Officer Caesar Goodson’s acquittal is the second “not guilty” verdict for the six defendants in the notorious Freddie Gray case. Three defendants haven’t been tried yet, and one was due to be re-tried. Goodson was the van driver, against whom the prosecution had lodged its strongest complaints.

If prosecutor Marilyn Mosby was smart she’d cut her losses now and withdraw the charges against the others, because it’s become even more clear than it already was at the outset that there’s no “there” there, except for the fact that the mob demanded these trials and Mosby quickly acquiesced to provide them.

If you’ve followed the excellent trial coverage by Andrew Branca at Legal Insurrection (the linked post above is one of his analyses), you would have found this verdict no surprise. As Branca puts it:

Goodson had been charged with second-degree depraved heart murder, manslaughter, two counts of vehicular manslaughter, second-degree assault, reckless endangerment, and misconduct in office. He faced up to 30 years in prison…

The state has argued a revolving array of three different theories of the case for criminal liability of the officers: (1) “Murder by failure to seatbelt”; (2) “Murder by failure to provide timely medical care”; and (3) “Murder by rough ride.”

In order to obtain a conviction on any of the criminal charges the prosecution must, of course, prove each and every element of that charge beyond a reasonable doubt. Over the course of the last three “Freddie Gray” trials, however, it has become increasingly apparent that the prosecution not only lacks sufficient evidence to meet that high burden, it may lack any direct evidence for any of its theories of the case.

In addition, prosecutors have been repeatedly found to have concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, that the state’s medical examiner originally believed Gray’s death to have been an accident after testifying that she had always believed the death to be a homicide, and just yesterday it was revealed by the Baltimore Sheriffs Office that the “parallel” investigation purported conducted by that office on behalf of prosecutors never actually took place.

According to Baltimore defense attorney Warren Brown (who was not an attorney in the case):

[In this case you have] an African-American judge who was in the Justice Department prosecuting police misconduct. So this is not someone that is going to be sympathetic on the face [of it] to the defendant who happens to be a police officer, on the contrary. His opinion was well-reasoned. He juxtaposed the law to the facts, and made it very clear that what you are asking me to do, States Attorney, I cannot do because you haven’t presented the evidence necessary for me to do that. And that’s justice, that’s what we expect from a judge or jury ”“ to render the decision based on the evidence juxtaposed to the standard that the state is held to ”“ which is proving their case beyond a reasonable doubt. To say that Goodson murdered Freddie Gray was absurd right from the start, but as I indicated before, they made their decision, the State’s Attorney office, to prosecute and then work backwards as opposed to getting all of the evidence, looking it over, and deciding where to go. And we know that because the police turned their investigation over to Marilyn Mosby’s office on a Thursday and on Friday morning she’s coming down the steps of War Memorial indicating what she’s going to do, and it left us all wondering, “How could you have decided that quickly?” So they made the decision to prosecute and work backwards and now they are having to pay the price for that because the evidence is just not there to support it.

Let’s hope they pay the price of at least losing their jobs. Because there are civil suits by the defendants, they may lose even more than that as well, although to successfully sue a prosecutor in the line of duty requires clearing the high hurdle of “malicious intent.”

In this situation, it just might be possible to do so.

[NOTE: By the way, since race was a huge issue in the furor surrounding Freddie Gray’s death, it is relevant to note that, as far as I can tell, just about everyone mentioned by name in this post on both sides was/is black: Freddie Gray, Mosby, Officer Goodson, Judge Williams, and defense attorney Brown.]