Liar White Cops' Testimony is Worthless after Video Shows Them Planting Drugs: Baltimore Drops Dozens of Cases

Anon hypothesizes: 1) If blacks can be convicted on the basis of skin color (regardless of the evidence), it is logical to assume that whites can be acquitted or never charged on the basis of skin color (regardless of the evidence).

2) If evidence can be falsified by police and district attorneys to CONVICT black defendants, then it is logical to assume evidence can be falsified to ACQUIT white defendants. [MORE]

From [HERE] State attorneys are dismissing dozens of cases in Baltimore after reviewing a video that appears to show a police officer planting evidence at a crime scene while two other officers look on.

Over a hundred cases that would have relied on testimony from those three officers are now under review. As of Tuesday night, 41 had been dropped or were set to be dropped.

“The credibility of those officers has now been directly called into question,” Marilyn J. Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore, said at a news conference on Friday.

The video, released last month and recorded in January, shows an officer who appears to place a bag of white capsules in an alleyway before walking toward the street, as the two other officers watch. He then appears to turn on his body camera and returns to the alley to retrieve the capsules.

The body cameras used by the Baltimore police retain footage of the 30 seconds before they are activated, so it is possible the officer did not realize the initial scene was being recorded.

In a statement last month, a public defender identified Richard Pinheiro as the officer who handled the bag.

The three officers shown in the video had been scheduled to participate in 123 cases. Ms. Mosby said that of those cases, the ones in which the charges hinged solely on the officers’ testimonies had to be thrown out because of a “credibility issue,” while others could still be prosecuted on other evidence.

So far, 27 cases have been cleared for prosecution to continue, 41 have been dropped and the remaining 55 are still awaiting review. The cases that have been dismissed involve drug-related felonies and weapons possession, Antonio Gioia, chief counsel at the Baltimore state’s attorney’s office, said at the news conference on Friday.

One of the officers involved was suspended; the other two were placed on administrative duty. On Tuesday, the police did not specify which officer was suspended.

At a news conference on July 19, Baltimore’s police commissioner, Kevin Davis said the idea that officers might plant evidence at a crime scene was “as serious as it gets.”

The Police Department shared additional videos that seemed to show officers seizing illicit drugs from people near crime scenes. Commissioner Davis suggested that it was possible the officers had found a bag of capsules in the alley without recording it, and had tried to stage a re-enactment of the scene as it actually happened. The department is still investigating the episode.

State attorneys may also have another video on their plate similar to the one from January, according to the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, which is not yet sharing the new video.

News of the other video surfaced on Monday, when the office said in an emailed statement that new footage of the Baltimore police showed a different set of officers “working together to manufacture evidence.”

In response, the state’s attorney’s office said it was requesting postponements on all cases requiring testimony from two officers involved in the new case. “Before we blanketly characterize their behavior as deceptive and/or a credibility issue, we referred the matter to the Internal Affairs Division of the Baltimore Police Department,” wrote Melba Saunders, a spokeswoman for the office.

Baltimore is addressing these videos in an era marked by growing concerns about police accountability.

Protests erupted in the city after the death of Freddie Gray, 25, a black man who died in April 2015 after sustaining a spinal cord injury in police custody. It was a pivotal moment for Ms. Mosby, who — then, at 35, the youngest top state attorney in a major American city — quickly announced that she would prosecute six officers in Mr. Gray’s death.

All officers involved had their charges dropped or were acquitted by July 2016. But the episode also prompted Baltimore to invite the Justice Department to conduct a study on policing in the city.

Released in August 2016, the report found that the Baltimore Police Department “engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution or federal law.”

Body cameras were deployed in Baltimore in 2016. “We have over 1,500 cameras deployed and expect full deployment of approximately 2,500 by early 2018,” a Baltimore Police Department spokesman, T. J. Smith, said in an email on Tuesday. He did not comment on the state attorneys’ review of the 123 cases.

“This is kind of a learning and a trial period, right?” Ms. Mosby said on Friday. “All of the body-worn cameras haven’t even been implemented, and I think that we’re going to go through growing pains.”

Regarding the review of cases associated with the three officers in the video from January, Ms. Mosby said prosecutors “have been working around the clock to ensure a thorough evaluation of each and every case.”

This is not the first group of case dismissals resulting from suspected official misconduct this year. In April, Massachusetts threw out more than 20,000 drug cases because a state chemist had admitted to years of falsifying drug test results.