BALTIMORE (AP) — Prosecutors in the manslaughter trial of a Baltimore police officer rested their case Tuesday in the same way they began — with testimony that Officer William Porter failed in his duty to ensure the safety of Freddie Gray.
Defense attorneys will start their presentation Wednesday, aiming to expand on the damage they’ve already done to the state’s case. Perhaps most notably, there was an audible stir in the courtroom Monday when the state’s star witness, Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Carol Allan, conceded under aggressive cross-examination that she would not have ruled Gray’s death a homicide had the driver of a police transport van followed Porter’s instructions and taken Gray to a hospital.
The van driver, Officer Caesar Goodson, instead picked up a second prisoner and then drove to a West Baltimore police station, where Gray was found unresponsive and paralyzed from a broken neck. He had been in the back of the van for 45 minutes, handcuffed and shackled for most of ride, and the defense sought to shift blame to Goodson.
Goodson is one of six officers charged and faces the most serious allegation of second-degree “depraved heart” murder. His trial begins next month.
As for Porter, he showed “a callous indifference to life,” prosecutor Michael Schatzow said Tuesday.
The defense disagreed.
“There’s no testimony that what Officer Porter did was any sort of deviation from what a reasonable police officer would do,” defense attorney Gary Proctor said in arguing for dismissal of all charges.
Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry Williams denied the motion. It was the second time in as many days he refused to throw out the case.
Gray was a 25-year-old black man who died April 19, a week after he was injured. His death set of protests and a riot in the city and he became a symbol of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Porter, who is also black, is the first officer to face trial. His jury, seven women and five men, is considering four charges: manslaughter, second-degree assault, misconduct in office and reckless endangerment. He could face about 25 years in prison if convicted on all charges.
Porter is expected to take the stand in his own defense.
The trial began last week and jurors heard from 16 state’s witnesses over five days. They also watched Porter’s videotaped interview with Baltimore police detectives.
The state’s case was centered on what the officer did — and didn’t do.
“He intentionally didn’t call a medic and he intentionally didn’t buckle him in a seat belt,” Schatzow said.
The first and last witnesses were police trainers, one from the Baltimore Police Department and one from Columbia College in Missouri. Both testified that Porter had a duty under department policies to call a medic after Gray requested one and asked the officer to help him up.
The final witness, criminal justice professor Michael Lyman, also said Porter shared with other officers a duty to buckle Gray in, as required by department policy.
The defense suggested Porter either didn’t know or had forgotten those directives, and that Gray’s fatal injury came after he last spoke to Porter at the fifth of the van’s six stops. Defense attorney Joe Murtha also raised the possibility Gray had a prior back injury that might have contributed to his injury. The evidence? Gray told a detective in March that he couldn’t sit up straight in a chair because he had hurt his back.
Prosecutors contend Gray was already gravely injured by the van’s fourth stop, when Porter opened the doors and lifted him from the floor onto a bench.
Murtha’s aggressive style drew a warning Monday from the judge, who threatened to hold him in contempt if he didn’t stop “testifying,” by posing questions about information not in evidence, during his cross-examination of Allan. Prosecutors had to call Allan back to the witness stand to clarify a statement she’d made under Murtha’s questioning that her autopsy report was theory and not fact.
She eventually told jurors that her conclusions were based on medical records, police statements and the autopsy itself.
___
Follow Juliet Linderman on Twitter at https://twitter.com/JulietLinderman . Her work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/journalist/juliet-linderman . Follow David Dishneau on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ddishneau . His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/david-dishneau .
Comment count on this article reflects comments made on Breitbart.com and Facebook. Visit Breitbart's Facebook Page.