I was so impressed by Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby's press conference today that I wrote a diary supporting her for President of the United States. http://www.dailykos.com/... Rarely do public officials act so swiftly and courageously.
One thing that pleased me about her statement was that she said the police had no reason to arrest Freddie Gray, who had committed no crime, and accordingly she charged several police officers with False Imprisonment, a common-law (not statutory) crime under Maryland law. That is a very serious charge.
In particular, she said they had no "probable cause" to make an arrest.
Poking around on this a bit, I discovered a horrifying U.S. Supreme Court case that held that the police do not need probable cause to make an arrest if they are making the arrest in a "high-crime area" (whatever that means) and if they have "reasonable suspicion" of a crime (whatever that means).
The case is: Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119 (2000), a fiercely contested 5-4 decision, with the majority opinion written by authoritarian, Republican Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Here is the Wikipedia article on that: http://en.wikipedia.org/....
You can find more by simply Googling "U.S. Supreme Court high-crime area."
You can be sure we'll be hearing about this crap opinion in the days ahead.
I don't have time to flesh this out further at the moment, but I may add some more later in the day.
Incidentally, I live only about 30 miles from downtown Baltimore, so this story strikes close to home.
UPDATE: I learned of this case from this very good article on aljazeera.com: http://www.aljazeera.com/...
UPDATE 2: There was a good diary discussing the Wardlow case that somehow I missed: http://www.dailykos.com/.... H/T to dawgflyer13
Incidentally, to be clear, I think Wardlow poses a challenge to the prosecution on the False Imprisonment charges, if they can reasonably claim the arrest was in a "high-crime area," whatever that means. But I don't think this poses a hurdle to the other charges. I'm mainly passing this along because I'd forgotten about Wardlow and was shocked to read about it again.
UPDATE 3: According to commenter SouthSideDem, who is a criminal defense lawyer, the diary is wrong, because Wardlow permits pursuit and detention in a high-crime area if there is reasonable suspicion (in other words, a Terry stop; but an arrest still requires probable cause; so the Baltimore prosecutor was correct. I see the aljazeer.com article was plain wrong on this, and I should have done more research before posting. I'm going to leave the diary up for the conversation, at least for now, but apparently that case is not the hurdle I'd thought. I'm a pretty good lawyer, but I don't do crim defense.