In trial for first officer accused in Freddie Gray’s death, defense highlights

Which perspective the jury accepts could help them decide whether to convict Porter of manslaughter, the most serious charge he faces, legal experts said.

Gray was a 25-year-old black man who died in April from a spinal injury he suffered while riding in the back of a police transport van.

“When Mr. Gray went into the van, there was nothing wrong with his spine”, Schatzow told the jury of eight women and four men. The six officers involved in Gray’s death were charged on May 1, a few days after the city’s biggest uprising in decades.

Gray’s death triggered protests and rioting in Baltimore, fueling the Black Lives Matter movement nationwide.

Gray’s neck was broken between the second and fourth stops, which made his breathing increasingly hard, said the prosecutor. Judge Barry Williams has repeatedly denied defense motions to move the trial out of Baltimore.

The state’s first witness in the trial for Officer William Porter is a woman who trained him at the Baltimore police academy in 2013.

Porter arrived after Gray was apprehended and taken down – video footage shows him being facedown with his legs twisted up – by other officers and loaded into the van, which stopped about a block away.

Porter, who joined the city’s police force in 2012, answered a call for assistance from the driver of the police van, Officer Caesar Goodson.

Defense attorney Gary Proctor told jurors that Porter asked Gray if he needed medical attention at the fourth stop the van made during Gray’s 45-minute journey to the police station, but decided against calling a medic because Gray “wasn’t wincing”.

Gray also showed no symptoms of medical trouble when Porter spoke with him.

“You know, so he was always, always, like, banging around”, Porter said in the filing. (Indeed, almost all prospective jurors were familiar with it.) Presumably, then, they know that six officers have been accused of giving Gray a “rough ride” in the police van after arresting him and allegedly ignoring his repeated cries for help. He was unresponsive on arrival at the station, and was taken to a hospital where he died a week later, on April 19. If Porter is acquitted, there could be protests and possibly more unrest.

She was in the courtroom for opening statements.

The defense is delivered its opening statement in a half hour after a lunch break, saying Porter was not present when Gray was initially arrested.

Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said: “Everything is at stake”.

The other officers charged – two black and three white – will be tried separately beginning in January and lasting through the spring.

But no reputations hinge on the trial’s outcome as much as state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby and her husband, Nick Mosby, a councilman for Baltimore’s west side who announced his mayoral candidacy shortly after Rawlings-Blake pulled out.

The trial comes at a time of increased national conversation over the deaths of young blacks at the hands of police; the Baltimore police trials are considered by some to be an acid test for the criminal justice system. If Officer Porter is freed, there’s likely to be resentment unbound once more, with blood on the streets.

He faces charges of involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault, misconduct in office and reckless endangerment.