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Baltimore Drops Dozens of Cases After Video Casts Doubt on Officers


By JACEY FORTINAUG. 2, 2017


Marilyn J. Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore, said prosecutors “have been working around the clock to ensure a thorough evaluation of each and every case” related to the officers in question. Credit Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times


State attorneys are dismissing dozens of cases in Baltimore after reviewing a video that appears to show a police officer planting evidence while two other officers look on.

Over a hundred criminal cases that would have relied on testimony from those three officers are now under review. As of Wednesday afternoon, 41 had been dropped or were set to be dropped.

“The credibility of those officers has now been directly called into question,” Marilyn J. Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore, said at a news conference on Friday.

The video, released last month and recorded on Jan. 24, shows an officer who appears to place a bag of white capsules in an alleyway before walking toward the street, as the two other officers watch. He then appears to turn on his body camera and return to the alley to retrieve the capsules.


By BALTIMORE POLICE DEPARTMENT, VIA STORYFUL 1:19
Body Cam Video Shows Officer Allegedly Planting Evidence
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Body Cam Video Shows Officer Allegedly Planting Evidence
Body camera footage appears to show a Baltimore police officer planting drugs near the scene of an arrest in January. By BALTIMORE POLICE DEPARTMENT, VIA STORYFUL on Publish Date July 19, 2017. Photo by Maryland Office of the Public Defender.
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The body cameras used by the Baltimore police can temporarily retain footage even when they are not fully activated. When an officer presses a button to begin recording an event, the preceding 30 seconds of footage are saved as well, but without audio. So it is possible the officer did not realize the initial scene was being recorded.

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In a statement last month, a public defender identified Richard Pinheiro as the officer who handled the bag.

The three officers in the video had been scheduled to participate in 123 cases. Ms. Mosby said that of those cases, the ones in which the charges hinged solely on the officers’ testimonies had to be thrown out because of the “credibility issue,” while others could still be prosecuted on other evidence.

So far, 27 cases have been cleared for prosecution to continue, and the remaining 55 are still awaiting review. The cases that have been dismissed involve drug-related felonies and weapons possession, Antonio Gioia, chief counsel at the Baltimore state’s attorney’s office, said at the news conference on Friday.

One of the officers involved was suspended; the other two were placed on administrative duty. On Tuesday, the police did not specify which officer was suspended.

At a news conference on July 19, Baltimore’s police commissioner, Kevin Davis, said the idea that officers might plant evidence at a crime scene was “as serious as it gets.”

The police department shared additional videos from that day in January that seemed to show officers seizing illicit drugs from people near the crime scene. Commissioner Davis suggested that it was possible the officers had found a bag of capsules in the alley without recording it, and had tried to stage a re-enactment of the scene as it actually happened. The department is still investigating the episode.

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State attorneys may also have another video on their plate similar to the one from January, according to the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, which said in an emailed statement on Monday that body-camera footage showed a different set of Baltimore officers “working together to manufacture evidence.”

That footage, recorded in November 2016, appeared to show officers thoroughly searching the driver’s side of a vehicle without finding anything, and then searching it again about 30 minutes later and finding illicit drugs.

The episode resulted in an arrest of a woman, Shamere Collins, whose lawyer, Joshua Insley, said the charges against her were dropped on Monday.

The state’s attorney’s office said it was requesting postponements on all cases requiring testimony from two of the officers involved in the November incident.

“Before we blanketly characterize their behavior as deceptive and/or a credibility issue, we referred the matter to the Internal Affairs Division of the Baltimore Police Department,” wrote Melba Saunders, a spokeswoman for the office.

Baltimore is addressing these videos in an era marked by growing concerns about police accountability.

Protests erupted in the city after the death of Freddie Gray, 25, a black man who died in April 2015 after sustaining a spinal cord injury in police custody. It was a pivotal moment for Ms. Mosby, who — then, at 35, the youngest top state attorney in a major American city — quickly announced that she would prosecute six officers in Mr. Gray’s death.

All officers involved had their charges dropped or were acquitted by July 2016. But the episode also prompted Baltimore to invite the Justice Department to conduct a study on policing in the city.

Released in August 2016, the report found that the Baltimore Police Department “engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution or federal law.”

Body cameras were deployed in Baltimore in 2016. “We have over 1,500 cameras deployed and expect full deployment of approximately 2,500 by early 2018,” a Baltimore Police Department spokesman, T. J. Smith, said in an email on Tuesday. He did not comment on the state attorneys’ review of the 123 cases.

“This is kind of a learning and a trial period, right?” Ms. Mosby said on Friday. “All of the body-worn cameras haven’t even been implemented, and I think that we’re going to go through growing pains.”


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