BPD officers accept internal punishment

Two Baltimore Police Department (BPD) officers involved in the 2015 arrest of Freddie Gray have accepted internal disciplinary action in lieu of going before disciplinary trial boards.

The decisions of Officers Garrett Miller and Edward Nero were confirmed by police union attorney Michael Davey on Tuesday, days after The Baltimore Sun reported that the trials would be prosecuted by an outside attorney and the boards chaired by a police commander from a neighboring or state agency.

The punishments that Miller and Nero accepted have not been disclosed, but both officers will remain on the force. The Sun previously reported that they faced five days of unpaid suspension.

Davey told The Sun that Miller and Nero do not believe they are guilty of any disciplinary infractions but chose to accept punishment as means of moving the process along more quickly.

Gray, a 25-year-old black Baltimore resident, died in April 2015 from a severe spinal cord injury, one week after BPD officers arrested him. His death sparked more than a week of peaceful and violent protests that gained national attention.

The day after the state’s medical examiner’s office ruled Gray’s death a homicide, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby brought criminal charges against the six officers involved in Gray’s arrest in May 2015.

However following the mistrial of Officer William Porter and the acquittals of Nero, Officer Caesar Goodson, Jr. and Lieutenant Brian Rice, Mosby believed the possibility of securing any convictions was unlikely. She dropped the charges against Porter, who was set to be retried, as well as Miller and Sergeant Alicia White in July 2016.

The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division launched its own investigation into Gray’s death in 2015 but announced last month that it would not be bringing federal criminal charges against any of the officers involved in Gray’s arrest.

Rice, White and Goodson, who drove the police van in which Gray allegedly sustained his fatal spinal cord injury, are still slated to go before the disciplinary boards. They all face termination.

The charges came after the BPD asked neighboring Montgomery County and Howard County police departments to review their officers’ actions. Porter was cleared while charges against the other five have not been specified.

Disciplinary boards are typically composed of fellow officers and cases prosecuted by in-house attorneys. The city has chosen to bring in outsiders to prevent any conflict of interest.

The trials will be prosecuted by Neil Duke, who has been contracted by the City Law Department to work on a number of police misconduct cases as a defense attorney, a fact that concerns Gray family lawyer William Murphy, Sr., according to The Sun.

Duke is also a former vice president of the Baltimore National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and former chair of the city school board.

The chair of the three-person trial boards, who acts as both a judge and juror, has yet to be chosen but will come from neighboring Prince George’s County or the Maryland State Police, according to The Sun. Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis formerly served as assistant chief of police for Prince George’s County.

The appointment of an outsider as chair has raised concern within the BPD from Lieutenant Lisa Robinson, president of the Vanguard Justice Society, a nonprofit that serves black officers in Baltimore.

Robinson told The Sun that an outsider may not be as familiar with conditions and policies under which BPD officers operate.

The search for a chair may delay the trials. Attorneys for Goodson, Rice and White filed a joint motion with the Baltimore Circuit Court to push back the trial dates due to allegations that city officials tried to coach chair candidates, all of whom had previous experience on trial boards.