However, in Baltimore, a 35-year-old lawyer decided to break with the errors of the past and forge a new path. State’s Attorney Mosby put her staff to work, hired her own investigators and put her own people on the streets as the events surrounding the death of Freddie Gray unfolded.
Her response was so on time and thorough that she could say May 1 that information the police department officially turned over to her was essentially already in her possession. She had been collecting information all along. She also worked with the Sherriff’s Department to have the death of the inner city Black man investigated.
Her actions prove that an independent prosecutor is essential in the quest for justice. She is an example of the swift and thorough movement of the justice system and a decision untainted by fear of powerful interests who wanted her to declare the Gray death was justified or offer a mealy mouthed excuse for passing the buck to someone else.
With all the officer-involved killings in recent times, Michael Brown in Ferguson to Eric Garner in New York and too many cases before and after, the Black community was told “we are a nation of laws and the criminal justice system’s decisions must be respected.”
President Barack Obama went on television to make such a declaration after the death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teen visiting his father in Sanford, Fla., before being fatally gunned down by self-appointed neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman.
Now so-called respectable newspapers, pundits and experts across the country wish to pillory State’s Attorney Mosby and question her capability, character and motivation. The Fraternal Order of Police is calling for her to remove herself and editorial writers bemoan a “rush to judgment.”