Famed defense lawyer and liberal Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz blasted Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s rush to judgment in bringing homicide charges against six cops for the death of Freddie Gray.
Dershowitz told Newsmax’s Steve Malzberg that it was “a very sad day for justice.”
“Today had nothing to do with justice,” he said in a telephone interview Friday. “Today was crowd control. Everything was motivated by a threat of riots and a desire to prevent riots.”
Dershowitz also ripped into Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.
“The mayor outrageously said we’re going to get justice for the victim, the family and people of Baltimore, never mentioning the defendants. Under our Constitution, the only people who are entitled to justice are the defendants,” he told Malzberg.
“They are presumed innocent, they need due process of law, and the mayor and the state attorney have made it virtually impossible for these defendants to get a fair trial,” he said. “They have been presumed guilty.”
Dershowitz made his comments hours after Mosby announced her charges against the six officers, ranging from illegal arrest, assault and involuntary manslaughter, up to the most serious charges — those lodged against the driver — second degree “depraved heart” murder.
The prevention of riots is “not the job of the justice system,” he told Malzberg.
“You cannot allow police officers or any other defendants to become scapegoats for crowds demanding a continuation of rioting.”
Then he got to the specifics of the actual charges.
“There’s no plausible, hypothetical, conceivable case for murder under the facts that we now know them. You might say that conceivably there’s a case for manslaughter. Nobody wanted this guy to die, nobody set out to kill him, and nobody intentionally murdered him,” he said.
“My prediction?” Dershowitz concluded. “They’ve overplayed their hand, it’s unlikely they’ll get any convictions in this case as a result of this, and if they do, there’s a good possibility it’ll be reversed on appeal and will just postpone the riots for months ahead.”
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