Freddie Gray was one of the seminal police killings when it occurred in Baltimore in 2016, leading to protests and riots and calls for reform. The officers were charged with murder by State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, but not one of them were convicted.
Justine Barron in her book They Killed Freddie Gray following the work of her podcast, after sifting through thousands of documents and interviewing witnesses, concludes that the State’s Attorney and Media got the narrative and the killing completely wrong.
Barrone writes, “The media just as uncritically turned an enamored eye to State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, who emerged as a hero on the national stage, having pressed 
charges against six officers in the death of Gray.”
She noted, “What the media failed to take notice of was that these superficially valiant prosecutions were based on the same false narrative the Baltimore City Police Department itself was hoping everyone would buy into” —and they did— “hook, line, and sinker.”
In the rough ride narrative, Barron debunks and argues instead that police likely killed Gray when they threw him head first into the van at Stop 2.
In her speech, Mosby issued a call for peace, and by announcing the prosecution, she stopped the protests and riots in their tracks—what Barrone argues was her actual goal.
She came to believe that the prosecution “was not so much accountability as the manufacturing of consent and silencing of dissent.”
Listen as Barron joins Everyday Injustice to discussion her book and its implications for police reform.
