National Media Promote ‘Progressive’ Baltimore Prosecutor, Ignoring Local and Alternative Exposés
Justine Barron
 "Gray was killed as the result of a 'rough ride,'” prosecutor Marilyn Mosby wrote in the Washington Post (5/30/20), because "the officers did not strap him in."
As global protests against police violence followed the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby was featured prominently in national corporate media discussing prosecutors' role in police accountability. Since Floyd’s death, she has appeared on CNN (6/4/20, 6/9/20) MSNBC (6/4/20, 6/17/20), NPR (5/31/20), ABC’s Nightline (6/4/20) and NBC’s Today show (6/2/20), among other broadcasts. And she wrote op-eds for the New York Times (6/4/20), Washington Post (5/30/20) and Baltimore Sun (6/22/20).
While national corporate media outlets have offered Mosby a wide platform to brand herself as a progressive prosecutor, local and independent media have been publishing reports that challenge her office’s record in practice. The gulf between these two concurrent portraits of Mosby exemplifies how popular formats like talk shows and op-eds give local leaders a chance to raise their national profiles without facing scrutiny.
Many of Mosby’s recent appearances and articles have centered around her 2015 prosecution of six officers in the death of Freddie Gray. She discussed that case in a Washington Post op-ed (5/30/20), headlined “I Was the Prosecutor in the Freddie Gray Case. Here’s What Minneapolis Should Know.”
“Gray was killed as the result of a 'rough ride,'” she wrote. “The officers did not strap him in, and his spine was partially severed in the back of that wagon.” In 2015, Mosby charged the officers with failing to seat belt Gray or call for timely medical attention, not for using excessive force.
Yet an article I wrote this spring in the Appeal (4/26/20) revealed new evidence that calls into question the basis of Mosby’s 2015 prosecution. Numerous civilian witnesses said they saw police using excessive force against Gray, as they told the police department and Mosby’s own investigators soon after Gray’s arrest. Nine witnesses reported seeing officers throw Gray headfirst into the van, an action that was consistent with his type of fatal injury. Mosby’s office failed to share these accounts with the medical examiner or the public.
Mosby has characterized her 2015 prosecution as hindered by uncooperative police. “The Baltimore police department worked against us,” she said during a June 2 appearance on NBC’s Today (6/2/20). Yet the new evidence reveals that her case was built around how the officers, her defendants, described the events of Gray’s arrest.
 In the New York Times (6/4/20), Mosby charged for the first time that police had "throw[n] Mr. Gray into the back of a police wagon—headfirst, handcuffed and shackled."
For the most part, Mosby has been speaking about the Gray case as if the new evidence never came to light, with one exception. In a June 4 op-ed in the New York Times, headlined “Prosecutors, Please Stand Up to Police,'' she asked:
Why were the officers sitting on his back? Why did they throw Mr. Gray into the back of a police wagon—headfirst, handcuffed and shackled—where his spine was subsequently severed?
Neither Mosby nor anyone from her office has ever made the claim before that the officers threw Gray into the back of the wagon headfirst. In fact, her prosecutors argued the opposite in court—that the officers did not use excessive force, and that Gray was in good health when he was taken away in the van.
Mosby’s Times op-ed was published the day after the newspaper drew heat for publishing US Sen. Tom Cotton’s op-ed calling for a military response to protests. The newspaper, criticized for not factchecking some of the senator’s inflammatory statements, promised to do better in its op-eds. Like Cotton, Mosby was given unchecked space in the Times to offer a revisionist narrative. In this case, she gave the impression that her office held the officers accountable for excessive force.
The Gray case gave Mosby a national reputation as a progressive prosecutor, which was enhanced by subsequent profiles in Vogue (6/23/15), New York Times Magazine (9/28/16), Essence (9/18/18) and other outlets. Yet national media have not scrutinized whether her office has been operating in a progressive manner since she was first elected in 2015.
Most conspicuously, national corporate media have ignored the story of Mosby’s repeated prosecution of Keith Davis Jr., the first person shot by Baltimore police after Freddie Gray’s arrest. Police chased and shot at Davis more than 40 times when responding to a robbery call; no evidence was found suggesting Davis fired a gun at them. Instead of investigating and charging the officers, Mosby prosecuted Davis for the robbery and, when that case failed in court, an unrelated murder that police said he committed that morning. Davis is now likely facing his fifth trial for the same murder, after two hung juries and an overturned conviction resulting from a discredited jailhouse informant. Mosby’s refusal to drop the case has mobilized local activists against her.
The Davis story has been covered by independent outlets like the Intercept and the Appeal for years. Mosby’s repeated prosecution of a police brutality victim provides a startling contrast to her actions in the Gray case. And yet, in five years, she has not been asked about the Davis case once by any national corporate journalist.
 Marilyn Mosby's office wrote that punching a woman in the face hard enough to knock her to the pavement "does not rise to the level of illegality” (Baltimore Sun, 6/2/20).
Keith Davis Jr. is not a lone example of Mosby’s office siding with police and against victims in cases of force. Even in the last two months, Baltimore news outlets have shared one story after another in which her office did just that.
On June 2, the Baltimore Sun reported that Mosby’s office declined to prosecute an officer caught on civilian video punching a woman with a closed fist into apparent unconsciousness. The woman, who appeared to be having a mental health episode, swiped at the officer first. Prosecutors charged her with second-degree assault.
On June 10, the Sun reported that Mosby declined to prosecute any of the 13 officers who fired 147 rounds in a 2019 incident, killing the man they were chasing, who, prosecutors acknowledged, did not fire first. The officers’ bullets also struck a 51-year old woman who was in the area, as well as another officer.
Mosby’s decision not to prosecute the officers in these two cases made local headlines during the very same week that she asked prosecutors to “please stand up to police” in the New York Times and on numerous national TV broadcasts. Since then, her office released official “declination” (decline to charge) letters in three more death-in-custody cases from 2018.
Mosby’s office also took the side of an abusive police officer in a January 2020 incident. A video circulating showed a civilian kicking an officer who was restraining another civilian. The two civilians were charged with assaulting an officer. But on July 3, defense attorneys released additional civilian and body camera footage from the event, evidence that had been known to police and prosecutors. The additional video showed the officer was actually choking one of the defendants, while the other was trying to save his life. After the additional video was made public, six months later, Mosby’s office did charge the officer with making false statements in his police report.
When national corporate outlets do cover Mosby's work as a prosecutor, they usually report on announcements made by her own office that promise bold and progressive reform. She got national attention in December for announcing that her office had compiled a list of 305 officers with “integrity issues.” But a June 24 op-ed in the Sun, written by two defense attorneys, maintained that her office refuses to turn over that list to attorneys and generally resists transparency around police corruption.
More recently, Mosby spoke out about the need to reduce the number of inmates during Covid and followed this up by announcing that her office would drop more than 500 warrants for arrests for low-level drug and other offenses. These stories were covered by the New York Times (3/30/20), Washington Post (3/25/20), Associated Press (6/26/20), USA Today (7/7/20) and others.
Yet a local Twitter account called Baltimore Courtwatch has been reporting on court bail hearings, revealing in detail how her office fights to hold people without bail during the same pandemic in the vast majority of cases. A recent article in The Appeal (7/14/20) exposed that the same percentage of defendants has been held without bail in Baltimore City district court before and since Covid-19.
While Mosby cultivates a national presence, she has not given an interview to a local journalist since her re-election campaign in 2018. She was called out on Twitter (6/4/20) about it by Lisa Snowden-McCray, editor-in-chief of the Baltimore Beat and executive producer of the Real News. Mosby’s response was to jab at Snowden-McCray’s credibility:
Mosby has benefited from a media appetite for stories in which local prosecutors can be seen as a part of the solution to the criminal justice issues brought to the forefront by the Black Lives Matter movement. National corporate outlets have minimized or ignored the reality of day-to-day prosecuting in cities like Baltimore in place of that overarching narrative. Some prominent media figures have not held back in their admiration of Mosby, including MSNBC’s Joy Reid (Twitter, 2/18/20):
CNN analyst April Ryan (6/10/20) referred to Mosby and her husband, State Senator Nick Mosby, as “amazing people” and a “super couple” in a recent Instagram interview.
And so the national corporate media largely only reports on Mosby-related stories that are generated by her own office. She is then invited on national talk shows, where she is only asked about those same headlines. The investigative work into her actual record being conducted by local and independent reporters never enters the national conversation.
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