneys depicted all three men as the aggressors who posed a threat to the officers. They played up and exaggerated their run-ins with the law to depict young blacks as crime prone, menacing figures. Almost certainly, they will trot out the same script with Mr. Gray. The idea is to subtly, openly play on the prejudices, stereotypes, and negative beliefs of many white jurors toward young blacks.
Ms. Mosby acted swiftly and courageously in indicting the cops who killed Mr. Gray. Time has shown, it is one thing to indict and another to convict cops. Let’s hope this go around it will be different.
Mr. Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of the forthcoming book From King to Obama: Witness to a Turbulent History (Middle Passage Press) http://www.4earlofarihutchinson.com/
He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.
Follow Mr. Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson